hired Rod Fergusson as vice president of development in August 2012. Fergusson had a reputation as someone who made tough decisions to ship difficult games, and reined in Levine's worst tendencies; Irrational staff recalled Levine worked best when under constraints, and that without Fergusson the game might not have shipped. Thomas left Irrational in November, with the game on track to release. To finish the game, Irrational entered into a period of sustained crunch; one staffer estimated he spent most of the final year of development putting in 12-hour workdays. Content such as Vigors, Tear mechanics, weapons, locations, characters, and other enemies, were cut from the game—enough material for five or six whole games, according to one developer. After the game was released to manufacturing, more than a dozen staff voluntarily left Irrational, with the number accelerating as the game's post-launch content began development. The game ultimately took roughly five years to make, and involved a team of around 200 from Irrational in addition to support from outside studios. Infinite would be the last game Irrational would make in the series, as much of Irrational's staff was fired in 2014 and the studio rebranded as Ghost Story Games. The intellectual property would remain with 2K Games. Story Irrational artists had been reading Erik Larson's 2003 book The Devil in the White City, which prominently featured the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and they turned Levine onto the book as inspiration. The setting was inspired by turn-of-the-century American culture and propaganda, with some of the artwork around Columbia adapted from historical posters. By selecting the hypothetical date of Fourth of July, 1912, the team identified films to draw imagery from, like The Music Man, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Hello, Dolly, which exhibited ideal views of Americana at the turn of the 20th century. Other sources of inspiration for the game's art included photographs from before and after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and from Sears-Roebuck catalogs. The bright, open-air environments of Columbia presented a challenge to the team to keep aspects of the horror genre within the game; the developers took inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and David Lynch's Blue Velvet in how to transform bright, sterile environments into something frightening. While initial designs of the flying city were darker and closer to Art Nouveau, Irrational felt this made the game world too claustrophobic and too similar to Rapture.