BioShock Infinite (Licensed Videogame Soundtrack)

The BioShock games in Rapture were praised for how the soundtrack consisting only of songs up until its setting of 1959 made the thing more believable as a “period piece”. Infinite tries to go the same way, but director Ken Levine noted that digging up music from 1912 was not as easy:

BioShock Infinite is set in an interesting time because it’s right at the beginning of jazz and blues. Music before jazz and blues is not very listenable. I mean popular music -– it’s really kind of awful. You know, the John Philip Sousa marches and stuff. And then you get jazz and blues coming in, with the early stuff like ragtime. It’s much more challenging to find music from that era that sounds great to a modern ear. BioShock was set in 1959, so we had this huge slate of great music to choose from. But here we don’t have all the chord progressions, and the things we like didn’t exist or had just started to exist. So finding music has been a really interesting challenge.

Then again, the game’s own plot about finding tears across time and space allowed for stretching the definition of “period music”: taking songs originally from the 60s to 90s and make them sound as if they were made at the beginning of the 20th century! Levine and music director Jim Bonney chose songs that didn’t rely on “a modern percussion sound”, and also had to “find the right people to do it”, including Scott Bradlee of Postmodern Jukebox fame.