[MUSIC]
Would you kindly?
A Bioshock retrospective.
Read and written by Gardiner Bryant.
For more content just like this,
you can head over to The
Bryant Review, gardinerbryant.com.
We do gaming retrospectives,
we do developer interviews,
we deep dive into ethical
tech and a whole lot more.
So check it out, gardinerbryant.com
[MUSIC]
In 2007, we saw titles like
Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3,
Rock Band, Gears of
War, Portal, Half-Life 2,
Episode 2, Mass Effect,
Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars,
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
and Peggle.
[MUSIC]
Yet in late August, amongst a frenetic
year filled with some of
the most legendary titles
of any console generation,
we were also graced with Bioshock.
[SWEEPING, EMOTIONAL MUSIC]
On August 21st, Bioshock
will be turning 19 years old,
and it feels like a
product of a bygone era,
when quality was the goal and physical
media was still the norm.
A spiritual successor to System Shock 2
and helmed by Ken
Levine of Irrational Games,
Bioshock told a compelling narrative,
one that warned of a world
dominated by men who exploited
technology to justify
their fitness to be king.
[MUSICAL STING]
It was the kind of story that only a
video game could tell,
and an irony only a ludo
narrative could illustrate.
On the level of a prophet's admonition,
one might find in scriptural proverb.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This episode is all
about the story of Bioshock,
the story behind Bioshock, I should say.
So let's get into it.
[MUSIC]
[Andrew Ryan] I chose Rapture.
[MUSIC]
The city where the
artist would not fear sense,
where the scientists would
not be bound by any morality,
where the great would not
be constrained by the small.
And with the sweat of your brow,
Rapture can become your city as well.
The early days.
Our story begins with Irrational Games,
a little studio based in
Westwood, Massachusetts.
They had just published
their first game, System Shock 2.
Early on, the title was
intended to be an original story,
but after Electronic
Arts signed on as publisher,
the decision was made to set the game in
the System Shock universe.
System Shock 2 told the story of a
cyberpunk future for humanity.
Set aboard the starship Von Braun,
you play as the sole
member of your military unit.
You wake in a cryo tube well
after your unit has perished,
your body modified while in stasis with
an illegal cyber neural interface.
A friendly voice, that
of Dr. Janice Polito,
instructs you to meet her
on deck four of the ship,
but that proves to be an arduous task.
Most of the Von Braun's crew is either
dead or hideously mutated
into malicious, zombie-like creatures.
As you finally reach deck four,
you find Dr. Polito dead and you're
confronted by Shodan,
the rogue and malevolent
artificial intelligence
from the previous title, System Shock.
System Shock 2 was met with near
universal critical acclaim,
which was quite
puzzlingly followed by weak sales.
The game was written and
directed by Ken Levine,
and it has a distinct Lavenian style.
1. Compelling
characters with clear motivation.
2. A fleshed out world
brimming with atmosphere.
And 3. A clever, challenging story that
uniquely leverages gaming as a medium.
In retrospect, many critics have
recognized not only how
amazing the story was,
but how influential
the gameplay had become.
Subsequent titles, both from Irrational
Games and other studios,
drew heavy inspiration from
System Shock 2's mechanics,
its storytelling
devices, and its setting.
Without a doubt, System Shock 2 laid the
groundwork for its younger brother,
Bioshock, and prepared Levine
and company for the work ahead.
That's not to say that there's a straight
contiguous line from the
release of System Shock 2
to the launch of
Bioshock nearly a decade later.
In the intervening years, Irrational
shipped numerous titles, from real-time
tactical games like
those found in Freedom Force,
or their unique entries in the tribes and
SWAT franchises in the mid-aughts.
Along the way, Levine and the rest of the
Irrational team were honing their craft,
developing their most ambitious title
yet, all behind the scenes.
Initially, the core gameplay had three
functions, drones, whose job it was to
collect a valuable resource,
protectors who would defend those drones,
and harvesters who would try to steal the
resource from the drones.
If that sounds familiar, it should.
The resource, Eve, is what
everyone wants in BioShock.
The drones became the Little Sisters.
The protectors became the Big Daddies.
And the harvesters were everyone else.
A prototype existed for the original Xbox
as early as 2003, but the initial setting
for the proof of concept
didn't resemble the retail release.
In fact, this demo took the spiritual
successor to System Shock 2
angle quite literally, going
so far as a space station setting that at
one point was also
underwater, and you faced
off against cartoonish monsters.
But it looked a lot like a space station
and everything was
really clean and Star Trek-y
and the monsters were of like the
Scooby-Doo variety, it was
all over the place as far
as aesthetics.
