GameSpy: How difficult is it to craft "atmosphere" in a project like this?

Levine: Well, if you judge it by how many times we failed, then it was pretty difficult. We didn't hit it until less than a year ago. I remember the first demo we delivered to 2K Games, after they spent millions of dollars on buying us, was something that I brought to them and I said, "You know what? This is a piece of shit!" And to their credit (they said), "OK, well what are you going to do about it?" And instead of flipping out, we sat down and made a bunch of changes; we refocused and we got the world right.

That was a huge process. Originally the game didn't look anything like it is now. It wasn't this beautiful, unique utopia, but instead it was very traditional looking. We didn't have the little girls and the big daddies; we didn't have that relationship, and it really didn't have the heart of what makes BioShock. So we said that instead of trying to make the whole thing at once, let's try and get one room right. Let's get one character right. We didn't have any monsters or anything like that, so we concentrated on doing one thing at a time. We just worked on it and worked on it until we had one thing right, and that's how the game evolved.​