The development of BioShock Infinite began after BioShocks release in August 2007. The five-year development, led by studio Irrational Games, began under the moniker "Project Icarus". Irrational's creative lead, Ken Levine was inspired by events at the turn of the 20th century and the expansion of the concept of American Exceptionalism set by the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. His story took these events to create a tale set in 1912 where the player, as former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, is challenged to rescue a young woman, Elizabeth, who has been kept aboard the floating city of Columbia in the middle of a civil war between its founder Father Zachary Comstock and the Vox Populi, the underclass revolting against him.
Though development initially started in Rapture, the underwater city of the first two BioShock games, the team found this to be too limiting and created the open-aired city of Columbia that allowed for expanded opportunities for combat. The Irrational team referenced much of the media from the turn of the century, as well as more recent events such as the various "Occupy" protests, to shape the game's story and world. Central to the game was the character of Elizabeth, whom Levine wanted to be more of a companion akin to Half-Life 2s Alyx Vance rather than an escort mission. Levine took a novel approach for his story by bringing the voice actors for Booker and Elizabeth, Troy Baker and Courtnee Draper, respectively, into the studio to develop the characters and help refine the story.
Irrational and 2K Games used a number of different marketing approaches to promote the game. They worked with various gaming magazines to create promotional artwork reflecting the turn of the 20th century, and developed tie-in video clips teasing the game's mythology in the style of In Search Of.... A standalone browser game, BioShock Infinite: Industrial Revolution, was developed by Lazy 8 Studios under Irrational's direction to promote the main game and provide the player with in-game rewards. Additional promotional media included an art book, figurines of various characters in the game, a prequel novella, a board game, and a contest to have the winner have their name used within the game. 2K Games published BioShock Infinite on 26 March 2013 for PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360 as the third game in the BioShock series. Though the game was a commercial success, Irrational would downsize shortly after releasing a final piece of Infinite downloadable content and ultimately rebrand itself.
Development Irrational worked in secrecy on BioShock Infinite for two-and-a-half years since completing the original BioShock prior to its announcement; with the game announced as going gold on February 19, 2013, about five years of development had been put into the game, with about 200 people involved in the process. 2K Games gave them the freedom to develop their sequel at will. Though The New York Times claimed that the game cost an estimated $100 million to develop with up to an additional $100 million for marketing, Levine countered this assertion though the true cost of development has not been affirmed.
One issue at the start of Infinites development was reassembling the Irrational team. 2K had moved some of Levine's team, including Jon Chey, to 2K Marin to help develop BioShock 2. Levine had considered he and Chey to be "the yin and yang of the organization", with Chey handling production matters while Levine worked on the creative side. As such, Levine had to find people to help replace these absences, but felt that he never really had rebuilt Irrational for development of Infinite, and there was a schism in the company throughout the development period. The larger expectations of Infinite required Levine to manage a team of 150 developers, which he was not able to get to know personally as he had been able to for BioShock. The stress of having many more responsibilities with the larger team took its toll on Levine. After the game was released, Levine had looked back over the past five years and found how much he had aged, and believed the period had affected his health and his personal relationships. He opted to leave Irrational Games, and started a separate smaller project.
Though BioShock Infinite shares the same name with the other two games, Levine has stated that this is a new direction, and was coy to answer if they shared the same universe. Levine referred to the term BioShock not as a specific location or setting, but a concept conjoined by two ideas: the exploration of a fantastical setting, and the use of a large number of tools and abilities in creative manners to survive. Along with the System Shock games, which Levine and other Irrational developers had worked on, the titles share the same idea of a "component of learning about a new place" and shocking the player into discovering more of the setting, according to Levine. Levine affirmed that with the similarities between the games, "It would be dishonest to say this is not BioShock". Similarly, Timothy Gerritsen, director of product development, stated they wanted to keep the feel of the BioShock experience but still consider Infinite to be a new intellectual property; as a means to sever the implied connection to the previous games, the teaser purposely shows a Big Daddy figurine being crushed at the onset. This was furthered by the selection of the word Infinite as part of the title, to reflect the "many possibilities" they wanted to explore with the BioShock concept. The game does not completely eschew BioShock, as certain elements like the sound effects representing the player's health or for gaining new quests from BioShock are reused without modification in Infinite; Levine stated that they had worked these common elements as former BioShock players would already understand their impact, and that they had spent a great detail of time during BioShock to get these elements right and felt no need to reinvent the sounds again. Further, the introduction of Infinite purposely mimics several elements from BioShocks opening: one example given by writer Drew Holmes is the act of walking through a candle-lined water trough in a Columbia church to be baptized, which visually is similar to swimming through the flaming wreckage of the plane to reach the bathysphere terminus for Rapture. Levine said "it is a new thing, but it's also a continuation of the things we've done before" and has a shared heritage, in a similar manner to Final Fantasy sequels.
