bad fliesen braun weiß

bioshock has been sort of in the company's blood for a very longtime. it's a game we always wanted to do and always talked about. for awhile it didn't have a name but then, i think about fouror five years ago, the name bioshock came around for it. we always had a bunch of design principles that were pretty firm, that it wasa game that was going to take first-person shooting in a different direction. build upon principles of games we had done before, like systemshock 2, but really then take a different tack with that. where that game was a very under the hood and 'numbery' and 'rpg statty'- to really say "let's work on world simulation and immersion and ai. build up player choice through things he can see in theworld rather than numbers working under the hood." you know it really started with this idea of "let's make agame like shock 2 but make it our own, make it different" and we didn't really have a story or anything like that. allwe had was an idea for what kind of gameplay we wanted. this kind of emergent world, a sandbox world andwe wanted to build out from there.

when it first started, it was set in different times. it's gone from everything from modemday to the far future we set it back in time somewhat especially with the architecture. we built, internally funded and built, a number of prototypeswhich were radically different from what the game is today but i think that when you're trying to do something like bioshock it'snot something you wake up one morning and know what it is right away. it was the collective talent of a lot of people and alot of time to get the game where it is today. we did a demo early on, probably 2003, that... i wish we could find it. it wason xbox and it was still underwater but it looked a lot like a space station and everything was really clean and star-trekky and the monsters were ofthe scooby doo variety. it was all over the place as far as aesthetics. the story evolved a lot over time. originally, once we had this notionthat there was a genetic engineering experimentation going on in the world we started thinking "what would that do to this culture?" originally we hadthis notion that the city was run by a series of what we called savants. we started out with this concept of savants that were like these genetically engineeredcharacters that went so far they became sort of like "brains in a jar" kind of thing

and you were originally going to defeat a differentsavant on every level as you progressed through the game. and then,just, there were too many characters and it didn't make any sense and it gotreally, really out of control so we sort of pulled back from some of those ideas. plus interacting with a guy in a jar. . .wasn't so muchfun yeah, how were you going to have a boss fight witha guy in ajar? it was just a stupid idea, ultimately. you know, we had this 212 page design document layingout how every single thing in the game would work from controller mapping down to, you know, all thescripting components for the designers. i mean, the programming team did an amazing job. we got all of that stuff done. .. but it just wasn't helping us create the experience we wanted to make. so we all had to kind of step back from that and say,well, you know, "what went wrong?" so that was a low point. but it was very good in a way in that it made us realize that wewere, i think, we were designing in our heads and then just throwing it over the fence

and the programmers were working on this huge backlog of tasksthey had to do and slowly feeding that to the designers but by the time the designers got the technology theyrequested, they had forgotten they even wanted it. i mean it was that kind of process - a slow moving pipelineand we changed our process to be more of an interactive one where programmers were working very closely with the designers and saying, well,"what are we trying to do right now? what's this experience we're trying to make?" "how do we do that? what is the minimal set of technology we need tomake that happen?" and "let's get it done and try it really quick." so we took that low point and kind of turned it into... i think itkind of became a turning point in the project so that was very good. the original design was like way heavier into rpg typethings as well. we had prerequisites on everything. you couldn't hack this unless you had that, you couldn't shootthis unless you found that. there were all types of stuff. you couldn't do anything, really.

as we started getting these systems working we were just like, "gamershave to do way too much to get to the cool, fun stuff in this game." so we just started stripping all of that away and it got more and more atits heart, the heart of the shooter kept bubbling more and more to the top. e3 was great for us. that was, i think, the first point where the team- one ofthe great things about working on games is that you work together as a team and you go through these crunches where you're alldriving towards this huge deadline. contrasting that with the original vision demo that we did, e3 was an experience where, like,we got done and said "yeah, this really is showing us that we can make our vision a reality." so that was a huge motivating force for the team, everyonewas real excited and of course we didn't expect to get all the great press that we got so that was reallygratifying and rewarding. we looked at all these cool systems we had, all the weaponsand plasmids. we said, "if we took all the stuff and really focused on a shooter, we could have the deepest shooterpretty much ever!" we didn't want to miss on that opportunity.

