Game:

BioShock (2007)

Category:

Walkthrough

Duration: 57:57

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BioShock is a retrofuturistic video game series created by Ken Levine, published by 2K Games and developed by several studios, including Irrational Games and 2K Marin. The BioShock games combine first-person shooter and role-playing elements, giving the player freedom for how to approach combat and other situations, and are considered part of the immersive sim genre. Additionally, the series is notable for exploring philosophical and moral concepts with a strong in-game narrative influenced by concepts such as Objectivism, total utilitarianism, and American exceptionalism.

The series consists of three main games. BioShock (2007) and BioShock 2 (2010) take place in the 1960s in the fictional underwater city of Rapture. BioShock Infinite (2013) is thematically and narratively tied to the first games, but takes place in 1912 aboard the floating city of Columbia. After Infinite's release, Irrational Games was downsized and rebranded as Ghost Story Games to work on smaller titles, while 2K Games retained rights to BioShock. The publisher announced that a new BioShock game was in development by Cloud Chamber in December 2019.

The game series has received critical and commercial acclaim. The series had sold more than 37 million copies by May 2021 making the series one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time.A film adaptation of the series is currently in development at Netflix.

Developer Ken Levine founded Irrational Games in 1997 out of former members from Looking Glass Studios. Irrational Games produced System Shock 2, a sequel to Looking Glass's System Shock;Levine pitched another System Shock sequel to Electronic Arts, but the publisher rejected the idea based on System Shock 2's poor commercial performance.While Irrational worked on other projects, Levine still wanted to create a successor to System Shock 2.Levine said, "I have my useless liberal arts degree, so I've read stuff from Ayn Rand, George Orwell and all the sort of utopian and dystopian writings of the 20th century, and having developed the System Shock franchise, some of my first games, I felt that the atmosphere was a good one to set for a dystopian environment, one we borrowed heavily from System Shock."Levine has also mentioned an interest in "stem cell research and the moral issues that go around [it]."In regard to artistic influences, Levine cited the books Nineteen Eighty-Four and Logan's Run, representing societies that have "really interesting ideas screwed up by the fact that we're people."Walking through Rockefeller Center near the GE Building in New York City, Levine was inspired by the art deco styling of Rockefeller Center to make a similarly inspired space that had not been experienced in the first-person shooter genre.

The games in the BioShock series are first-person shooters with role-playing elements.While precise mechanics differ between all three games, they share common themes of players using a combination of weapons, the environment, and superhuman abilities—called "Plasmids" in BioShock and BioShock 2, or "Vigors" in Infinite—to defeat enemies. These weapons and powers can be used in various combinations to aid in defeating foes; for example, shocking a pool of water will electrocute the enemies standing in the liquid.[citation needed] In comparison to the hybrid role-playing game/first-person shooter stylings of System Shock, BioShock was marketed as a shooter to appeal to fans of the increasingly-popular genre.[6] The gameplay nevertheless retained comparable elements: plasmids in BioShock supplied by "EVE hypos" serve the same function as "Psionic Abilities" supplied by "PSI hypos" in System Shock 2; the player needs to deal with enemy security cameras, machine gun turrets, and robots, and has the ability to hack them in both games; the player must manage supplies and ammunition; and audio tape recordings fulfill the same storytelling role as email logs did in the System Shock games.

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