BioShock Infinite

• 1. Introduction

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  BioShock Infinite sends its hero to a city that floats among the clouds above America in 1912. Irrational Games developed it and 2K published it in 2013, and it is a first-person shooter that leans hard on story. The hero is Booker DeWitt, a man weighed down by gambling debts. His assignment is to find a young woman named Elizabeth and bring her out of the sky. Nothing about that errand stays simple. Why does a whole city guard one woman? Why did a game that looked so assured on screen cost its creators years of turmoil? And why are players still arguing about its final scene?

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• 2. Floating Nation

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  Zachary Hale Comstock called himself a prophet, and he founded Columbia, a steampunk city-state suspended in the sky. Its name honors the female personification of the United States. The American government paid for it, imagining a floating world's fair that would display American exceptionalism. That bargain soured after Columbia intervened in the Boxer Rebellion on its own initiative. The city then seceded from the nation and vanished into the clouds.

  Cut loose from the country, Comstock rebuilt Columbia as a theocratic police state. Citizens worshipped him as a prophet and venerated the Founding Fathers like religious icons. Institutional racism and elitism ran through daily life, and minorities formed the underclass that supplied the city's labor.

  Daisy Fitzroy leads the opposition. Her rebel group, the Vox Populi, fights for the marginalized against the ruling Founders, and the two camps are close to civil war when the story begins. The Occupy movement of 2011 shaped how the Vox Populi grow out of a haphazard start. Even so, the name Columbia and the theme of American exceptionalism reached the writers late, only eight months before the game was revealed.

  Erik Larson's 2003 book The Devil in the White City centers on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It circulated among Irrational's artists, who then pressed it on creative director Ken Levine. Posters from the period were adapted into the city's artwork. The team settled on the 4th of July 1912 as a hypothetical date, then mined films like The Music Man, Meet Me in St. Louis and Hello, Dolly for their idealized Americana. Photographs from around the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and Sears-Roebuck catalogs added more texture. To make bright, sterile spaces menacing, the developers studied Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

  Tears in the fabric of space-time dot the city, and each one shows a glimpse of another universe. Some residents exploited these views to invent new weapons and technologies. Others copied futuristic media they overheard, which explains the anachronisms scattered through the streets.

  The music leans into that idea. Garry Schyman, who had scored both earlier BioShock games, wrote the original score, drawing partial inspiration from Jonny Greenwood's music for There Will Be Blood and Paul Buckmaster's for 12 Monkeys. He began with an orchestral approach and settled on small, intimate string ensembles of three to ten players. Levine judged the popular music of the 1910s not very listenable for modern ears, so the licensed songs bend history. "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys and "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper appear in a ragtime style. In the fiction, they are tunes heard through Tears and recorded by Columbia's own artists. Their arranger, Scott Bradlee, had first caught the eye of audio lead Jim Bonney with his music mashups.

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• 3. Building Elizabeth

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  Troy Baker and Courtnee Draper voiced Booker and Elizabeth, and Ken Levine deliberately kept the full story from them. The idea was to let the two actors find the bond between their characters naturally. They also helped refine the script and their roles. Booker needed that attention because earlier games had treated their protagonists very differently. In the first BioShock, Jack speaks only during the opening sequence, and Subject Delta in BioShock 2 is a silent protagonist. Booker, by contrast, received his own voice and a fully formed identity.

  In early builds, Elizabeth picked locks the player could not and did little else. Players reacted warmly to her in the E3 2011 demo, and Irrational responded by widening her role and abilities. Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 and Trip from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West served as models. The team refused to give her a gun. She tosses supplies to Booker, deciphers codes, and opens Tears that summon items or ledges. This also spared the designers a genre habit of delivering information over a radio or through a window.

  Inside the fiction, her situation is grim. Elizabeth has lived in isolation since childhood, groomed as the city's future leader and watched by Songbird, a large robotic bird-like creature who is both her friend and her warden. Levine said that relationship drew on his experience with a friend in an abusive relationship. Her costume was built for the open spaces and limited resolution of the game, so players could spot her from far away. The color scheme came from superheroes.

  Programmers started her artificial intelligence from the routines of the roving Big Daddy and Little Sister characters in BioShock. The goal was a companion who looks and moves around like a real person, rather than one who fights or stands idle. Banter in Naughty Dog's Uncharted series inspired her chatter. Her actions depend on factors such as whether the player is near her and looking at her, and how tense the moment is. The game also watches the player to keep her out of the line of fire. Cutting her was discussed because she was so hard to program, but Levine insisted she stay.

  Her hairpin and her gift for opening Tears are only the surface. The source of that power traces back to a severed fingertip, a detail the story saves for late.

