BioShock Infinite – Ken Levine Interview Feature

Ken Levine Image Copyright: Irrational Games

Ken Levine and the team at Irrational Games managed to pull the wool over gamers’ collective eyes with the announcement of Bioshock: Infinite.

Long believed to be working on an original IP Levine managed to shock the world when it finally emerged that he’s spent the last few years returning to the universe he created in the first place - albeit with a slightly new perspective.

TVG recently had the opportunity to catch up with Levine at Gamescom where he shared his views on the game and how they managed to keep it all a surprise.


Many commentators had expected Project Icarus to be a new IP or, at least, the hints on Irrational Games' website and the 'What Is Icarus?' teaser site successfully casted that illusion. Was that intentional or did it come as a surprise to you that the press had expected Irrational to move away from BioShock?

We had this whole secret thing and we launched the game with nobody knowing what it is. There were a lot of rumours about what we were doing.

We wanted as many people to not know what the game was when they saw that trailer. You saw that little trick we did where it feels like you’re going back to Rapture at the beginning in the fish tank. We had a little head fake there. We wanted people to have the feeling they had in BioShock one, when they first saw Rapture, they were like WTF? What am I seeing here?

By the time BioShock 2 came out, and its not the fault of the team, people had seen Rapture before and that feeling was gone. They had a challenge there to get that same feeling of, what is this place I don’t understand? It’s cool, I don’t get it, but I want to get it.

We want to get back to that place. So we were very careful with security. We referred to the game as Icarus internally. So if we sent emails and they got leaked, people wouldn’t know what the game was. It was tough, even like down to planning the event, we had these gift bags we gave out with materials from the game. Any information you give to people can give away the secret. We’re not the CIA, but we became like the CIA.

When the Irrational Games website first went live earlier this year, and still today in fact, the source code from the site's homepage included a lot of references to characters from Greek mythology (Eurynome, Erebus, and Ouranos to name but a few). This, coupled with the 'Project Icarus' codename for BioShock Infinite, appeared to be more than a mere coincidence. Was it just a red herring or are these characters implicit in what Irrational is doing with BioShock Infinite?

I came up with the name Icarus and I think I did it subconsciously. You can see the comparisons to some degree to mythology – the city flying high. We came up with that as a code name not even intentionally; I don’t remember how I came up with it. The thing about any mystery is that if you don’t give some people some clues to feel they could have maybe figured it out on their own, it’s not really a fair mystery. Some people did clue into this. You want to give people some information so you’re not just presenting a blank wall of intrigue without any insight. Part of the fun is people speculating on it. It wasn’t the focus of making the game, but it was kind of a free benefit for that.

Was it fun to watch everybody speculating? Did you guys sit back and have a chuckle at some of the strange ideas they might have come up with?

It was fun and scary, because we were always worried about it the whole time; we were terrified of leaks. We interviewed people for jobs at the time and a lot of people didn’t get the jobs. The secrecy we asked them to honour, it was something we wanted people to experience and have that surprise. If the leak got out, it wouldn’t have been such fun for people.

You've mentioned that Irrational Games has been working on an all-new engine for BioShock Infinite. What does the new engine allow you to do that you couldn't achieve with the previous one?

It’s a new piece of technology on top of Unreal Engine 3. We’re not sharing any code with previous Bioshock games. To make this city in the sky, to deliver on that and make that experience real, the scale of the encounters; the distance was huge. The buildings are floating and can fall out of the sky. The lighting model of Unreal is traditionally not good at dynamic lights, the lighting changing, as you saw, when Elizabeth appears on this beautiful summer’s day, this oppressive rain cloud comes in and all the lighting changes. The something we wrote on top of Unreal 3, it’s called a deferred lighting system, a complicated piece of technology, which I can’t even pretend to understand. That allowed us to light everything and change the lights.