you know the e3 demo was kind of showing you the moodof bioshock and the world and the art direction. for barcelona, we wanted to show people, well, "we'veshown you how kind of creepy and different this game is "and why it's interesting visually and conceptually, now let's showyou why it's going to be an amazing shooter." and that was great. basically, took all the little bits of the game that happen emergently and threw themall into one demo so you can see what happens when all hell breaks loose in this game. what we did with that, we had this huge chunk of a leveland sort of all these things sort of sprawling around and then ken came in one day and he was like ""ok, here's thetheme of the demo. the theme is 'hunting the big daddy.' "i want to know that we're starting here and our goal is this and we dothese things on our way and then we get there and we have the climax." and it's the combination of him having that vision and us knowing howmuch we have to throw at it, that makes a presentation for the fans that says, "look, we're just telling you a little story.that this is how to understand our game."

and actually, after that demo, when we realized how amazingthat experience was, ken ca me up to me and he said, "well," "you know the x06 demo where you're fighting, you have two securitybots and they're fighting this giant protector who's on fire" and there's a gatherer and there's a guy throwing grenades off thebalcony at you and you're shooting machine guns and stuff's exploding," he says, "that's amazing, i'm glad we pulled that off.now i want the game to be like that all the time!" and i looked at him and i was like, "i don't know if we cando that!" because that was a very small level in the game." so coming off that high point in barcelona, heading downward, realizingwe had to make the whole game like that, that took some adjusting. but then we actually started pulling it off, which was great. ourtech team in australia's been just optimizing, optimizing, optimizing and just when we think we've squeezed the last ounce of power out of the pc or the console,they find another way to improve it and the game is actually like that all the time now. you're constantly having those massive battles with allkinds of crazy stuff going on. it's great to see that

comparing it with games i've played in the past and i've worked onin the past, the current game is just so much more dense and chaotic and at the same time still very creepy and lonely and dystopian. so i thinkwe've kind of achieved that vision. and hopefully, people will like the game. the game stories i do tend to be... evolve out of thegame i'm working on. sometimes they're very natural, like when we made freedomforce. i wanted to make a real ominous comic book story. in system shock 2, we had something to start with. we had the systemshock world to start with. tribes, we worked out of that universe. but here it's like we're starting something that had no real precedent.and so i was waiting for the game to tell me what the story should be. and there were a lot of things that evolved over thecourse of the game that sort of pointed in that direction. like, you know, we knew we wanted the game to be in aplace that was remote from the world but complete. because whenever i play games that take place in an actual place,like you know you have a game that takes place in seattle or new york

and you go up to a - there's a jersey barrier that you can't jump over or you goup to a guy working in a store and you can only say one or two things to him. that always frustrates me because i'd rathersimulate something completely and give the player... never have that, never press on that suspension of disbeliefwhere the player is like "wait, why can't i do that?" i'd rather make a world where the player can do everythingthey can expect to do and i think the team wants to do that. and so we had to sort of come up with a place that wasnatural, where you can do everything that you wanted to do but also you were never saying "why can't i just get in a car and drive off?"or "why can't i talk to that that guy?" or "why can't i talk to this guy?" and this underwater city sort of came out of that, that there was this placethat was cut off that you couldn't leave and that was self-contained. you could really go to town and make simulate, not just the worldbut the culture, the products and the people and the history and i didn't want to do a strange science-fiction worldbecause that's always going to be hard to relate to.

so we made a place that was sort of like its own little alternate history.and everything sort of evolved out of that because i had to ask myself- "if we're going to make this believable, why wouldsomebody build a city at the bottom of the ocean?" and, you know, that's where bioshock's story came from,is asking that question. "why would somebody do this?" and trying to come with a believable answer andeverything came out of that. the city of rapture was built by andrew ryan andhis team with a real strong philosophical bent and that bent was that people, as he says, "is a mannot entitled to the sweat of his own brow?" and he lived in a time in america... first of all, he wasborn in the soviet union before the revolution and he saw what happened with the revolution andhe was an anti-communist and came to america. he felt that if he was great man, he should beentitled to the fruit of his own labor.