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• 4. The Truth About Anna

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  Robert and Rosalind Lutece look like twins, but the story eventually reveals them as one person seen from two realities. They worked out how to communicate across those realities and later to cross between them. The pair steer Booker toward Columbia and turn up along his path.

  In July of that year, Booker arrives and is hunted as the False Shepherd, a figure prophesied to corrupt Elizabeth and bring down the city. He frees her from her tower and narrowly escapes Songbird. He then commandeers an airship and tells her they are bound for Paris. When she learns the real destination is New York City, where his debts will be settled, she knocks him out and flees. Booker wakes to find Daisy Fitzroy holding the ship, and she wants help arming the Vox Populi. After Booker and Elizabeth reunite, they cross Tears into a world where he is a martyr and open warfare has erupted. There Elizabeth kills Fitzroy to stop her from murdering a Founder boy.

  Comstock's secret comes next. Frequent exposure to Tears had left him aged and infertile, so he took Elizabeth from another reality. He killed his wife and the Luteces to hide her origin, framing their deaths as assassinations. He also built a large Siphon to control her power.

  Songbird recaptures Elizabeth, and she is tortured and brainwashed into obedience. An elderly Elizabeth pulls Booker forward to 1983, as Columbia attacks New York City. She sends him back to 1912 knowing how to control Songbird. Booker rescues the younger Elizabeth and chases Comstock to his airship, where he drowns the prophet in a baptismal font. Together they have Songbird destroy the Siphon, which releases the full extent of her powers.

  Rapture, the underwater city, is where the truth lands. The newly omniscient Elizabeth explains that countless worlds hold versions of both of them, and theirs is one of infinite possibilities shaped by choices. Robert Lutece had approached Booker on behalf of Comstock to acquire his infant daughter, Anna DeWitt, in exchange for erasing his debts. Booker tried to take Anna back. Comstock escaped through a Tear, and as it closed it severed the tip of her finger. Comstock raised her as his own daughter, Elizabeth. The lost fingertip left her existing in two realities at once, which is the source of her gift. Angry at Comstock, Robert persuaded Rosalind to help him bring Booker to rescue her.

  Killing Comstock in one world solves nothing, because he lives on in others. Stopping him means preventing his birth. Elizabeth takes Booker back to a baptism he attended after his part in the Wounded Knee Massacre. Booker rejected it, but in the universes where he accepted, he emerged reborn as Zachary Comstock. Joined by Elizabeths from other universes, he lets them drown him in the river. One by one they disappear, and the screen cuts to black on the last. After the credits, a Booker wakes in his apartment on the 8th of October 1893, calls out for Anna, and opens the door to her room.

  The period setting suggested quantum theory from Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, which leads toward the Many Worlds Theory. Irrational consulted the physicist Mackenzie Van Camp to ground the science fiction in real quantum mechanics. Levine promised an ending "like nothing you've experienced in a video game before." He also wanted to avoid the original game's problem of losing momentum in its final third.

  He refused to supply a final answer. Levine said, "what actually matters is what people think. Why does my interpretation matter more than yours?" Chris Kohler of Wired noted that, like the story's parallel universes with their constants and variables, the game can be played in endless ways while certain things never change. Tom Phillips of Eurogamer applied that to Elizabeth's line, "We swim in different oceans, but land on the same shore." Despite its moral decisions, Infinite offers only a single ending.

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• 5. Troubled Production

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  In late 2007, 2K Games asked Irrational about a follow-up to BioShock, and the answer was a reluctant no. Exhausted from shipping the first game, and wary of repeating themselves, the staff and Ken Levine did not want to return to the property so soon. A compromise followed. Select personnel formed a new studio, 2K Marin, which took on a sequel, while Levine and Irrational turned to a game in the XCOM franchise.

  Concept work on Infinite began in February 2008, and 2K granted the team a great degree of creative and financial freedom. By contract renewal negotiations in the middle of that year, Levine had reportedly lost interest in XCOM and wanted BioShock back. Many in the studio were disappointed that another company was making the next BioShock. While 2K Marin worked on BioShock 2 and the Australian office worked on XCOM, the main Irrational team drew up concepts for its own game. Rapture and the Renaissance were both considered before the floating city won out.

  Everything else stayed undefined for a long time. Designers and artists sometimes spent months on ideas that were scuttled within minutes after Levine changed his mind. His creative process was described as brilliant but time-consuming, because he focused on very small details. One department ran dress rehearsals before any meeting with him. Multiplayer was in the mix too. Border Control was a tower defense mode set in the game's world, and a cooperative mode code-named Spec-Ops would have supported up to four players.

