BioShock

• 1. Introduction

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  BioShock, a first-person shooter released in 2007, hides its sharpest trick inside a polite request: "Would you kindly." The phrase sounds harmless. In the game it carries a hidden weight, and it changes what the player believes about their own freedom.

  The setting is Rapture, an underwater city that once promised a perfect society and now lies in ruins. A man named Jack arrives there, guided at first by a friendly voice on the radio.

  Who built this place, and what broke it? Who is the voice, and what does it really want? And how did a studio that once considered giving up produce a game that many now rank among the greatest ever made?

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• 2. The Fall of Rapture

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  Rapture was built in the 1940s by a business magnate named Andrew Ryan, who wanted a place where society's elite could thrive beyond the reach of any government. To keep the city sealed off, Ryan banned all contact with the surface world. As the city prospered, the gap between rich and poor widened. A con man named Frank Fontaine used the anger of the working class to build illegal businesses, until his power rivaled Ryan's own.

  With the doctors Brigid Tenenbaum and Yi Suchong, Fontaine founded a company devoted to plasmids and gene tonics. All of it rested on ADAM, a genetic material that grants superhuman powers. ADAM proved addictive, and demand soared. Fontaine secretly mass-produced it using sea slugs implanted in the stomachs of orphaned girls, nicknamed Little Sisters. When police killed Fontaine in a shootout, Ryan seized his assets, including the Little Sisters.

  Months later, a man from among the poor, called Atlas, began a violent revolution against Ryan. Both sides armed themselves with plasmid-enhanced humans known as Splicers. To protect the Little Sisters as they scavenged ADAM from corpses, Ryan created the Big Daddies. These were genetically enhanced humans grafted into gigantic diving suits. On New Year's Eve of 1958, Atlas ordered an all-out assault, and Rapture collapsed into a war-torn dystopia. Countless people died. Many Splicers were disfigured and driven insane by ADAM abuse, and the few sane survivors barricaded themselves away.

  The player's own story begins in 1960, when a plane carrying Jack crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. He is the only survivor. He reaches a nearby lighthouse, where a bathysphere carries him down to Rapture. Atlas contacts him by radio and offers to guide him through the ruined city.

  Atlas asks for help saving his family, who he says are trapped in a docked bathysphere. When Jack first meets Little Sisters, Atlas urges him to kill them and take their ADAM. Dr. Tenenbaum intervenes and insists he spare them. She gives him a plasmid that removes the sea slug and frees the girls from their brainwashing. Before Jack reaches the bathysphere, Ryan destroys it. Furious, Atlas sends Jack through the districts toward Ryan's lair. Along the way he meets deranged citizens such as the surgeon J.S. Steinman and the artist and musician Sander Cohen.

  In Ryan's office, Jack learns the truth about himself. He is Ryan's illegitimate son, sold as an embryo by Ryan's mistress to Fontaine. Tenenbaum and Suchong rapidly aged him into adulthood and shaped him into an obedient assassin. He can open any system in Rapture that is locked to Ryan's genetic code. Jack was then smuggled to the surface with false memories of a normal life.

  Ryan takes control of Jack by asking, "Would you kindly?" Atlas had used the same phrase before many of his own commands. It works as a hypnotic trigger that forces Jack to obey any order. Jack also realizes that a letter he read aboard the plane carried the same phrase, and that he caused the crash himself.

  Ryan chooses to die and compels Jack to beat him to death with a golf club. Atlas then reveals that he is Fontaine, who faked his death and used the name Atlas to give the poor a heroic figure. Fontaine takes control of the city and leaves Jack to be killed by hostile security drones. Tenenbaum saves Jack and helps strip away Fontaine's conditioning, including a command that would have stopped his heart. Fontaine injects himself with a huge supply of ADAM and becomes a hulking creature. The Little Sisters help Jack drain the ADAM from his body, and Fontaine dies.

  The ending depends on how the player treated the Little Sisters. If Jack rescues all of them, he takes them to the surface and adopts five as his daughters. Tenenbaum happily narrates how they live full lives and gather around his deathbed. If the player harvested any of them, Jack turns on the girls for their ADAM. Tenenbaum condemns him as he leads a group of Splicers in seizing a submarine armed with a nuclear warhead. The more girls were harvested, the angrier and harsher her narration becomes.