he didn't want the government or the church oranybody else telling him what was or wasn't his. which i think, you know, is to an american is a verysort of understandable concept. he felt so strongly about this, that he felt he couldn't stay in america, especiallywith the coming threat of nuclear war with the new nuclear weapons after wwii. and he wanted to take what he considered the best and thebrightest people to a place they could practice their craft - whatever their craft was - artist, scientist, industrialist- and do it without another person's hand in their pocket. and that's why he created rapture. in bioshock, the civil war happens because of verynatural things - greed, sex, jealousy, power. you know, all of thethings that screw up everything in reality but also the things that drive us all - are the verythings that cause a civil war in rapture.

the great thing i think about bio5hockfrom wherei'm sitting as a writer is that nobody's perfect. there are no paragons. there is no gandalf. there isno ben kenobi. all the characters you encounter - tennenbaum, and atlasand ryan, the people you hear about like fontaine and the people you hear about in their audio diaries andyou encounter everybody is ?awed - in substantial ways. and you're sort of put in this position with all thesemoral choices like, "who am i going to listen to?" and there are no black hats and white hats.everybody's hat is sort of a dark grey. the diaries are a great way of telling the story but we have to assume that noteverybody's going to listen to those because people are playing a first-person shooter. there's going to be a contingent of people who really care about thatand we really support them. the story is really detailed and rich. there's an incredible amount of detail you can put the wholehistory of rapture together from those audio diaries.

we carefully wrote them and chose them. there's - just listening to the world,listening to the public service announcements as you walk around the world, the various advertisements from the world, seeing the vendingmachines, watching the big daddy and little sister interact, seeing the ghostly scenes that you come across,and you find out why there are ghosts in rapture. there are a dozen storytelling mediums in the game andthey're all really rich and they're designed so that even the person who's playing it in the most casualway is going to get a sense of what's happening here. it's a challenge, i mean, it's always a challenge, and this isa challenge that's gone on as long as there's been video games and certainly it's been highlighted since the age of3d video games because you have artists trying to achieve what they're trying to achieve, anddesigners are trying to achieve a game space and a play space. in the best situations you find that they compliment each other. aspace that's good for tactical combat tends to look good for art

it means there's pillars and architectural features and lightin different places. so when those things happen it's great. other areas, we will thrash out right until the very end, trying toget them right, trying to get concordance between design and art. and they're shouting and, you know, eventually weget every space to where it needs to be. well the compromise comes when design roughs ina space and they require the player for example, work its way up the scaffolding orthese fallen columns but the space, the narrative of the space is a subway station and sometimes thatdoesn't make sense for the type of space you're trying to create. so there's this back and forth. it's fun. it'schallenging... so you change the game play and you change the space and meet in the middle.-- you just rip out all their stuff.-- ignore everything they have to say. i think on the first vision demo that we did, whichwas, you know, something we do to shake out

both how the game play is going to play out and anearly pass on what the art is going to feel like, that treatment was - it was really dry. it was, it wasperiod. all of the technology of that era was there, it was very 1940s. anywhere from the 30s to the 60s in technologystill used early aviation technology and rail road technology. but it was a very ?at interpretation of it. it sort of looked like the newyork city underground, you know, the tunnels there in the era they were built. there was really no attempt to go much beyond that then, and i think whenwe came out of that we all agreed it was too dry, too brown and ?at. it was also more of what you would have expectedfrom an undersea base. yeah, it was. i think we came into it with that idea of "howcan we actually make this work? how would it be practical?" lt just came out looking way too practical. you know, yes theywould build everything with concrete and tiles but, you know... that ended up being really stale. it looked like everylevel was going to sort of feel like that.

so, from there we had to turn, and we did a few earlyattempts at this. one of the first was the train station. which still exists sort of in the game in welcome asthe kashmir restaurant. that was the first time we started using things likecarpeting, parquet floors, decorative pillars instead of practical, you know,poured concrete. and then we introduced the advertising and a lot of decorativeelements and we knew we were much more on the right track there. the first thing that we had to get our head around was art deco, youknow, and a few of the guys have a bit of a background in that. i was the person who slept through art history sol canspot it but it took me awhile to separate noveau from deco and then pass that on to some of the other junior artistswho were really coming up to speed with that but... that was the first real problem we had to solve.from there, you know, concepting spaces,