  Jon Chey was a notable absence from the original BioShock team. He had worked with Levine since their days at Looking Glass Studios in the 1990s, and he headed the Australian branch. Chey called the two teams' arrangement a "synergy," with his side emphasizing technical ability and Levine's side creativity. Dissatisfied with the company's direction and with the dynamics of a large firm, Chey left 2K in 2009. Levine then had to shoulder more production work, and he felt the staff buildup "shattered" the company culture. He recalled the change this way. "Managing 30 or 40 people where you know everybody's name is a very different process than managing 150 people."

  Irrational worked in secrecy for two-and-a-half years under the moniker Project Icarus. The game was announced at a press event in New York City on the 12th of August 2010, where journalists saw a teaser trailer. The E3 2011 demo was praised, but it was carefully rehearsed and heavily scripted, because the game's artificial intelligence was not yet functional. The big story elements were locked, yet Levine kept changing large parts at a whim. Cost and staff grew while completion stayed out of reach.

  Staff feared the game would never ship. Release dates slipped and people left. In January 2012, Irrational hired Jordan Thomas, a former BioShock level designer who had been creative director of BioShock 2. He and Levine drew a roadmap and cut scope, dropping the entire multiplayer feature. Producer Don Roy arrived in March 2012 and found there was no playable game to try. He built a new workflow to impose order. Rod Fergusson joined as vice president of development in August 2012, known for tough decisions that ship difficult games. Staff recalled that Levine worked best under constraints, and that without Fergusson the game might not have shipped. Thomas left in November, with the game on track.

  The finish demanded sustained crunch, and one staffer estimated he put in 12-hour days for most of the final year. Cut material included Vigors, Tear mechanics, weapons, locations, characters and enemies, enough for five or six whole games according to one developer. More than a dozen people voluntarily left after the game was released to manufacturing. Development lasted roughly five years and involved around 200 people at Irrational, plus outside studios. In 2014 much of the staff was fired, and the studio rebranded as Ghost Story Games while 2K kept the intellectual property.

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• 6. Sky-Lines and Salt

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  Booker can carry only two weapons at a time, but his real arsenal is a set of Vigors. These superpowers can shoot lightning, launch enemies into the air to disable them, or take control of enemies and machines. They can also be laid on the ground as traps. Each one drinks Salt, which works like magic points. The game is a first-person shooter with role-playing elements, adapting the formula of the original BioShock with similar weapons, powers and upgrades under different names.

  Booker's shield regenerates by itself out of combat, but his health needs medical kits or food. Dying costs money and partly heals nearby enemies. Gear grants passive abilities and fits into one of four slots. Infusions raise the shield, health or Salt meters. Vending machines sell supplies and upgrades, and optional side-missions ask the player to unlock safes or decode ciphers. Audio logs called Voxophones and film projectors called Kinetoscopes fill in the characters and events.

  The Sky-Line is a rail system that Booker and his enemies ride using special hooks. He can jump on, off and between tracks at any time and fire one-handed weapons mid-ride. The hook doubles as a melee weapon that executes weakened foes. Opponents range from ordinary infantry to Heavy Hitters, tougher mini-bosses, and armed automatons guard the city.

  The modified Unreal Engine 2.5 behind BioShock could not carry a vision of buildings thousands of feet in the air. Irrational switched to Unreal Engine 3 and added its own lighting engine plus a way to simulate the buildings' movement and buoyancy. Early designs of the flying city were darker and closer to Art Nouveau, but the team judged them too claustrophobic and too much like Rapture. A brighter, expansive look replaced them. The vertical, open-air spaces allowed more kinds of combat, such as choosing between long-range attacks and closing in for melee. The much larger levels also meant 2K Marin helped build out the architecture and details.

  In BioShock, players could find one plasmid and weapon pairing and never change it. Irrational built enemies with different strengths and weaknesses to force experimentation, and it wanted moral choices to be less obvious, with initially ambiguous results. Several ideas did not survive. Nostrums would have made permanent character changes that could never be removed, but they resembled other loadout systems, so Gear replaced them. Early demos had Vigors with limited charges instead of Salt. Early builds also allowed as many as 16 enemies on screen. That was dialed back to six, which forced each enemy to be tougher and produced "bullet sponge" foes.

  The game has four difficulty levels, and three are open from the start. Beating the game on a lower level, or entering the Konami Code at the main menu, unlocks 1999 Mode. Enemies hit much harder, the navigational aid and aim assist disappear, resources matter far more, and death punishes harder.

