BioShock | Code Like It's 198x

In February 2007 Ken Levine stood behind a one-way mirror in Boston and watched a focus group laugh at his game. “Why are these zombies wandering about this place? Why are those robots flying at us? It’s all really stupid,” Edge recalled them saying. Six months later BioShock came out, and within five years it had sold more than four million copies. It was a first-person shooter about a political philosophy, set in an art deco city at the bottom of the Atlantic, and it asked its players to decide what to do with a little girl.

Fast facts

Developer: Irrational Games, whose Boston and Canberra studios were renamed 2K Boston and 2K Australia just before release.
Publisher: 2K Games, part of Take-Two Interactive.
Creative director: Ken Levine.
Released: August 2007 for Windows and Xbox 360; PlayStation 3 in October 2008.
Engine: Irrational’s own branch of Epic’s Unreal Engine 2.5.
Setting: Rapture, an undersea city, in 1960.
Sales: more than four million copies.

A spiritual successor

Irrational had wanted to return to the ideas of System Shock 2 since finishing it in 1999. The new game started as a system rather than a story. By 2002, Edge reported, all the team had was “a game system with three groups: protectors, harvesters and drones carrying a valuable resource”. Early pitches set that system in an abandoned Nazi genetics laboratory or a science-fiction base, and Codemasters, Atari and EA all turned it down. 2K Games signed it in 2004, and Take-Two bought Irrational in January 2006, announcing BioShock as the first game from the deal. The money turned what Levine called a role-playing game for a team of 30 into a role-playing shooter for a core team of 90.

The game ran on the engine Irrational had built for Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4, “custom rebuilt” from Epic’s Unreal technology, as Edge put it in 2005. Hyper reported in December 2004 that BioShock would use “a modified Unreal engine”; Engadget later described it as Unreal Engine 2.5, with water effects that Irrational wrote itself.

Rapture

The setting came to Levine at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Walking round its art deco towers and its statue of Atlas carrying the world, he began to picture a whole city in that style, and the story of John D. Rockefeller finishing the project alone after the Depression fed into the character of Andrew Ryan. Ryan, an industrialist who turns his back on American society, builds Rapture beneath the sea as a place where everyone is free to pursue their own happiness. “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” he tells the player. Levine had first announced the game with a Second World War setting, which he later put down to having a press event before he had “my act together”. “We started really thinking: ‘Why would this place exist?’” he told Edge in 2006. “It all came out of that: the time period, the people who created the place, the look, the feel, the philosophy.”

The philosophy is Ayn Rand’s. Her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) asks what would happen if men of talent stopped carrying everyone else, and Rapture is that experiment gone wrong. By the time the player arrives, after a plane crash in the ocean in 1960, the city has been torn apart by civil war, and its people by ADAM, the genetic material that powers their new abilities. Edge’s review found Ryan combining influences “from Orwell to Ayn Rand (note the initials)”. Levine said the theme was not genetics: “It’s the dangers of having ideas that are fixed.”

Plasmids, Big Daddies and Little Sisters

The player fights with guns in one hand and plasmids in the other: genetic powers such as electric bolts, fire and telekinesis. Edge traced them back to System Shock 2’s cybernetic modules. Machines and gun turrets can be hacked to fight on the player’s side.

The three groups of the 2002 design became Rapture’s inhabitants. The Little Sisters are young girls who draw ADAM from corpses with a syringe. Each is guarded by a Big Daddy, a hulking figure in an old diving suit armed with a drill or a rivet gun, who, Edge’s reviewer noted, will leave the player alone unless provoked, and moans “like whales”. The team struggled with the drones: they began as bugs, became dogs in wheelchairs, and ended as little girls. “We were like, ‘Oh God, we’re going to put a little girl in a game and she’s going to be a target. We can’t possibly do this,’” the art director Nate Wells told Edge.

The answer was to make the girls a choice rather than a target. Once her Big Daddy is dead, the player can harvest a Little Sister, which kills her and gives the most ADAM, or rescue her, which gives less; the game’s ending depends on which the player chose. Wells said it let the team “take it off screen and defer it to a moral choice”. It worked on players. The journalist N’Gai Croal wrote in Edge that he had planned to harvest them all, “but when it came time to do so, I very nearly lost my nerve”. Levine told Edge of a player who “had to sleep on the couch for a couple of days” after his wife found him harvesting.