trying to work with design on coming up with cool things, coollandmarks for the player to see, getting those nailed down. crying a lot when, you know, you slave over ideaslike that and it gets cut. those are just a few of the huge, huge problemswe've had to solve. that was one of those things that just sort of materializedas, you know, we were trying different art styles and things like that to try to avoid really video-gameyspaces. that was one of the things that we went with so... i tell you, it's a fantastic way to get art directionprops because, you know, what game is set in a time period like that? it's usually just some sci-?grey-brown world. yeah, and so we had our chance, the opportunity topick and choose from objects and architecture that that did exist and really just mold it into new things and sortof blow it out of proportion to even the simplest little things.

i think the first... the first exteriors i remember thatwe did were much more functional looking, of course. they looked like, i remember thinking about and idid some early visualizations of- "well if you have a building on the sea floor and the sea flooris constantly moving, how do you balance that building?" and eventually we threw all of that stuff out and decided that it's amuch bigger impression to really see the city that's sort of just sunk. it looks like a city and it played into the fact that rapture was sort ofa terrible idea in the first place. it never could have possibly worked. and, you know, that hubris and that vanity that they thoughtit could work, it played better to see an entire city. it needed to look a little preposterous and ridiculous but also beautiful.and it's easier, i think, for the player to identify with that time period and with what we were intending to say about this being acity rather than it being like these domes on the sea floor. we would do walk-throughs of the level and try to hit keypoints that make the player feel they're constantly underwater.

whether that's a leak in the ceiling that's depositingwater on the floor... and you never know how that stuff is going to work out. you kind of putit in there, but once it got in there with final effects and sound, i think it turned out to be really convincing. you can't turn acorner without seeing or hearing or feeling water in some way. when we first started building everything, we would gothrough and then scott, our art director, he would go, "dude, you have to flood the area or something! put somewater somewhere! make people... make people drowning. " "stick things, break pipes, break the ceiling!" so, we had to look for... basically, we ended up taking a look at...really it was just hard to train yourself to put water in places because you don't usually flood anywhere wherever you're going to make anything. imean, i don't think i've ever worked on a game where i've just flooded everything. and, in this game it was really, actually, a conscious effort to go, "how cani flood this area and make it look interesting and not make it look overdone?"

you try to keep these strings of narratives so that the narrativesgo through the whole game, like the civil war narrative, or how commercial this society was or this conflictbetween ryan and fontaine. you try to just get little bits to keep the player, to keepreminding them of, you know, what's going on and what went on, but it's very difficult in a game like this where time has passed between thein some ways between the back story, front story and when you're playing, that you have to be really careful not to visuallyconfuse the player and keep those themes continuous. in some ways, we had... we had originally thought tohave evidence of the civil war throughout the game, starting from the very beginning, but unfortunately it didn't makemuch sense because the player hadn't really been told about that yet. so, a lot of that we held and pushed toward the back of the gameso as the player learns more about what happened in rapture, those things sort of come at the right time in the story for them to actually see them andactually see evidence of the civil war right around the time they hear about the civil war.

yeah, there are, you know, so many layers. and when you'retrying to sell the story of a crazy surgeon in the medical deck" it really didn't make sense to paint on top of thatthe civil war with the limited space and player ram. because it would keep the narrative from punching through. i think alot of the levels and the art was refocused at a point in development based on this idea that really art, design, programming- everybody ca me up with at the same time is there's this real sense, in the early levels, of anindividual within that level, an npc or an enemy that defines it's his personal narrative of rapture or her personalnarrative of rapture. and in the early stages each character, there's a character you will associatewith each level, and each one has a different story to tell about rapture. not directly to you, but through the level that you seein front of them and through their behaviour in the game. so we would go through and just try to support that characterin that level so that you really feel like that's his home.

each one becomes just sort of,just layers your knowledgeof what happened in rapture until the very end. yeah, it's a really great way of lending local color toany specific zone. because you can't tell the story of what happenedto thousands of people in any great detail, so you pick one of those thousands and be like, "this is theart he took and here's how it affected the people around him." of the characters in the game, the protector isprobably the one that's changed the least. that concept of guys in diving suits being these big tough"protector"-type guys has pretty much stayed with us the whole time. he was the one thing that stayed, that waspersistent through the whole development process. once we really started and sat down and started doing concepts. whathe would look like entirely changed over a period of a few months. the very first drawing i did was a guy in a dive suitand we knew we wanted those guys in.