Story and setting
For the first six months of development, the team prototyped several possible ideas to brainstorm on what concepts would be effective for the next game. The team had originally considered reusing Rapture from the first two BioShock games, aware that Rapture would be synonymous with the BioShock name, and that players had reacted positively to exploring the underwater city, learning of its history, and having "the sense of the world, and being in that place". As they worked to determine the story and types of quests the player would undertake, they found themselves bored and struggling to come up with new ideas and feared that players would react the same. This prompted the team to consider an alternate setting despite this being a "terrifying" prospect in terms of project scope. Irrational had also considered placing events during the Renaissance, but upon the announcement of Assassin's Creed II in 2009 which took place during the same historical period, they dropped this idea. The idea of the air-city came early in the development. The open-air environment gave them an opportunity to use color schemes that sharply contrasted with the darker palettes that were a staple of their earlier games. Even then, their initial designs of the flying city were darker and closer to Art Nouveau, making the game world too claustrophobic and appearing similar to the city of Rapture. The period of American exceptionalism allowed them to create a brighter, expansive system.
According to Irrational's Ken Levine, the name "Columbia", in reference to the female figure that personifies the United States, and the idea of American exceptionalism did not come about until six to eight months before the game's reveal. An early concept was to depict a group of technology geeks against a band of luddites, but Levine found that such conflict exists "only in shades of reality" and wasn't compelling enough. Instead, the Irrational team recentered on the idea of American exceptionalism, a tangible concept that continues to be repeated throughout history. The idea came to Levine after watching a PBS documentary, America 1900, about the late 19th century, which quickly caught on with the rest of the team. In particular, Levine pointed to one quote of U.S. President William McKinley on the eve of the Philippine–American War, which spoke to the need of America to "uplift and civilize and Christianize" the natives of the Philippines. Though the accuracy of the quote is disputed, Irrational's lead artist Shawn Robinson noted that BioShock Infinites goal is "not to teach any history", but felt such historical aspects helped to ground the work's fiction. Levine stated that in the same manner that BioShock was not built specifically around Objectivism, Infinite is not built around jingoism, but only uses the concepts to help set the stage to tell the story of individuals caught up in the conflicts. Another work that Levine took inspiration from was Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City about Dr. H. H. Holmes, the first recorded serial killer at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago; Levine considered how the work gave "a great optimism and excitement for the future and one of this ominous feeling at the same time". Levine noted that in contrast to the character of Andrew Ryan from the first BioShock, where history had influenced some of his decisions, Booker and other characters have been directly involved with some of the aforementioned history, reflected in how these characters react to certain scenarios.
Levine considered how the founding documents of the United States can be interpreted in several ways, leading to conflict between those that hold various interpretations of those ideals, leading to Infinites different factions. Figureheads of the powers-that-be like Saltonstall are based on both historical and present-day nationalistic personalities, seeking to put the needs of America before others. One example given by Levine is President Theodore Roosevelt, whose ideals were highly influential during America's transformation in the early 20th century; Levine considered how Roosevelt willingly gave up office to fight during the Spanish–American War. On the other hand, the Vox Populi were based on historical factions that often splintered into small, independent groups that undertook violent actions, such as the Red Army Faction from the 1970s and the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front of present day. During the course of the game's development period, the series of "Occupy" protests occurred across several cities; Levine, comparing these protests to other historical ones already incorporated into Columbia's history, used the real-time events to refine the game's story. Specifically, due to the nature of the various decentralized groups involved with the "Occupy" protests, Levine was able to define how the Vox Populi group would grow from its haphazard beginnings. Levine reflected that despite the game's earlier setting, many of the modern day political turmoil calls back to similar tactics and behavior used in the early days of America's democracy, and thus provided a means to flesh out these aspects within the game.