  Those two endings were never part of the original plan, as the designers' own accounts later made clear.

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• 3. Tools of Survival

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  BioShock plays as a first-person shooter with role-playing customization and stealth, and it resembles System Shock 2. The player takes the role of Jack, a silent protagonist, and fights with a mix of ordinary weapons and magic-like plasmids. Apart from the wrench, a melee weapon, every weapon can be improved at upgrade stations. Upgrades add range or reduce recoil. Different ammunition types work better against different targets.

  Plasmids grant powers such as casting fire or electric attacks. Some also open new routes, for example by melting an ice block or tripping an electric lock on a door. Using them costs EVE, which works like mana. EVE can be refilled with EVE hypos or with certain food and drink. Health drops when Jack takes damage, and food or medical packs restore it.

  When health reaches zero, Jack respawns at a nearby Vita-Chamber, a device that works as a checkpoint. A later patch lets players turn the Vita-Chambers off, so that death means reloading a saved game.

  Tonics add passive bonuses, such as greater strength, more efficient use of EVE, or better resistance to damage. Only a limited number of plasmids and tonics can be active at once, and players swap them at stations around Rapture. Both are bought with ADAM, which the player gathers through the Little Sisters. Reaching a Little Sister means beating the armored Big Daddy who guards her. A Big Daddy left alone stays neutral, and so does the girl beside him.

  The game offers other ways through its challenges. Plasmids can lure enemies into traps or turn them against one another. Stealth helps Jack slip past security systems and turrets. Hacking can take over any automated system in Rapture. The hacking mini-game asks the player to link two points on opposite sides of a grid with limited pipe pieces before time runs out. Failure costs health and can set off alarms.

  Early on, Jack receives a research camera. Photographing a type of enemy builds knowledge about it, which turns into attack boosts against that type later. Money found in the city and on defeated foes buys ammunition, health, EVE and other supplies at vending machines. Those machines can be hacked to lower prices, just like security cameras.

  Early testers, however, found all of this bewildering.

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• 4. Troubled Production

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  Ken Levine and other veterans of Looking Glass Studios founded Irrational Games in 1997. Their first game, System Shock 2, earned critical praise but sold poorly. Levine pitched a sequel to Electronic Arts, which rejected it because of those disappointing sales. Irrational went on to make Freedom Force and Tribes: Vengeance. It also saw the cancellation of Deep Cover, and The Lost never shipped because of legal complications.

  The team wanted to return to a free-form game with a strong story, but one easier to approach. Co-founder Jonathan Chey recalled: "We recognized that there were things in System Shock 2 that were holding it back, that were excessively complicated, that were opaque or hard for people to understand or that they simply didn't like."

  By 2002, the team had a core mechanic built on three groups. Drones would carry a valuable resource, protectors would guard them, and harvesters would try to steal it. These became the Little Sisters, Big Daddies and Splicers. A 2002 demonstration, built on Unreal Engine 2 for the Xbox, was set on a space station overrun by mutated monsters. Its hero was Carlos Cuello, a cult deprogrammer hired by a Senator.

  The team agreed this was not the game they wanted to make. Publishers were also hard to find, because immersive sims did not sell well. They considered ending the project. Then gaming magazines and websites began reporting on their effort to build a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, and the team chose to continue with a full revamp.

  In 2004, 2K Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, offered to publish the game, mainly because of the drone, protector and harvester idea. The setting had by then become an abandoned World War II-era Nazi laboratory, unearthed by scientists of the 21st century. When 2K acquired Irrational in 2006, it increased the previously modest budget. Levine judged the cyberpunk look overplayed, given that Electronic Arts had rejected System Shock 3. That pushed the team toward the underwater world of Rapture.

  During development the team grew from six people to sixty, and strife followed. According to Jean Paul LeBreton, Levine distrusted some of the more egotistical new hires and often argued with them. 2K worried about the growing budget and told Levine to sell the game as a shooter rather than a shooter and role-playing hybrid. Near the target date, Levine ordered round-the-clock development.

