BioShock Infinite Interview

Atomic Gamer catches up with Irrational Games’ Director of Development Timothy Gerritsen. Want to know what genre BioShock Infinite is? Then here’s some buzzwords.

AG: I wish you guys had shown in two or three times. I was taking notes. It was tough to keep up with. BioShock, I remember at the time, you know, Ken was really trying to distinguish it and saying it wasn’t an RPG, it was a first person shooter. What are you guys calling BioShock Infinite? It’s a first person shooter?

TG: It’s definitely a first person shooter, but you know I don’t think we ever wanted to create oh this fits very neatly into this mold, and you know, certainly there are choices and consequences to choices, and with BioShock 1 it was a capital shooter and sort of lower cased RPG. We’re definitely a capital shooter lower cased RPG. There are going to be those elements. There is going to be that depth one of we are our own worse critics. If you were queued after for bit, you kind of know, we’re very harsh on ourselves. So when we looked at the BioShock 1 experience where did we nail it? Where did we fail? How do we fix what we fail? How do we change it? How do we do something more? How do we take something that was successful and build it and make it into something even cooler? And so, there are going to be those deeper elements and consequences to choices and how do things build and how do things build and how do I choose to build those items? There’s going to be so much depth and so much variety in what’s going on, so I can’t wait to really dive into those details because there’s so many cool elements I relate to. This is our unveiling, so we’re not going to get into that just yet.What were you sort of hoping to show people with this first unveiling? Sort of the look of the game, or

It was about we wanted to redefine. We wanted to declare, BioShock is so much bigger than a location. It’s not just we didn’t call the game Rapture, we called the game BioShock, and we felt like there’s so many cool elements that we wanted to explore, we’re not done with this space. This is not, you know, the concept of what is BioShock is so much bigger, we still want to explore that notion, and there’s so much more to it, so Infinite sort of encapsulates all of that. there are so many possibilities and so much going on and we wanted to just sort of lay that out there that, you know what, it’s not just here’s Rapture, here’s a bunch of checklists of features, and you know, when the powers that be at Take2 came to us and said, you know, it’s time to do your next game, they didn’t come to us and say you need to whip out a BioShock game, you know, here’s a list. They came to us and said, what do you guys want to do? We sat down and said, we really like BioShock. We want to explore those we want to explore, what is the meaning of BioShock? What is it about? What are the core themes and elements of it? How do we twist those? Then we said, all right. Let’s do that. Let’s make another BioShock game, but you know what, let’s just throw out all the rules. Let’s kill the sacred cow, let’s start over. Nothing is sacred, because that’s the only way we can create what we feel is the quintessential BioShock moment of what the hell is going on? You know, it’s about, you know, really that immersion into this work that you have no idea of what’s it all about, and this joy of discovery and then trying to figure out and explore those elements and how do they relate to one another, and then tie that in within the first person genre, doing more than just the practical shooter.