Today in a Reddit AMA, Irrational Studios co-founder Ken Levine confirmed that the original composer for Bioshock 1 and 2, Garry Schyman, has returned to work on Bioshock Infinite. Said Levine in the AMA:
"His score is very different from the first two games, yet very much guided by the same aesthetic principles. We were lucky to have him and I can't wait until you get to hear some of his stuff. He's working in a different, sparer style, but it's awesome."
Schyman, a veteran in the entertainment industry, is responsible for the score in games Dante's Inferno and Destroy All Humans, and TV shows Magnum PI and The A-Team. Levine then went on to cover a number of other topics, including some inter-developer nipple tweaking, and what it takes to get Bioshock Infinite out earlier (tell him he's pretty). He also had a few specific game details to spare, at one point comparing the archaeology of the original Bioshock to the anthropology of Infinite:
"…the backstory won't be about a collapse, because when you get there, the city is very much alive and kicking. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say the past matters in a very serious way in this game. Shawn Elliott said that where the last game was about Archeology, this game is also about Anthropology, in other words, you get stories from both the living and the dead in Infinite."
He also discussed the possibility of a sequel, saying that Bioshock Infinite would be difficult to do again, but admitting they'd done it before:
"If a large corporation has a property that can make a lot of money, they're going to be interested in making sequels to it. With Take Two, they understood what we wanted to do with Infinite, in other words make a sequel that in many ways felt like it wasn't a sequel. I think that's the most common thing we've heard from the press who played it. "It's just like BioShock, and it's totally different at the same time." (I'm paraphrasing). We knew BioShock is really a hard game to sequelize. There's no real standard formula, and if you use a standard forumla, the fans are going to be turned off. So, in other words, we invented a franchise that is nearly impossible to sequelize.
But we figured it out last time so who knows."
As for the rest of the AMA, Levine at one point reveals that Infinite should be about the same length and replayability as the original Bioshock, maybe more as they have a "very large selection of gear and vigor and weapon upgrades.", also hinting at another story based replay mode. My favorite part was perhaps when Levine revealed how he'd come up with the Big Daddy-Little Sister dynamic, drawing inspiration from..ants:
"The original idea came to me when I was watching a show about ants…There were the worker/gatherer ants, the army ants who protected them and other bugs who ate ants. I remember thinking that those roles read very clearly even if you didn't know anything about the story and how cool it would be to be in a game where you could watch that ecology around you. It took some time for the ants to anthropomorphize into Big Daddy and Little Sister."
Who knew?
Bioshock Infinite comes out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 this upcoming March.