  Lead designer Paul Hellquist was often left out of key design meetings, which he blamed on his questioning of Levine's choices. He poured his frustration into the Medical Pavilion level. Then 2K gave Irrational another three months to polish the game, which prolonged the crunch.

  Focus tests of the first level, using a beta, went badly. Players were lost, did not know how to use their new powers, and missed key story information. One tester described the southern accent given to Atlas as a "lecherous Colonel Sanders." Project lead Alyssa Finley called the feedback "brutal" but humbling. The team redesigned the opening levels to teach core mechanics, adjusted the lighting, added a quest marker, and gave Atlas an Irish accent to sound more trustworthy.

  Another late playtest came when Levine called the game "ninety-nine percent" complete. Testers felt no connection to Jack, and the person overseeing the tests warned Levine that the game would likely fail. Levine was ideologically opposed to cutscenes. The next day, he and the lead group found a "cheap" fix: an opening cutscene showing the plane and its crash. It set the time frame, put the player inside Jack, and hinted at the "would you kindly" twist. Levine compared it to the opening crash of the television show Lost.

  Development cost about $25 million. At its peak, 93 developers across 2K Boston, 2K Australia and 2K Shanghai worked on the game, alongside more than 30 contractors and testers. In a 2016 interview, Levine said he would have liked about six more months to improve the gun combat and fix lag in the final boss fight. Many on the team left Irrational after the game shipped.

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• 5. Borrowed Ideas

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  Alyssa Finley described the final story draft as "an almost complete rewrite" of what came before. The final script was recorded so late that it caused bottlenecks, because the team had to build the story while also fixing bugs.

  The Little Sisters came out of a long search. Once Rapture was chosen, the Big Daddy was developed first as the protector. The team could not settle on a drone, and they considered designs including bugs and dogs in wheelchairs. They wanted players to care for the drones and feel pathos toward them. The idea of little girls emerged from brainstorming. It was shocking at first, since children could easily be killed, which risked making the game horrific in the manner of Night Trap.

  As Levine wrote the story, he drew on twentieth-century thinkers of dystopia and utopia, including Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. He found Objectivism, the belief that people should be driven by selfishness rather than altruism, ludicrous and ideal for an antagonist. Combined with his observations of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his writings, it shaped the philosophy of Rapture and of Andrew Ryan. It also shaped the question of whether to save the girls or harvest ADAM for the player's benefit.

  2K Games raised concerns about the first version of the Little Sister mechanic. The player would actively prey on a girl, which would alert a Big Daddy and trigger a fight. Levine disliked that approach, and 2K said it would not ship a game "where the player gets punished for doing the right thing." The girls became invulnerable until the player dealt with their Big Daddy. LeBreton considered this "a massive kludge" in the game's fiction.

  Levine had wanted just one ending, which would have left the characters' fates "much more ambiguous." He later said: "it was never my intention to do two endings for the game. It sort of came very late and it was something that was requested by somebody up the food chain from me."

  Levine also took an interest in stem cell research and the moral issues around it. He cited the books Nineteen Eighty-Four and Logan's Run, which depict societies with "really interesting ideas screwed up by the fact that we're people." The mind control on Jack came from LeBreton, inspired by films like The Manchurian Candidate. It gave a better reason to limit the player than the usual locked doors.

  The team agreed on a key phrase but struggled to find one that would not give away Atlas. Levine found "Would you kindly" while working on marketing materials that asked hypothetical questions such as "Would you kill people, even innocent people, to survive?" He later worked the phrase into the first script.

  In a 2018 interview, Levine recognized that Andrew Ryan, Sander Cohen and Brigid Tenenbaum were all written as Jewish characters. Ryan was inspired by Ayn Rand, who was also Jewish. Levine said his own culturally Jewish background shaped this without intention. Each of them sought to escape a world where they felt out of place. Levine put it this way: "There's literal displacement and then there's a feeling of not fitting in, of 'I don't really belong here'."

  He saw many of Rapture's people as once oppressed, then free, then turned into oppressors themselves. He felt that reversal echoed throughout human history.