the actual details of what that would be for the big daddiesdid change, but we always knew we wanted a guy in a dive suit. we originally had four protectors, then we madeone cut and another cut and we're down to two. we had put in a lot of work to one of the protectors that, inthe end, we realized that if we wanted to have polish time for the two main protectors, that we had to cut thisone that we called the slo-pro. the slo-pro is the heavy artillery... -yeah. he'sbasically the tank. slo-pro-from was his full name. again we have thedumbest names. i apologize but... slo-pro-from is slow-protector-f'd-up-melee. nice. --well, it's for the kids, you know?-- if nate was inhere right now, he'd be crying. it's his favorite concept. one of them got cut which i'm not happy about.

yeah, he was cool. that was maybe my favorite one. it's still not clearto me why it got cut... probably just to hurt me. originally we had the whole ecology system and thegatherers were actually not girls, they were these slugs. these little slugs that flew around and if you gotnear them they'd roll up and start clicking and that's when the protector would come in andattack you. and we had the full animation for those. those guys were working fine, but if you step back, we wanted to build therelationship between the protectors and the gatherers. nobody cares about a slug. it really wasn't much of a choice as to whether you wanted to harvest them ornot. it was just like ""that's an ugly sea slug. i want to kill that little... yeah, yeah it was like you just wanted to stomp on them. theywere really nasty and they just looked like things you squished. but it took us a long time to find a gatherer that weliked. we went through and started getting concepts from...

everyone internally was working on it, and we even hadoutsourcing concept artists throwing their ideas into the mix. we gotta dig some of those up. ..remember that littlesquirrelly guy? -- yeah, there was this one little gerbil-man. there were crabs, going with the whole underwatertheme. there was a consideration that they might be monkeys atone point, which... that idea didn't last very long. i'll admit it, my bad idea was a dog whose front legs could move but its backlegs were bound in a wheelchair, going around eating stuff. it was a bad idea. there was this little hunchbacked oompa-loompa type of guy, and eventuallywe started seeing that the more humanoid we got, the the better it felt. ultimately it came down to you don't have sympathy for any ofthose characters and you don't want to interact with them. and then rob waters, our in-house concept guy who worked on all of ourstuff in recent years drew this incredibly creepy looking little girl and that was like "this was the way we got to go." itwas incredibly creepy and it can be expressive.

one of the biggest problems with the slug back in the time was hehad no appendages, he had no face, no eyes, you just couldn't. . ." he had no lower jaw even! --yeah.you had no idea whatthis thing was trying to communicate to you as a gamer. having her evolve from an insect, into another tentacled monster,all the way to this idea that it was these little girls, i think it was just exciting because you're crossing aline there i don't think people expect. having ken come up with ideas like that, these challengingideas that we have to illustrate and sell to an audience, to make it edgy without going over the line... i think that was justrewarding, challenging. hopefully we've done a good job with that. specifically, the splicer characters changed a lotover time and came from a lot of different places. " it was before i think the story had really gelled andbefore the architecture had gelled. interestingly enough, those have a lot of effect on what the characters are goingto look like because they have to sit down in that world and live in that world.

we talked before about how we changed the aesthetic of the facilities froma much more industrial, practical place to a much more residential place. i think when we saw that happening in the architecture then werealized we had to go back and look at these splicers again. they had to look, they had to be as domestic looking as that world. insome of the original passes you'll see monsters that are very monstrous. that was one angle that we were thinking about... that theywere genetic distortions and how maybe they even specifically mutated themselves to use certain weapons better or thingslike arms would go away because they didn't need that arm because they had such a specific duty that theycreated for themselves. and again, as we moved away from that we basicallywent back to square one and then rob took over and we came up with pretty much the splicers you seenow. a lot of the distortions in the faces came from, actually ken found this thing online and it wascalled project facade... which was... it's terrifying.

