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May 18, 2006 | 5:02 PM PST
by: Eric Topf
During E3, Xbox 360 Editor in Chief Sascha Lichtenstein and Senior News Editor Eric Topf had the honor of sitting down with the creators of the highly anticipated PC and Xbox 360 game BioShock, considered to be the spiritual successor of the classic hit System Shock 2. Creative Director Ken Levine and Lead Designer Paul Hellquest plainly answered all questions asked of them regarding this most ambitious title of theirs. The complete transcript of the video interview can be read below, but it must be noted that due to the loud ambient noise in the background, some questions and words were unable to be coherently heard and we have had to improvise or paraphrase certain things, but rest assured, that the quality of the notes are as accurate as can be had.
There were other members of the press present at this meeting, so all questions asked by our group have been indicated as such.
AMN: How long has it been in development from conceptual stages to now?
Ken Levine (Creative Director): I'd say really around 4 to 5 years from conceptualization I mean just like we've been kicking around the design team and artists, programming at irrational for years and I think it really started to heat up, I don’t know about 2 years ago? A year and a half ago?
Paul Hellquest (Lead Designer): Yeah about a year and a half ago, we had been sorta bouncing things off of each other all through development of SWAT 4 and after that sorta started wrapping up we really started focusing on it.
Ken: And we designed it about, I think January of 05, with the design document which was pretty solid, with the core design, then I think conceiving the AI in the world. The big step up from Shock 2, is your relationship with the AI's and the AI's relationship with each other. We'd just done SWAT 4, we should have done the thing, and Paul's the designer on that of AI's that outflank each other and take cover and, everybody's done that and what's next? And a big part of BioShock became this "AI ecology" and that was a big step in development for it and that was about a year and a half ago, two years ago, and then, the aesthetic component, was the final big step of getting this whole look, I don’t know if you've seen the screenshots.....it's a really unique look, and once we got that it was just "boom, boom, boom" (pounds table for emphasis, shaking the camera)
Question: What was your inspiration for the strange meld of style of art? (paraphrased questioner here)
Ken: Go to New York, go to the Empire State building, go to Rockefeller Center. Visually it's a very art deco feel and I think that translates really well into polygons, it's very boldly shaped silhouettes...they're really bold, and we're a big believer in silhouettes and shapes. Both the AI's in the world - you see really interesting silhouettes - and with the architecture really stands out. The texture is still fairly low resolution, and you have to sort of make a statement from "macro standpoint" and nothing does that like art deco. And also you have that feeling of oldness, you know, going back to a place that, where time is like a dream almost in the world of BioShock and you have to declare that back in that time where it felt like the future, when art deco felt like the future of man, and...going back to a vision of their future. It always says futuristic, no matter what time period.
Paul: The other thing that’s great about the aesthetic is it sort of wraps the world in this feeling of innocence, when everything you see around you is not innocent at all anymore. And that advertising style that was popular in the late 1940's and 50's is in the game sort of talking about this happy time, but the game is showing something very different.
AMN: How much influence do the System Shock games have on the design of this game?
Ken: Well it's funny, we actually started System Shock 2, before it was System Shock 2, we were designing a game that was just called Shock, before we had any license to System Shock 2, and then we got the license and we sort of applied the license to what we were doing. And, my point is that, not that System Shock 1 wasn't an inspiration but so was Ultima Underworld and all the games of that ilk, because I...when I played Ultima Underworld 1 I was a civilian, and I was like "AAAAAAAAH THIS IS AMAZING!", and I always wanted to make games with "Emergence". Until Grand Theft Auto came out most of the time you talked about "Emergence" most people didn't know what the hell you were talking about. And now those games are really coming to the fore. And I remember back in the days when we were playing those games like Shock 1 and Ultima Underworld, and then those FMV games came out, everybody said those games are the future and I'm like "Please don't let those be the future!", let the emergent games be the future. And it really shows that in time those games have really come around, and when you can get a big company like Take 2 to give us a lot of money, spend a lot of risk on a game like this. And it's because, these games have come in. People understand what we are doing.
Question: *Hard to understand the questioner, but it seems like he is asking how the music in the game will complement the ambiance and style of the environment.*
Ken: Well, a lot of music in the game is actually period music from the time. If you see the demo....really creepy....if you've seen the Shining and you hear that music playing, echoing in the hotel hallway, that old music, its a really eerie feeling and we actually have that in the demo, hearing this music from the period endlessly playing on the "gramophone" in this world that has died already, but this love song is still playing. I remember playing a game called Uninvited many many years ago, and it was the first game that had audio sampling and it had a old really loud record on the gramophone. And you're in this haunted house and you play this loud record and all of a sudden...it's back and white on the Macintosh...and here comes this fully realized audio out of my speaker, 100% authentic unlike the visuals and I was all "Whoa that’s so creepy!" and it really gave me an emotional feeling. And that’s an important part of this game is that music. And while there's some music we create, a lot of it is ambient background, the music that the people of rapture were playing that you still hear.
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