Said Sean Robertson, lead animator.
The demo's protagonist was quite
different than what we got
in the final release as well.
He even had a full name, Carlos Cuello.
Levine described Carlos as "a cult
deprogrammer, a character
who had been hired by a senator
to deprogram his daughter who had been
caught up in a lesbian cult."
When I first learned that,
I was quite shocked.
Pun intended.
The studio, however, was finding it
challenging to sell the
game to any publishers.
The weak sales of System Shock 2 had
cemented this type of
game as a non-starter.
The Irrational team, frustrated by the
lack of publisher interest,
were about to call it quits on the
project until the
gaming media got wind of it.
Various outlets were reporting on a
follow-up to System Shock 2.
The buzz was so enormously positive that
the team decided to regroup and rebuild
the title from the ground up.
By 2004, they had
secured a publisher, 2K Games.
In fact, the co-founders of Irrational
had decided to sell
the company to Take Two.
2K had agreed to publish based solely on
the drone protector
harvester demo, and they left
everything else up to a rational.
However, the issue was now the
"everything else" part.
Designing Over and Over Again
The original concept of the game came
from a highly detailed
212 page design document.
It covered every aspect of Bioshock, from
the controls to the
scripting components for
designers to use.
But once the team had implemented the
design dock to spec, they
found that the result was
not what anyone wanted.
So we all had to come step back from that
and say, well, you know, what am I wrong?
So that was a low point.
Said Chris Klein, lead programmer.
He continued, we changed our process to
be more of an
iterative one where programmers
were working very closely with designers
and saying, well, what
are we trying to do right
now?
What's this experience
we're trying to make?
How do we do that?
What is the minimal set of tech we need
to make that happen?
They had even built up a number of RPG
mechanics, complete with
complex trees of prerequisites,
which severely hampered what the player
could do in the early stages of the game.
As we started getting
these systems working,
we were just like,
gamers have to do way too much
to get to the cool,
fun stuff in this game.
So we just started
stripping all of that away
and it got more and more at its heart.
The heart of the shooter kept bubbling
more and more to the top.
The making of a spiritual successor.
I often find myself
wondering what makes a good sequel,
let alone a spiritual successor.
It requires identifying the essential
components of the work.
The creators have to boil down the
essentials of the original,
then re-implement them into an
unmistakable approximation
that can also somehow stand on its own.
For a game, that may be
the setting, the story,
the controls, or the unique mechanics.
In the case of System Shock 2,
the team at a rational
coalesced around the psionic powers,
which became plasmids.
Stealth and slower pace of gameplay.
Storytelling through audio logs
distributed throughout the world.
One-way communication from
NPCs over a radio system,
and the general
commitment to a deep, immersive,
and otherworldly atmosphere.
However, the setting
couldn't be more different.
Instead of an isolating,
oppressive, zombie-filled
futuristic space station,
the player in Bioshock
is placed in an isolating,
oppressive,
zombie-filled underwater utopia.
But Irrational didn't land on the
dilapidated art deco aesthetic until
development was deeply underway.
Once they did,
however, they leaned into it.
Throughout the process of realizing
Bioshock, the studio
experienced growing pains.
Ramping up production by hiring on new
staff members will have that effect.
A team of six had grown to 60 in just a
few short years to take
on the extra workload,
reflecting the ambition of the title.
But this naturally led to strife.
Various departments, from level design to
art direction, were finding
it difficult to work together.
Levine himself was wary of
some of the new hires' egos,
often fighting himself having to
passionately advocate
for his vision of Bioshock,
what the world was and
who the characters were.
To compound this internal conflict,
tension was brewing with 2K.
The publisher was worried about marketing
the game as a first-person shooter
role-playing hybrid.
They were demanding that Levine instead
market the game solely as an FPS.
But worst of all, 2K was upset over the
game's ballooning budget.
Just months from the
game's initial release date,
Crunch was instituted to get Bioshock
over the finish line.
Crunch, Noun.
Compulsory overtime during the
development of a game.
Crunch can lead to work weeks of 65 to 80
hours for extended periods of time,
often uncompensated beyond
the normal working hours.
It is often used as a way to cut the
costs of game development.
It's also known to cause extensive
deleterious effects on the workforce.
[Music]
Tech and gameplay.
[Music]
Bioshock was built
using Unreal Engine 2.5,
with a few of UE3's features backported
for use in the game.
This included some
lighting and water effects,
but Irrational put extra work
into their own water shaders.
