I was never a fan of the BioShock series, but the game wasn't really a sequel or a prequel — it was a completely separate work by game designer Ken Levine.
As Schreier describes in Press Reset — a book almost entirely devoted to toxic management and the ugly side of game development — the situation on the last BioShock was catastrophic. Levine constantly changed the concept, there was no real release plan, and development kept rolling back from production to the very beginning, to concepts and pre-production.
Worth mentioning that this tortured five-year ordeal has its own dedicated Wikipedia page (!), and we all owe a little something to Rod Fergusson, the man who closes out doomed projects, hired by Irrational Games into a top position seemingly for one purpose only: to ship the damn game.
I was 27; within a week I knew it inside out. One of the most beautiful FPS games I've ever come across. In terms of its effect on forming my taste, Infinite sits on the same shelf as Dishonored 2 — an Olympic standard, and there are maybe ten games up there in total.
A couple of years later I came across the game's art book. At the time I assumed a game of such incredible beauty and art must have a matching book, but alas — it was more of a graveyard of half-decomposed ideas and gaudy sketches.
At that moment Infinite taught me a new lesson: it showed me the back of the tapestry, exposed the seams and took off the rose-tinted glasses of naivety. In places the art was atmospheric, but for the most part it was ugly, alarming and infantile. I looked at those pages and couldn't believe that this daubing had, first, anything to do with developing a AAA game, and second, had somehow been reborn into the thing I loved so tenderly. And separately, a thought I couldn't quiet: this was the art selected for an art book.
It was a scrappy but maximally honest layer of development. It served a specific purpose and was created in a foul atmosphere of madness that dragged on for years. That's exactly what I'd show every aspiring concept artist, modeller, level designer — everyone who's so eager to get into games right now. Art books like this show best what you'll actually be doing 90% of the time.