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• 7. Praise and Backlash

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  Metacritic summarized the critical consensus as "universal acclaim," with scores of 93-94 out of 100 across the platforms. Only Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us rated higher among 2013 games on the site. Ryan McCaffrey of IGN called the game "a brilliant shooter that nudges the entire genre forward with innovations in both storytelling and gameplay." Darren Franich of Entertainment Weekly offered a film comparison: "if BioShock was The Godfather, then BioShock Infinite is Apocalypse Now."

  Columbia drew special affection, with critics calling it among the best settings in games. Elizabeth drew even more. Edge called her "a technical triumph, the most human-seeming AI companion since Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance." Mikel Reparaz of Official Xbox Magazine said the interplay between Elizabeth and Booker was the heart and soul of the game. Baker and Draper were singled out for their performances. Most critics praised the twist ending as a stronger finish than the original's, though some conceded plot holes. Edge described it as "a finality that doesn't make sense within the universe the game has created."

  Combat divided opinion. Tom Hoggins of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "the gunplay is far from Infinite's most satisfying component," although many thought it improved on earlier games and loved the Sky-Line. Steven Burns of VideoGamer.com found the lack of escalation tiring. Others disliked the two-weapon limit and the death penalty they considered meager.

  The violence sparked a larger argument. Chris Plante of Polygon said the magnitude of lives taken and the cold efficiency of it was unfamiliar even to exploitative films. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku found the kills "indulgent and leering." Cliff Bleszinski, creative lead of Gears of War, felt the violence detracted from the experience. Rus McLaughlin of VentureBeat disagreed, saying the carnival's sudden bloodshed shows Columbia is ugly, xenophobic and ready to explode. Levine called violence "a part of the storyteller's toolkit."

  Politics followed the game everywhere. Levine called Infinite a Rorschach test and said his vision was about not buying into a single point of view. He described the racism in Columbia as a reflection of 1912 rather than a point the game was making, adding that great historical figures were "men of their times." Many reviewers praised the treatment of race. Some commentators compared Comstock to Mormon founder Joseph Smith, and Levine partly agreed while denying a one-to-one parallel.

  Religion mattered too. A developer who threatened to quit over Comstock's presentation helped Levine rethink the character, and Levine set out to understand why people followed him. One self-described devout Christian requested a refund over the forced baptism, while Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku called the scene admirable. A Tea Party group, the National Liberty Federation, posted one of the Founders' propaganda murals on Facebook before its source was recognized. Fox News created a logo strikingly similar to the game's own for a segment titled "Defending the Homeland," about immigration control.

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• 8. After Launch

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  When the cover art appeared in early December 2012, players noticed what was missing: Elizabeth, and anything unique to the game. Levine said the cover was meant to appeal to casual players. Irrational ran a poll to choose the reversible art and offered alternate covers as printable downloads. For the cover and commercials, the directors hired Anna "Ormeli" Moleva, a Russian cosplayer whose 2011 recreation of Elizabeth had drawn attention. Merchandise included replicas, figurines, a board game called BioShock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia and a prequel novella, Mind in Revolt.

  The game reached PlayStation 3, Windows and Xbox 360 on the 26th of March 2013, and Aspyr released the Mac version on the 29th of August 2013. The Special Edition included an art book, a propaganda poster, a Handyman mini-figurine, a keychain and the soundtrack. The Ultimate Songbird edition added a Songbird statuette designed by Irrational's Robb Waters.

  Sales started fast. In its first week, Infinite topped Steam's digital PC chart. It was the best-selling console game in the United States for March 2013, with more than 878,000 units sold, not counting digital sales. In the United Kingdom it debuted first on the all-formats chart, the second biggest launch of 2013 after Tomb Raider. Take-Two Interactive reported 4 million copies by July 2013 and 2 million more by May 2014. The total reached 11 million a year later.

  Awards piled up. More than 85 editorial awards came at E3 2011-39 of them Game of Show. After release, the Associated Press, CNN, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Entertainment Weekly and Forbes named it Game of the Year. Game Informer, IGN and Official Xbox Magazine were among those that gave it Best Shooter.

  The first piece of added material was Clash in the Clouds, an arena mode of escalating waves released on the 30th of July 2013. Burial at Sea, a story expansion set in Rapture that links Infinite to the original BioShock, came in two episodes. They arrived on the 12th of November 2013 and the 25th of March 2014. The Complete Edition followed on the 4th of November 2014, and Virtual Programming released a Linux port on the 17th of March 2015.

  BioShock: The Collection remastered Infinite for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in September 2016, and the Switch versions arrived on the 29th of May 2020. On the 3rd of September 2022, a Quality of Life Update added a launcher built by 2K Games. Fans criticized it for breaking compatibility on Linux and Steam Deck, adding telemetry and hurting performance. Two years later, 2K removed the launcher.

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