it was some of the early attempts at plastic andreconstructive surgery to treat soldiers at the end of wwi who had suffered horrible injuries to their face and it wasthese sort of creative solutions to reconstruct their faces. of course the medicine wasn't really there, so sometimes the productwas as terrifying as where they started out but those were kind of... disturbing inspiration for some of the faces, some of the ways you see thatthe splicers faces are distorted...came from looking at those pictures. yeah... cringing at those pictures. the other reference was looking at old mugshotsfrom the 1940s. for whatever reason, times were harder and youcould just really see it in their faces. some of those portraits were just inspiration forreally different looking characters. and hairstyles, there were some really bizarrehairstyles. for criminals then.

on the technology side as far as graphics goes? a giant leap from our past projectsin terms of capabilities of our renderer, the tool sets available to our artists the last game we did, swat 4, was basically, "here's a couple thingsyou can do, i hope our artists are good because that's all they have." on this game we had- i knew things were different when i came on to this projectand we hired a new effects artist, stephan alexander, who's done an amazing job. a couple weeks after we hired him, i found him writinghis own vertex and pixel shaders and i thought, "wow, this is a big change from what we had before where artists were just sortof painting textures." now they're actually working very, very technically, working in high-dynamic range, lighting and now we have technicalartists who are pushing the programming team and driving the tool set. and with this current generation of technology we're actually able to do alot of this stuff because it's actually really easy to create new effects. the hardest part is really making them fit consistently inwith the rest of the pipeline. so that's been a big challenge. to create these beautiful new graphical effects like all the water that you'llsee in the game, all the beautiful lighting effects, all the dynamic shadows,

and getting- all of those are easy to generate on their own but they'revery difficult to make them work consistently within the rest of the game. that's necessitated another huge effort and verycareful planning and a heck of a lot of luck. i mean we have an amazing team in australia who are doing,justfocusing on the core technology that lets us build the game. so most of the guys here are actually working on buildingthe gameplay systems on top of the core technology but there's just a massive effort on the other side of theworld devoted to just laying the foundation for this - the tools team, engine team, renderer team...there's lots more, i just can't remember them all! but there's been a lot of effort that's gone into the tools just to allowpeople to create the kinds of experiences that we're creating now. giving the designers the ability to do complicated scripting, building thishuge al system which just allows the player to do basically anything he wants, has been a massive challenge and i'm sure john abercrombie,our lead al programmer, will talk a little bit about that.

we have our own behavior system that we've used before and we were able to bring thatover from a previous project and re-use it and extend some functionality of that. basically it allows us to encapsulate behaviors and have them be hierarchicaland interrupt each other and those sorts of things. it's called tyrion. because we had worked with the system before and we had a lot ofexperience with it, we could- we had knowledge of how to use it well and it allowed both us and the other programmers whohad used it before to really do a lot more than we had and prototype quicker and get things done fasterthan had we not had it and used stock unreal. i think there's two big things for me that i spent time on. onewas the interactions between the big daddies and little sisters. we spent a lot of time prototyping different behaviors anddeciding which ones to go further with and that was a lot of- more time was spent doing that upfront than later on and we've, you know,the other thing was getting the splicers' attack behaviors correct. figuring out how they were going to fight to start with and thenbuilding upon that and coming up with ideas that they could do,

things to make them more interesting. certainly i thinkthose two would be the biggest things that i worked on. on the animation side of things, we actually haven'ttaken what unreal 3 provides we're built on top of havok's animation sdk whichprovides the groundwork for doing things like inverse schematics and animation blending,animation playback, all sorts of good things. even though we do rely on music a bit in our game to kind of convey the mood,it was a challenge for us to inject that emotion into literal sound effects. you know, like wind sounds and... what were some other scary sounds thatwe had to make?... that we had to make scary that wouldn't be otherwise? machine sounds, for example. all the machines, it wasimportant that they sound broken and old and kind of random. everything had to have this kind of, a filter of scarinessand darkness and kind of degradation put over it. so nothing should ever sound squeaky clean, nothing should ever soundlike it's in perfect working order, nothing should ever sound too happy-

there had to be an element of some kind of twistedbrokenness to it. a lot of the machine vo, for example, we had to pitch-shift it so it was going reallyfast then really slow and then we'd break it up into lots of different little sections. so... yeah... so just kinda sounded broken and weird and wouldkind of creep people out like not everything's normal. we would sample the composer, garry schyman, sort offrequently and just take sort of sections of string sounds and set them maybe like a semi-tone apart to just createtension in the player as they're walking around in the world. they might just hear a sting that might just sort ofevoke some sort of emotion out of them. everything from literal sound effects to machines to gettingcreative with music just creates this really frightening atmosphere. actually a lot of our inspiration kind of came fromsystem shock 2, which is just like system shock 2 had that really cool thing of... theambiance was just so ominous and pressing all the time...