And rightly so, the
water effects in the game,
critical for the setting of Bioshock,
were universally praised.
But many aspects of the
game's tech were unique.
The game's gunplay, carried out in the
player's right hand,
was complemented by the far more
fantastical powers called plasmids.
[Music]
This pairing of two-handed gameplay meant
the title needed to tread outside of the
traditional controller setup.
Granted, Halo had popularized the left
trigger to throw
grenades with your left hand,
but Bioshock took this a step further.
With the press of the left trigger, the
player character would seamlessly switch
from wielding his gun to summoning
lightning from his hand.
Holding left bumper would call up a
radial wheel of your plasmids.
Same with right
bumper, but for your weapons.
While this menu was visible, the action
would slow to a crawl,
giving you a moment to breathe and the
focus to select the
most strategic weapon.
And of course, Right Trigger would just
as quickly re-equip your
weapon in the right hand.
In many ways, Bioshock's control scheme
was a pioneering effort that was mimicked
by countless others.
Doom 2016 and later titles in the
franchise worked
quite similarly, in fact.
Design
Their initial design language was rooted
in realism and practicality.
Everything in Rapture, the underwater
city where the game takes place, was
built with concrete and tiles.
It ended up being brown, dull, and
looking like the New
York City Underground.
How could they believably sell Rapture, a
city built some 30,000
leagues under the sea,
if players couldn't believe in the
engineering that made it possible?
Seafloor stabilization,
airlocks, and the like.
it looked like every level was gonna
sort of feel like that.
Eventually, we threw all that stuff out
and decided that it's a
much bigger impression
to really see the city
that sort of just sunk.
It looks just like a city.
And it played into the fact that
Rapture was sort of a
terrible idea in the first place.
It never could have possibly worked.
And that was the first
time we started using
things like carpeting, parquet floors,
like decorative
pillars instead of practical,
poured concrete.
The first thing that we had
to get our head around was
art deco.
There were a number of challenges,
subtle distinctions that the design team
had to be able to
immediately parse through.
Sinclair continued.
I was the person who
slept through art history.
So I can spot it.
It took me a while to
separate Nouveau from deco.
There was nothing quite
like Bioshock's art direction
in the industry.
It was iconic and it
told the story of the game
as much as the performances did.
Every corridor, every
room, every crack in the tiles,
it all served as evidence
of the rundown condition
of a once idyllic Rapture.
A subtle hint that the
city's idealism was crumbling
as it met the reality
of the Atlantic Ocean
on the other side of the bulkhead.
Through the windows of Rapture's
underwater skyscrapers,
the murky aqua hues of the
oppressively deep Atlantic
were realized in brilliant detail.
The dark silhouettes of seabed flora
swayed in the ocean currents
while schools of fish undulated by.
The atmosphere was positively dripping in
prestigious decor and leaking pipes.
Upturned vending machines, crumbling
brick, and burning
furniture littered the common
areas.
Scars cut deep into the once-gleaming
floors while support
columns were riddled with bullet
holes.
The corridors echoed with the chilling
nonsense of plasmid, adult zombies,
ghostly apparitions,
almost demonic little sisters and the
tortured, wordless voices
of their protectors, the big
Speaking of, one of the more lamentable
cuts to the game was the Slow Pro FUM,
which stood for slow-moving projectile
shooting F'd up melee. He
was a third big daddy design
that ultimately was cut late in
development due to time constraints.
Described as a tank, Slow
Pro would have been deadly in all but
medium range combat. He carried a
shoulder mounted cannon and
a sharp hook for melee attacks.
the playtests.
In January of 2007, just a few short
months out from release,
the team conducted extensive
playtesting of the game.
The results were not what Levine and
company were hoping for.
The feedback from their players was quite
negative, ranging from
the environments being
too dark to players losing
their way and getting lost.
The player is also deeply mistrusted,
Atlas, the NPC who is giving you
instructions and
guidance throughout the game.
At the time of this playtest, Atlas was
voiced by a Colonel Sanders-like,
complete with a southern
drawl and a lecherous attitude.
The team took the feedback to heart,
revamping the lighting,
adding the quest markers,
which saved me when I
got lost a number of times,
and re-recorded Atlas' lines with an
actor performing an Irish accent.
[Atlas] Careful now. Would you kindly lower that weapon?
You think that's a child down there?
Don't be fooled. She's a little sister now.
Somebody went and turned a sweet baby
into a monster
Whatever you thought about right
and wrong on the surface
Well, that don't count for much down in Rapture.
Much closer to release.
