Why BioShock Infinite‘s Creator Won’t Settle for Success

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BioShock Infinite might be the most ambitious videogame ever.
Screenshot: Courtesy Irrational Games

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In 2007, Irrational Games released BioShock, a videogame that took the first-person perspective and remorseless slaughter of blockbusters like Halo and Call of Duty and set fire to the medium’s narrative conventions and audience expectations. The result may have been gaming’s first work of art. As protagonist Jack, the player explored a city called Rapture, an undersea metropolis built in the 1940s. The game actually took place in 1960, by which time Rapture’s gorgeous Art Deco architecture had become dilapidated and the residents feral.

BioShock teemed with monsters out of Jules Verne’s nightmares. Giant creatures called Big Daddies lumbered around in archaic diving suits with spherical helmets, emitting unintelligible whalelike moans and skewering players with enormous drills while their doll-like child companions, the Little Sisters, harvested genetic material from the corpses. The player, using cryptic audio recordings and graffiti, could gradually piece together Rapture’s history: a catastrophically failed experiment in libertarianism built by an Ayn Rand-like character. At its core, BioShock functioned as an unmistakable critique of Objectivism, Rand’s laissez-faire philosophy. As such, it was the first political manifesto that allowed you to kill people with swarms of bees emitted from your genetically modified hands.

BioShock may be the most critically celebrated game ever produced. Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post, said that BioShock demonstrated that videogames “obviously have artistic value.” Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called it “one of the most fully realized world creations in any medium.” But this wasn’t some cult sensation. It was a mainstream commercial success, selling a surprising 5 million-plus copies and turning Ken Levine, the game’s creative director as well as the president and cofounder of Irrational Games, into a videogame celebrity—along with the Big Daddies, one of which made an appearance on The Simpsons.

For Levine, who spent his youth marinating in comics and obsessing over Dungeons & Dragons, the level of popularity induced by what he calls “our weird little game” was a novel experience. “When I was growing up, I was incredibly lonely,” he says. “Nobody liked the things I liked.” He’s 46 now, a Jersey kid with a nasal voice and a Sawyer-on-Lost beard. But whereas he was once an exile on the far-nerd end of childhood’s continuum, BioShock‘s reception brought him acceptance—even an interview request from a sports-talk radio station.

Yet when given the chance to make a straightforward sequel to BioShock, Levine declined. “Usually a sequel is 10 new levels, five new monsters, a few new weapons,” he says. “It’s more corporate- driven than creatively driven.” Instead he and his team got busy plotting a complete reinvention of the game. Irrational’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, wasn’t about to pass on the opportunity to milk a little more money out of BioShock, so different developers made 2010′s BioShock 2 (which contained nine new levels and fewer than five new monsters in its single-player campaign). The sequel scored decent reviews, but it failed to penetrate the wider culture in the way that Levine hungers to do.

In fact, even the original BioShock failed to match his ambitions. “Culturally we’re in a relatively weird place right now,” Levine says. “You haven’t had that thing that communicates to everybody the promise of what a videogame can be.” Music and movies are almost universal, he notes. For instance, Cliff Bleszinski, cocreator of the blockbuster Gears of War game franchise and one of the most visible figures in the gaming industry, has just 175,000 followers on Twitter, while Justin Bieber’s manager has 2 million. “There’s nothing in the language of gameplay that speaks to such a broad audience,” Levine says. “OK, Angry Birds. But that’s not really, to me, the full expression of what games can be about, in terms of narrative, in terms of immersion.”

Which raises a thorny question: Can a videogame become an influential cultural artifact in these days of disposable 99-cent iPhone titles? Even Call of Duty, with its tens of millions of copies sold, is not that game, Levine feels. “Its penetration is very narrow but deep,” he says. On the other hand: “Everybody saw Avatar, but they’re kind of done with it. It’s wide but shallow. I think you want to be wide and deep.” What would represent Levine and Irrational’s dream for the new incarnation of BioShock? “Harry Potter,” he says, “is pretty wide and deep.”

When Levine’s attempt at a wide and deep game—BioShock Infinite —comes out in late February, it will be the first title from Irrational in five years. By the standards of videogame developers, many of whom pump out sequels every year, that’s a hiatus akin to the two-decade gap between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. And like a Malick movie, BioShock Infinite is jam-packed with its creator’s obsessions and flights of fancy. The opening sequence is drenched in biblical imagery, with an American prophet leading his followers to a city in the sky, where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington are revered as quasi deities and racial purity is imposed by force. The game’s backdrop is an imagined clash 100 years ago between theocratic white supremacists and violent collectivists.

Whether Levine and Irrational can realize this vision is an open question. Last May, Levine announced that the game, which had been slated for an October release, would be delayed until February 2013. Since then, Irrational has seen several high-profile departures, including the art director and the director of product development, both core members of the creative team. Rumors have churned around BioShock Infinite: blown deadlines, scrapped gameplay elements, an idea doomed by its own grandeur. The fact that the game was originally known within Irrational as Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

One thing is sure: The struggle to make a product that meets Levine’s oceanic definition of artistic success has changed the company fundamentally. Irrational has grown from three cofounders to 115 employees; Levine says he no longer knows everyone who works for him. He has to be brutally blunt when their work does not meet his expectations. And as the deadline looms for Irrational to lock in and ship the final version of BioShock Infinite, the forums and blogs where videogame fans congregate reflect concern that it may well be a troubled game—one that instead of showing a way forward for the medium will be remembered forever as an example of What Not to Do.

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