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• 6. Art Deco and Sound

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  Scott Sinclair served as art director, and once Rapture was chosen, his team began sketching the city inside and out. Art Deco suited the job because its large, simple shapes could be built with few polygons. The artists looked to a Gotham-style metropolis, with architectural illustrations by Hugh Ferriss and the Art Deco buildings of New York City shaping Rapture's skyline. They avoided the "tropical" Art Deco of places like Miami Beach, which did not produce the feeling they wanted.

  A turning point came when level designer Jean Paul LeBreton and artist Hoagy de la Plante set themselves apart to build a level together. It became part of the Tea Garden area. Levine held it up as a prime example of a "great BioShock space" and of departments working together.

  The game runs on a heavily modified Unreal Engine 2.5 with some technology from Unreal Engine 3. Irrational had already stretched the engine for SWAT 4. Because of the underwater setting, the team hired a programmer and an artist to focus on water effects. Finley recalled that knowing the engine so well was a blessing and a curse. Prototyping was quick, but the team grew willing to accept fast, inefficient solutions that cost more time later.

  The Havok Physics engine added ragdoll physics and more lifelike movement in the environment. The Windows version supports both Direct3D 10 and DirectX 9, and the DirectX 10 version adds water and particle effects.

  Lead level designer Bill Gardner named Capcom's Resident Evil series as a major influence, saying its "nods" could be seen throughout. The team was especially influenced by Resident Evil 4, including its environments, combat and tools, its "gameplay fuelled storytelling," its inventory system, and its opening village level. A focus on consoles also pushed Irrational to simplify. Instead of convoluted menus for weapon changes, plasmid upgrades and purchases, those functions moved into vending machines scattered around the world.

  The soundtrack holds 30 licensed songs from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which play from phonographs across Rapture. Garry Schyman composed the original score to blend with them while adding something he described as "eerie, frightening and at times beautiful."

  On the 24th of August 2007, 2K Games posted an orchestral score on its official homepage as an MP3 download. It contained 12 of the 22 tracks from the game. The Limited Edition included The Rapture EP, with remixes by Moby and Oscar The Punk of "Beyond the Sea," "God Bless the Child" and "Wild Little Sisters." The score later appeared on vinyl with the BioShock 2 Special Edition.

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• 7. Launch and Ports

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  BioShock first appeared in public at E3 2006. A fan petition then reached 5,000 signatures, and 2K Games responded with a limited edition that included a Big Daddy figurine and making-of materials. The game came out on the 21st of August 2007 in North America, and on the 24th of August in Europe and Australia, for Windows and Xbox 360. The demo released the week before was so popular that demand crashed Xbox Live's servers.

  The Windows release shipped with SecuROM copy protection that needed activation over the Internet from 2K Games' servers. Their unavailability was reported as the reason Australia's midnight release was cancelled. After player complaints, 2K raised the simultaneous installation limit from two copies to five, and later removed the activation limit entirely. Levine admitted the first approach was malformed and hurt the game's reputation at launch. The first release also cropped the top and bottom of the view to fit widescreen monitors, so players lost vertical view without gaining horizontal view.

  The first Xbox 360 patch arrived about two weeks after release to fix stability problems. For some players it caused new ones, including freezes, poor framerates and audio trouble. In December 2007, a shared patch for Xbox 360 and Windows added new plasmids and a field-of-view lock for widescreen. It also added new Xbox 360 achievements. In 2014, 2K released a DRM-free version in the Humble 2K Bundle, followed by DRM-free releases on GOG in 2018.

  In 2008, 2K Games confirmed a PlayStation 3 version. On the 3rd of July 2008 it announced a partnership with Digital Extremes, with 2K Marin, 2K Boston and 2K Australia also working on it. Jordan Thomas directed. The graphics were no better than on the Xbox 360, though cutscene videos had much higher resolution. Exclusive add-ons included Survivor Mode, where enemies were tougher and Vita-Chambers restored less health. A demo reached the PlayStation Store on the 2nd of October 2008, and the game launched on the 17th of October 2008 internationally and the 21st in North America.

  BioShock was bundled with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as a double pack on PC and Xbox 360 on the 7th of July 2009. Feral Interactive released a port for OS X in October 2009.