it was relentless. it was like this psychologicalbutton that you'd just be like,"ok, i'm afraid now" and there's no music or anything, it'd just be thisunrelenting drone, you know? and so we definitely tried to replicate that again inbioshock and just kind of like... you walk into a space and there's this, this really lonely hum thereand it's like - you know? and it just freaks people out. it's great. all the sounds in rapture feel like they're from theperiod where the friction takes place. we have to lay off the synth stuff. that was one thing about bioshockas a sound designer that we did not have the luxury of and that is, in a lot sci-? games you have these reallysynth-heavy kind of soundscapes and alien sounds and you know weird kind of doors opening and it'sall a very kind of synthetic-driven sounds. but our whole sound palette was based off real recordingsof very old antique machines a lot of the time.

in fact, i think the ambiance in science... like,science is our most 'techy' deck i guess you could say? and there are all these computers around and we actuallysampled an old ms 20, an old analogue 1970s synthesizer to kind of like get that really authentic oldcomputer kind of sound. it worked out pretty well. our soundtrack is incredible and it was made by, it was composedby a guy called garry schyman, and he was just really into- the music direction for bioshock was this early-20th century, avant-gard,experimental orchestral stuff, which is a tough direction to nail. i knew garry schyman was the guy for it because any time he'd sendme his own personal listening collection, the stuff he would send me would be this completely weird, avant-gard orchestralstuff so i was like, "he's the guy for the job." so our score for bioshock is like... i consider myself a fairlycomprehensive garner and i've never heard anything like it. so, yeah, and also we'll have a live orchestra. a lot of the guys from thela philharmonic are playing.you can hear them playing in the background.

we have a really amazing, like virtuoso violinist whoplays all our main parts, which is incredible. because we really wanted to get, and actually when we recorded theorchestral stuff, we really wanted to get the sound of humans, turning pages and moving their fingers on the violin strings. it was veryimportant that this didn't sound like a modern hollywood score at all. it was very important that it sounded more like a very old recording ofhumans playing music and that was definitely the direction for bioshock. even mistakes got left in whereas otherwise, you know inlike scores... in other scores for games are big budget and have that very spiffy feel to them, but wedefinitely wanted everything to be completely human. the process of voice-recording was something that started out, i think weunderestimated the scope and the amount of voice-recording we had to do for the game. i've done a lot of games before and somehowbioshock just got huge in this regard- the amount of time writing, the amount of time recording,the amount of time casting and re-casting was giant.

it ended up being a huge project. we recorded in la,recorded in boston and we recorded in new york. we just kind of recorded all over the place and it wasprobably 40 or 50 different sessions. it was huge. it's not, "all right, marines! let's do this and that!" sort of standardythings you see in video games. it was really such a broad range of characters. making sure they were not too. .. not projecting their personalities enough or cartoonish. finding thatspace between those two things was really challenging in a game like bioshock has to be believable. that's the whole thing about this world. it's thisfantastical world where... people have to believe in it. guys like sander cohen, you know, they're out there butyou have to believe this guy could actually exist. and you've got guys like steinman, you have to believe he exists... thesecrazy people... and then ryan and atlas and tennenbaum, the little sisters, those are all really tough characters to get because they'rebig.they're really big personalities and all you have is their voice. it's like radio. you don't have the actor's face and if we had these actors'faces it would have been so much easier because they're all very capable actors.

you don't have makeup, you have these guys at the end ofthe day in the game who are like these animated puppets. making those guys be space marines or aliens is usually easy,you know, that's believable. but making them sort of emote, and when you see sander cohen, that you believe that's the guy who'sbeen talking to you... that's tough to line all those things up.

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