This claim can be controversial. After all, 2007 was a landmark year for the transformation of the blockbuster game. In November, ‘Assassin’s Creed’, ‘Mass Effect’ and ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’ were released, essentially inaugurating a series of franchises that would dominate video game culture for the next decade. “Assassin’s Creed” defined limited open-world gameplay in densely populated places. “Mass Effect” took the BioWare-style RPG – defined by immersive, character-driven storytelling – even further, and “Modern Warfare” transformed Call of Duty into a world-reaching techno-thriller. All of these were aimed at the largest possible markets.
In an interview with Kieron Gillen shortly after the release of “BioShock,” Ken Levine, who is credited with “story, writing, and creative direction” in the official game credits, explains Gillen as “the main man behind” BioShock,” explains. that “games are not stories.”
“Games are gameplay,” Levine continued. “Games are interactive.” This reality, Levine explained, is where the true heart of “BioShock” came from. During the creation of ‘System Shock 2’, the spiritual predecessor to ‘BioShock’, the team had realized that creating a defined space and asking players to navigate through it created a huge amount of gameplay possibilities. The story of “BioShock’s” Andrew Ryan, the industrialist who created Rapture, came out of that limitation. A city at the bottom of the ocean is as cut off from the world as a space station. Who would build it and for what purpose? That was the starting point of “BioShock.”
This logic is remarkable from our position in 2022, if only because the story style that “BioShock” was so clearly embedded in the foundation of gaming culture 15 years ago relies so heavily on the story as its main driver. When I played the game again in preparation for writing this article, I was amazed at how much traditional narrative action drove everything I experienced in the first few hours.
“BioShock” is about a man whose plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. He discovers a bathysphere that transports him deep underwater and places him in Rapture, a once glorious city for all who wanted to leave the post-war balance of power of the world and go it alone. It was once populated by rogue capitalists, scientists who wanted to be free to experiment without ethical constraints, and people who sought hope in a world that actually started from scratch. In reality, the laissez faire social system produced in Rapture ended in dystopia; a scientific discovery called ADAM allowed humans to scramble their genes and produced a world of pseudo-zombified addicts who want to tear each other apart for the special juice inside each other.
The player character is caught up in all this as soon as they enter the city, and is immediately drawn into an ongoing war between the masters of different domains in Rapture, by whom they must shoot their way to progress through the game. All of this turns out to be some kind of proxy war between two factions: Atlas, the leader of a rebel faction that started the events that destabilized Rapture to the state it currently stands in; and Andrew Ryan, the founder and implied tyrant of Rapture, who extolled the virtues of freedom while controlling many different parts of the city both privately and openly since its inception.
The player brings both factions together. Atlas turns out to be Frank Fontaine, a rival businessman of Andrew Ryan. The player is revealed as a brain-controlled pawn, giving a Shyamalan-esque twist that every moment of the player’s freedom was basically just another character’s will. Andrew Ryan is killed, Fontaine becomes a big red muscular man and there is a boss fight. The game is over, in a new way, but also somehow predictable.
The plot beats of action cinema are all over “BioShock”. Each domain of Rapture is controlled by some twisted rest of the world before it, and like a modern day John McClane, the player must penetrate that tiny world and tear it apart from within. These characters are developed through extensive audio logs, moody diaries that fill the world and how a character became the twisted figure they are the moment the player encounters them.
In the wake of games like “System Shock 2”, the new thing about “BioShock” was that it was unwilling to place these cinematic beats in the context of cinema. “Assassin’s Creed” and “Mass Effect” performed similar maneuvers, but in a very traditional split between gameplay and cutscenes. Conversations and context took place within a cinematic device, with camera angles and the player’s capabilities limited to just watching.
By contrast, “BioShock” spends most of its time giving the same threads, like villain monologues or Rapture falling apart, and putting it into the action. As you walk down a crumbling glass path, it begins to crack under your feet, water pouring in through small crevices. Later in the year, “Modern Warfare” would become legendary for maxing out the same “in the action” gameplay with the “All Ghillied Up” mission, but a few months earlier, something was in the water, so to speak. .
Looking at a list of the best-selling games of the past decade, it’s hard to see “BioShock”‘s influence at the highest echelons of the medium’s economic transformations. Likewise, the most robust expansion of games in the world, the mobile games market, is not dominated by the storytelling techniques or the gameplay patterns of “BioShock”. However, it’s hard to imagine a “The Last of Us” or a “Wolfenstein: The New Order” without “BioShock” appearing and paving the way for broad, commercial games based on selling a narrative conceit structured around a traditional firing frame.
We can also see it in a broader sense in the narrative mechanisms of the first-person genre. NPR understood “The Stanley Parable” as opposed to the third “BioShock” game; developer Davey Wreden named the game as inspiration when the original mod came out. The metro world of “Metro 2033” was promoted by a comparison with Rapture. “Fallout 3” writer Emil Pagliarulo shouted “BioShock” as a highlight of the game story before “Fallout 3” was even out. The groundbreaking first-person games that came after “BioShock” have largely talked about its titanic influence, either on purpose or simply through critical comparison. The clever mix of deeper storytelling and action in the middle is unmatched for its time period, even if “Half-Life 2” laid some of the foundation that followed.
In addition to the game culture ecology and broadening effect on what games were in the commercial realm, “BioShock” also produced its own progeny. The (much better, in my opinion) “BioShock 2” was developed under a different team from 2K Marin rather than the Boston-based 2K studio. Highly promoted and following a number of industry trends, including a stapled multiplayer format, the game’s legacy is usually misunderstood as a lackluster sequel to a legacy game. Under the leadership of Levine and some ruthless development circumstances, 2013’s “BioShock Infinite” was sold as the rightful successor to the legacy of “BioShock”. It’s a claim that’s still debated today, but it seems undeniable that all the highlights in “Infinite” are overshadowed by their reliance on and reference to the more shocking original points in the first game.
The ripples emanating from the impact of “BioShock” are still palpable. When you look around the current video game landscape, it’s hard to have an experience that can’t be understood in relation to what “BioShock” did 15 years ago. It’s hard to imagine that games like ‘Last Stop’, ‘The Magnificent Trufflepigs’ or even ‘Firewatch’ exist without the commercial path that ‘BioShock’ has paved on many platforms.
Cameron Kunzelman is a critic who writes about games. His byline has appeared on Waypoint, Polygon, Kotaku and Paste. He has a podcast where he and his co-host are reading all Stephen King in order of publication. He’s on Twitter @ckunzelman.
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