This claim may be controversial. After all, 2007 was a landmark year in the transformation of blockbuster games. November saw the release of Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, effectively creating a series of franchises that will dominate video game culture for the next decade. Assassin’s Creed set limited gameplay in an open world in densely populated locations. Developed by Mass Effect, a BioWare-style RPG defined by an immersive, character-driven narrative, Modern Warfare turns Call of Duty into a world-travelling tech thriller. All of these were aimed at the largest possible market.
In an interview with Kieron Gillen shortly after the release of BioShock, Ken Levine was credited with the official game credits as “Story, Script, and Creative Direction,” but Gillen said he was “the main person behind BioShock.” “The game is not a story”.
“Games are a way of playing,” Levine continues. “The game is interactive.” Levine explained that this fact is the true heart of BioShock. During the creation of System Shock 2, the spiritual predecessor to BioShock, the team created a specific space and required the player to move within it to create a massive amount of gameplay. I realized there was a chance the story of “BioShock” Andrew Ryan, the entrepreneur who created Rapture, was born out of this limitation. A city at the bottom of the sea isolated from the world is like a space station. Who built it and why? This is the origin of Bioshock.
This only makes sense because the storytelling style that made BioShock so explicitly embedded in gaming culture 15 years ago relies heavily on story as its primary driving force. It’s noteworthy from a point of view when I set up the game in preparation for writing this article, I was amazed at how much all I went through in the first few hours due to the traditional narrative action.
Bioshock is the story of a man whose plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. He discovered an abyssal region that carried him into the depths of the waters, and set him in Rapture, which was once a glorious city for all who wanted to leave their post-war and offensive world power relations to themselves. It was once populated by rogue capitalists, scholars who wanted to experiment freely without moral constraints, and those who sought hope. In a world that really started from scratch. In fact, the laissez-faire system created in Rapture ended in dystopia. A scientific discovery called ADAM allows people to distort their genes, creating a world of pseudo-zombie addicts who want to tear each other apart because of the special juices they possess within each other.
The player character is captured in all of this as soon as they enter the city, engulfed in a constant war between the masters of the different Rapture realms. Game. All this turned into a kind of proxy war between the two factions. Atlas is the rebel leader who initiated the events that destabilized the Rapture in its current state. Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture and an unspoken tyrant, extolled the virtues of freedom while personally and publicly ruling various parts of the city since its inception.
Players attract both factions to each other. Atlas is revealed to be entrepreneur Frank Fontaine’s rival to Andrew Ryan. And the Shyamalan-eski touch adds that it’s actually another character’s will: Andrew kills Ryan, Fontaine becomes a big red muscle guy, and there’s a boss fight. The game ends in a new, but somehow predictable way.
Action movie plots abound in BioShock. Each area of the Rapture is controlled by the rest of the previously distorted world, and like contemporary John McClane, players must infiltrate this tiny world and dismantle it from within. These characters are developed with massive voice records, tiny voice memos that fill the world, and the way the characters take on quirky shapes the moment the player encounters them.
Following in the footsteps of games like System Shock 2, what was new about BioShock was that it didn’t attempt to frame those cinematic rhythms in a movie. “Assassin’s Creed” and “Mass Effect” ran similar runs, but with a very traditional split between gameplay and stories, and it took place in a cinema set that was all about viewing.
By contrast, “BioShock” spends most of its time introducing the same thread—the sinister monologue and dismembering ecstasy—and then puts it to work. As you walk along the dilapidated glass path, it begins to crack under your feet and water flows through the small cracks. Later that year, Modern Warfare became legendary for maximizing the same “action” gameplay with the “All Ghillied Up” mission, but a few months ago, so to speak, something was in the water.
Looking at the list of best-selling games of the past decade, it’s hard to see the impact of “BioShock” at the height of the broker’s economic transformation. Likewise, the world’s most powerful gaming expansion, the mobile game market, is not dominated by Bioshock’s storytelling technologies and play styles. But it’s hard to imagine “The Last of Us” or “Wolfenstein: The New Order” without the advent of BioShock, which sells narrative claims built around traditional shooter frameworks. Paving the way for a wide range of commercial games based on .
It is also commonly found in storytelling mechanics in first-person literary genres. NPR has come up with “The Stanley Parable” versus the third “BioShock” game. Developer Davey Wreden confirmed that the game’s name was the inspiration for the time the original mod came out. Subway World of “Metro 2033” is announced as the opposite of Rapture. “Fallout 3” writer Emil Pagliarulo shouted “BioShock” as the loud watermark for the game’s narrative before “Fallout 3” ended. The groundbreaking first-person game that came after “BioShock” has been largely talked about for its massive impact, whether on purpose or simply through crucial comparisons. Even if Half-Life 2 laid some foundations for what followed, its masterful blend of deeper narrative and forward and central action is unparalleled for its time.
In addition to the growing influence of games in the environment of gaming culture and the commercial sphere, the game “BioShock” has spawned its own offspring. (In my opinion, much better) “BioShock 2” was not developed by Boston-based studio 2K, but under a separate team at 2K Marin. The game’s legacy is misinterpreted as a lackluster follow-up to its predecessor, due to the heavy interest in it and its follow-through of many industry trends, including the core multiplayer format. Under Levine’s leadership and some brutal development conditions, 2013’s “BioShock Infinite” was marketed as the rightful heir to the “BioShock” legacy. It’s a claim that’s still being debated today, but there’s no denying that whatever high points found within ‘Infinite’ were overshadowed by the first game’s adoption and references to its more shocking points of origin.
Bioshock ripples can still be felt today. Given the current video game landscape, there is no incomprehensible experience regarding “BioShock” from 15 years ago. It’s hard to imagine games like “Last Stop”, “The Magnificent Trufflepigs” and “Firewatch” exist without the trading methods BioShock has used on so many platforms.
Cameron Kunzelman is a reviewer who writes about games. His by-lines have been featured on Waypoint, Polygon, Kotaku, and Paste. He has a podcast with him and hosts Read Stephen King in order of publicationHe’s on Twitter Tweet embed.