  Mobile versions were rougher. In early 2008, IG Fun secured the rights to a phone version, a top-down, two-dimensional platformer planned as three episodes, of which only the first appeared. Tridev made BioShock 3D in 2010, with parts of the game reduced to single images because of phone limits. The iOS port by 2K China arrived on the 27th of August 2014, content complete, with touch controls or Bluetooth controller support. It was delisted in September 2015 after it became unplayable for many users who upgraded to iOS 8.4. 2K promised a fix and a re-release, then dropped the effort.

  The Xbox 360 version was the third best-selling game of August 2007, with 490,900 copies. The Wall Street Journal reported that Take-Two Interactive shares "soared nearly 20%" the week after the glowing early reviews. By the 5th of June 2008, over 2.2 million copies had shipped. Nvidia's Roy Taylor said the PC version had passed one million. Take-Two's chairman Strauss Zelnick put sales near 3 million by June 2009. By March 2010, the total reached 4 million, helped along by the release of the sequel.

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• 8. Acclaim and Legacy

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  Metacritic averaged 96 out of 100 for the Xbox 360 and Windows versions, and 94 for PlayStation 3. The Boston Globe called it beautiful, brutal and disquieting, and Wired noted that Ayn Rand's name is a partial anagram of Andrew Ryan. The Chicago Sun-Times said it never expected anyone to build an engaging game around Rand's fiction and philosophy. The Los Angeles Times concluded: "It really makes you feel." The New York Times called it "intelligent, gorgeous, occasionally frightening."

  Critics did find flaws. Vita-Chambers revive a defeated player at half-health while leaving enemy health untouched, so persistence alone could wear foes down. Reviewers called this one of the most significant gameplay flaws. IGN found the Xbox 360 controls and graphics weaker than those on PC. Some reviewers thought the Splicers lacked variety and the moral choice was too black and white.

  Jonathan Blow argued that the Little Sisters choice had no real effect, which made the girls feel like simple mechanics. Daniel Friedman of Polygon agreed, noting that saving them cost the player only 10% of the possible ADAM rewards. Former LucasArts developer Clint Hocking wrote a noted essay on "ludonarrative dissonance." He saw the story as praising selflessness while the mechanics rewarded preying on the girls.

  Awards followed. At E3 2006, several sites named it a Game of the Show. In 2007 the Spike TV Video Game Awards chose it as Game of the Year, Best Xbox 360 Game and Best Original Score. It won the 2007 BAFTA "Best Game" award, and Game Informer named it Game of the Year for 2007. At the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards it won for visual art, writing and audio. The 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards gave it twelve nominations, the most that night, and it won for art direction, original music composition, sound design and story development.

  The Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008 listed it for the Most Popular Xbox Live Demo. In 2011, GameTrailers ranked its trailer first among its Top 100 Video Game Trailers of All Time. In August 2012, IGN put it first on its list of the Top 25 Modern PC Games, and in November 2012 Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games.

  Glen Creeber and Royston Martin used BioShock as a case study in their book Digital Culture: Understanding New Media. They saw it as a sign of games "coming of age" as an art form. John Lanchester of the London Review of Books recognized it as one of the first games to be covered by the mainstream media as art because of its narrative. Peter Suderman wrote in Vox in 2016 that it was the first game to show games could be art. In February 2011, the Smithsonian Institution announced an exhibit on the art of video games, and public voters added BioShock.

  The "Would you kindly" twist is regarded as one of the strongest narrative moments in games to that point, because it undercut the player's sense of control. The Black Mirror episode "Playtest" includes the phrase as a homage.

  BioShock 2, led by 2K Marin, was announced in 2008 and released on the 9th of February 2010. Irrational's BioShock Infinite followed in 2013, set in the floating city of Columbia in 1912. Its expansion Burial at Sea returns to Rapture in 1959, before the war between Atlas and Ryan. After finishing it, Levine announced he was restructuring Irrational to focus on smaller, narrative-driven titles.

  The original was remastered for 1080p and higher framerates in the 2016 BioShock: The Collection, a job done by Blind Squirrel Games. Feral Interactive released a standalone remaster for macOS on the 22nd of August 2017, and the Collection reached Nintendo Switch on the 29th of May 2020. According to Bloomberg News, 2K Games was developing a remake of the original and shelved it in 2025.

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