Reportedly, as the game was 99% complete,
another playtest was conducted.
This time, the person running the test
told Levine that the game
was likely to be a failure
because players felt no connection with
the main character, known only as Jack.
At this point, the game
didn't have many cutscenes.
Ken was adamantly against them.
However, this was the moment when the
game's iconic opening was added.
Billed as a cheap fix to the problem,
this intro cinematic was not simply a way
to connect the player
to the main character.
It was a set piece that made a statement.
This was nothing like any
game you've ever played before.
It's hard to believe that the brilliant,
chilling sound design of the plane crash,
fighting your way to the ocean's surface,
swimming up to the towering lighthouse,
the absolutely iconic Bathysphere
diatribe from Andrew Ryan,
voiced by the
incomparable Armin Schimmerman.
The sweat of his brow.
"no" as the man in Washington, it
belongs to the poor.
And the gorgeous, ominous, and
atmospheric introduction of Rapture.
All of that was added when the game was
99% complete, mere weeks from release.
What an introduction.
It wasn't my first
impression of Bioshock.
I had seen a few of the trailers that
they had released previously,
and man, I was hyped for it.
So when the demo dropped, I left my Xbox
360 on overnight in order to download
this interactive preview of the game.
My friend Mike and I were
both seriously impressed.
It was gorgeous, it was terrifying, and
it was nothing like
we'd ever seen before.
The demo consisted of that introductory
cutscene and the
following tutorial areas,
with some light
plasmid and gunplay combat.
And of course, the first
encounter with Andrew Ryan.
It had me sold instantly.
We were so impressed, in fact, that when
Mike's mom came over to visit,
we couldn't stop talking about the game,
and it piqued her interest.
So I booted up my 360 and played the demo
for her as she watched
on in absolute horror.
Later that week, I heard that she had
woken in the night several times,
having a nightmare about
being trapped in Rapture.
It left an impression and it sparked
unprecedented interest.
The demo was so in demand, in fact, that
it crashed Xbox Live.
[RYAN] ...Andrew Ryan isn't the giddy socialite
to be slapped around by government muscle
and with that... farewell
or "dasvidaniya"
whichever...
The release.
When the game
released, August 21st, 2007,
I left my closing crew job at the local
McDonald's to drive over an
hour to the closest GameStop,
if I remember correctly, it was still an
EB Games location at the time.
I had intended to pick up the
game at the midnight launch,
but the store wasn't actually doing a
midnight launch because
I live in rural Maine.
So I just slept in my car so I could pick
up a copy when the store
opened at 10 a.m. the next day.
I was 18 at the time, so I'm surprised
that I had my
priorities in such perfect order.
When I got the game
home, it didn't disappoint.
I played it on my Xbox 360 on a 3x2
32-inch Sony CRT PVM, which I had
acquired through my dad's work.
He was a security guard at the time, and
they had used it in
their CCTV monitoring booth.
It had light burn-in, so I
got it for next to nothing.
And admittedly, the closest thing to a
consumer video input
the monitor had was VGA.
At least that was all I
recognized at the time.
So I had bought a first-party VGA cable
for my 360, which yes, they did make.
I was playing Bioshock at 1024x768.
It might have actually been
higher than that on my 360.
The PVM was brilliant, unlike the plasma
screens and the LCDs at the time.
There was depth to the color.
The dynamic range was as good as it got
for the time, and it also
added to the game's atmosphere.
My little brothers would watch me play,
and they were just as scared
of the game as Mike's mom was.
The Splicers were terrifying
to them, and they scared me too.
My middle brother couldn't help but keep
watching the whole time asking,
"Why do you keep moving forward? Just
stay where you are, where
there aren't any monsters."
[Music]
Personal reflection.
I thought about his question.
Despite my fears, the story
compelled me to keep going.
And importantly, after I beat the game, I
really wrestled with the narrative.
It induced the same kind of deep,
uncomfortable dissonance I had felt
just a few short years prior as I
divorced myself from
my parents' religion.
See, as a young man, boiling over with
the errant political
ideology of my father's weird,
cultish, proto-QAnon dogmatism, Bioshock
was an indictment of everything I had
been told to believe.
Despite having left his church, I hadn't
separated myself from his off-brand of
perverted conservatism that worshipped
violence and authoritarians.
Nor the ideology that mistook blind,
pseudo-intellectual confidence for merit.
I credit Bioshock's narrative as
instrumental to exercising
that partisan demon from my
mind.
The story, the themes, the allegory, the
setting, perfectly
balanced and profoundly astute,
a sprawling, masterful and effective
critique of an ideology that was
polluting my post-exit
worldview.