Would you kindly

Much of the story comes from audio diaries left by Rapture’s dead, and from Atlas, a voice on the radio who guides the player through the city, always politely. Late in the game the player learns why every instruction has come with the words “would you kindly”: the phrase is a conditioned trigger, and the player’s character has been obeying it all along. The revelation turned the shooter’s usual arrangement, in which the player does what the game says, into the story itself. Croal, writing in Edge, set BioShock beside Manhunt as games that “weave the notion of the developer-as-dominant, player-as-submissive into the very fabric of their narratives”.

Reception

Edge gave the game eight out of ten, praising Rapture and Andrew Ryan but calling the lip-synching “unforgivable” and regretting that the Little Sisters all used the same character model. Croal thought it would not “sell like Gears Of War”, but that “it’s going to be one of this generation’s most influential games”. It sold more than four million copies, according to Edge in 2012, and became what that magazine called “a Game Of The Year critical darling”. Levine was frank about the surprise: “We thought we were building our own little nerdy kingdom.”

The PC version was less welcome. It used the SecuROM copy protection, which checked each copy online and limited how many computers it could be installed on, at first two. Edge wrote in 2010 that SecuROM “stopped many people playing their new copy of BioShock on release”. Two days after launch 2K raised the limit to five computers, with five reinstallations on each, and in June 2008 it removed install limits altogether, though the game still needed activation, SecuROM and the disc in the drive.

Afterwards

The PlayStation 3 version followed in 2008. 2K Marin made BioShock 2 (2010), returning to Rapture, and Irrational, back under its own name, made BioShock Infinite (2013), set in a city in the sky. When Levine wound Irrational down in 2014 he handed the series to 2K, writing that it had taken more than half a billion dollars at retail.

Sources

Edge issue 145, January 2005, pp. 58–62, “Irrational Discourse”: the engine shared by Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT 4 and BioShock, “custom rebuilt” from an Unreal base.
Hyper issue 134, December 2004: BioShock announced as a successor to System Shock 2, on “a modified Unreal engine”.
Edge issue 167, October 2006, from p. 40, BioShock feature: Rapture as a 1940s city; the Second World War setting; Levine’s quotations on the theme; plasmids and hacking; the link to System Shock 2.
Edge issue 180, October 2007, pp. 88–89: review (Andrew Ryan; the Big Daddies; the character models; the lip-synching).
Edge issue 181, November 2007, p. 121: N’Gai Croal, “Playing In The Dark” column (harvesting the Little Sisters; the revelation; the sales and influence quotations).
Edge issue 182, December 2007: letters page, including Edge’s reply confirming its score of eight out of ten.
Edge issue 217, August 2010, pp. 71–73: feature on DRM (SecuROM on BioShock).
Edge issue 210, January 2010: BioShock 2 preview, credited to 2K Marin.
Edge issue 241, June 2012, pp. 142–145, “The Making of BioShock”: the focus group; the early game system and pitches; 2K and Take-Two; the team’s growth; the Rockefeller Center and Andrew Ryan; Atlas Shrugged; the evolution of the Little Sisters and the harvest-or-rescue choice; the player on the couch; four million sales; the quotations from Levine and Wells.
BioShock (2K Games, 2007): the plane crash in 1960, Andrew Ryan’s line, ADAM, the Big Daddies’ weapons, the Little Sisters’ rewards and the endings, the “would you kindly” revelation.
Take-Two Interactive, “Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Acquires Irrational Games”, press release, 9 January 2006 (web). https://ir.take2games.com/static-files/15eb630f-c0bd-438d-a577-b2349e895a0e
Christopher Grant, “BioShock Infinite is to Unreal Engine 3 as BioShock was to Unreal Engine 2.5”, Engadget, 3 November 2010 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2010-11-03-bioshock-infinite-is-to-unreal-engine-3-as-bioshock-was-to-unrea.html
Shacknews, “Simultaneous Installgate 07: 2K Ups BioShock Install Limit”, 23 August 2007 (web, secondary): the five-by-five plan. https://www.shacknews.com/article/48621/simultaneous-installgate-07-2k-ups
Shacknews, “BioShock PC Install Limit Lifted, DRM Remains”, 20 June 2008 (web, secondary). https://www.shacknews.com/article/53236/bioshock-pc-install-limit-lifted
Wikipedia, “BioShock” (web, secondary): release dates; the original two-installation limit.
Ken Levine, “A Message From Ken Levine”, Irrational Games, 18 February 2014 (web): the series handed to 2K; half a billion dollars at retail. https://irrationalgames.ghoststorygames.com/new-featured/a-message-from-ken-levine-2/