Also, the amount of enemies you face at once: traditionally in Bioshock you’re going around corridors, facing one or two guys at a time. Here you fight 10 or 15 guys at once. Sometimes you’re fighting them half a mile away. The experience of going on the sky lines at 80mph, we couldn’t really do before because you’re constantly streaming in new assets. One of the reasons we’ve been working so long without talking about the game is that there’s a lot of new technology to it. It would have been easy for us to make a sequel that’s five new weapons, five new monsters and go. For us that wasn’t interesting.

Can you say how big Columbia is and is it much bigger in comparison to Rapture?

I can’t say really how big it is right now. I can say what’s cool about it though. Often times in Rapture you’ll see buildings outside the window and those were always fakes. They weren’t actually spaces you could explore. In Infinite you can see these buildings in the distance, you can go from one to the other. The buildings are real and floating, and could fall out of the sky. So everything’s a lot more real than it was previously. You’re outside nature, as part of the game. We have to make these buildings to go to them. It’s a speck in the distance and then you go to it and you’re inside, and you go outside and to another building, it’s another speck in the distance. That requires a lot of technology, a huge amount of asset work obviously.

How long have you guys been working on this?

Two and a half years. We’re not out till 2012, so it’s a bit of a ways to go.
The first BioShock we worked on for many years. For us, these ideas take a while to percolate and come to form.

Focussing on the game, how is it quintessentially BioShock when it is so different from that? What makes it BioShock?

To us when we started, we had these two principles that we think define a BioShock game. You are in a place that is fantastical and ridiculous and absurd, but also grounded in human experience in some way. As crazy as it is, it feels like people could have lived here. The second thing is you have this huge range of skills that you can use and that challenge is that you decide how you approach the problem. The game doesn’t dictate that.

Beyond those two principles, everything was up for grabs. Nothing was a sacred cow. People think its like Rapture, the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, but BioShock is about mystery to me. If you don’t have mystery, you don’t have a BioShock game.

I think once people play the game, and have seen more about the game, they will understand on a very intimate level even more so why this is a BioShock game and how to be a BioShock game. I don’t want to give too much away.

You mentioned the Big Daddy, the guy now is different. Is that the new version of the Big Daddy? Is it or isn’t it a different type of character?

That is clearly not a Big Daddy. We call it Alpha, they are leaders of other enemies and they augment the other enemy’s abilities. That guy is one of them – he’s an Alpha. [N.B. In a post-Gamescom podcast, Irrational Games referred to the Alpha that appears in BioShock Infinite’s teaser trailer as ‘Handyman’].

There’s very little that we do in the game, that was like, ok, we’ve got an apple in this game, we need a parallel in this game. I think there are people that understand how things echo between the two products, BioShock 1 and BioShock infinite. We very specifically didn’t call it BioShock 3 because it’s not a follow on exactly, but it’s very much a BioShock game.

We struggled with the name for a long time because it’s very much a BioShock game to us but is not part 3 of the BioShock story, it’s a new beginning. I’m not going to say there are no parallels there, but I want people to discover.

Was it a noted decision to move away from the Big Daddy, or was it that he didn’t have a place there?

In terms of this specific experience of seeing a Big Daddy in a diving suit and little girl walking around together, we thought as much as we love that, we had said what we needed to say about that particular relationship and those characters. By part two even more had been said about them.

This is a tribute to the company, we want to go in a different direction that felt very Bioshock but also felt very new. The company was, “that guy in the diving suit on the cover of game”, you can’t move away from that. To that way lies the abyss of, “hey kids, look here we go again..”

You have to be rethinking, you have to be reinventing or you become that franchise which is part 19. That was very important to us.

The weapons and abilities are similar yet new. How much is different? Also with the appearance of Elizabeth, is there a co-op aspect of working with her?

Elizabeth is not a playable character. She is a companion for you in the world with an important gameplay component and very important narrative component. Building a relationship between the player and the character is very important to us and very challenging to do. That BioShock feel of having weapons in one hand and powers in the other we think is core BioShock. The sweeter powers will be vastly expanded, but also there will be some differences in how those work that will make the game a broader range of expression. We’ll be talking more about that later…

TVG would like to thank Ken Levine, the Creative Director at Irrational Games for taking the time to speak with us about BioShock Infinite...