Reception
Besides the impact it had on me
personally, the game was
met with universal praise.
At a time where the gaming press had
measurably more integrity, outlets
including Destructoid,
Eurogamer, Gameinformer, GameSpy,
1UP.com, and the official
Xbox magazine all gave the
game top marks, while other outlets
including GameSpot, IGN,
and PC Gamer giving the game
near perfect 9 out of 10 scores.
But Bioshock also crossed over into the
broader cultural discussion.
Pete Metzinger of the Los Angeles Times
raved, "Sure, it's fun to
play, looks spectacular,
and is easy to control, but it also does
something that no other
game has done to date.
It really makes you feel."
After all, aren't video games supposed to
make us lose ourselves
in vast imaginary worlds?
Bioshock does, and more.
The fact is, most critics heaped
comparable praise on
the title, and rightly so.
Legacy
Bioshock is esteemed as one of the
greatest games of all
time, from the art direction,
the storytelling, or
the twist at the end.
In 2010, Bioshock 2 launched under the
auspices of 2K Marin.
The game was less of a critical darling
but stood on its own
merits with a decent story.
It was an evolution of the mechanics of
its older brother, and it
provided a mostly satisfying
experience for fans of
the Bioshock universe.
Then Irrational followed up with Bioshock
Infinite, a game set
in 1912 aboard a city
in the sky.
When Bioshock Infinite was announced,
many derisively took
to calling it Skyoshock,
but it immediately caught my attention.
But the story of Infinite will have to be
saved for another
episode, which I just might
pen sometime soon.
If you'd like to see that,
make sure you get subscribed.
Impact
Bioshock was intended to be a spiritual
successor to System Shock 2.
I'd say it was, and
quite successfully so.
Not because it was a critical darling and
a smash hit, but because
of how it was similarly
able to trigger a
seismic shift in the industry.
Much like Doom, Half-Life, and Halo
before it, the games
industry can be inspected through
a pre and post-Bioshock lens.
In fact, I'd argue that Bioshock might be
the last truly
profound, even revolutionary
title for the industry.
One that had a lasting and importantly
positive impact that
shaped all other games that came
after it.
I already mentioned how the game's
control scheme solved the
problem of Bioshock's unique
mechanics, but it was
influential in other ways too.
While titles like System Shock 2, Deus
Ex, and others had mixed
action and RPG mechanics
before, it was Bioshock that hit the
sweet spot and set the
standard going forward.
At least as far as I'm
concerned as a mainstream gamer.
Upgrade trees that lent a sense of
progress while not gating
off the fun, a sense of growth
and the accumulation of
power throughout the narrative.
Similarly, the game's storytelling
prowess caused many
other games to step up their
narratives.
I would be curious to see an alternate
reality where Bioshock
had never been published.
How would that have negatively impacted
games like Uncharted 2,
Heavy Rain, or even Portal
2?
Would you kindly?
While games like Halo 3, Super Mario
Galaxy, Gears of War,
and yes, even PEGL all have
their own merits, Bioshock stands apart
from the other absolute
giants released that same
year.
Even today, some 18 years since its
release, the game feels fresh,
innovative, and important.
No microtransactions, no cosmetic DLC, no
online multiplayer,
just a man, a lighthouse,
and a city.
The game is relevant today for its combat
and stealth mechanics,
its strategy, and all
that jazz, but most especially, Bioshock
is relevant today for
its prophetic admonitions
against mistaking loud,
provocative idealism for merit.
Ultimately, Bioshock is a cautionary tale
that demonstrates
precisely what happens when
we let technology undermine trust and
social understanding.
What happens when we let those at the
very top spend money,
enact violence, and weaponize
technology to ensure their superiority?
It's all so sadly, deeply relevant.
Technology is a tool, one we could
harness to improve and make
better lives for ourselves
and our neighbors.
Bioshock teaches us that, if left to
their own devices, the
people at the top will use
those tools of liberation
to oppress and divide us.
So, would you kindly help me depose the
Andrew Ryans and the
Frank Fontaine's of our world?
This has been Would You Kindly?
A Bioshock Retrospective, an article that
was originally posted
on The Bryant Review,
GardinerBryant.com.
This is an article I had an
absolute pleasure writing.
If you liked this article, you can check
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We have my girlfriend Emily.
All of us are writing over there, and we
have usually about one article a day, and
they're all just as cool as this one was.
Thank you so much for enjoying this
episode, and I will see
you guys in the next one.