BioShock begins on a plane somewhere over the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Your character, Jack, examines a package he has brought with him. Suddenly, the scene goes black and screams of panic fill the air. You find yourself in the water, swimming between the flaming wreckage of the plane toward a mysterious tower jutting out of the sea. You enter the structure and descend toward Rapture in a bathysphere.

Before you reach your destination, a film narrated by Ryan begins to play: “I am Andrew Ryan and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No, says the man in Washington: it belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican: it belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow: it belongs to everyone.

“I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture.”

As the film continues, pay attention to these words: “A city … where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.” Ryan brought many top scientists with him, and one of them, Bridgette Tenenbaum, created ADAM through one of those happy accidents that sometimes advance human knowledge: a sea slug bit a dock worker, who found that his crippled hand was healed. She discovered that that particular type of sea slug excretes a substance with powerful properties.

Heavyweight Bout

Mobster Frank Fontaine helped Ryan start Rapture, and he bankrolled the research that eventually led to the creation of ADAM. He became rich from the resulting plasmids business, which allowed ordinary citizens to gain extraordinary powers. Ryan soon felt threatened by Fontaine’s status, and when he discovered the mobster’s involvement in the smuggling of forbidden items, such as religious material, the relationship descended into conflict.

Plasmid output required a lot of ADAM, however, and the sea slugs didn’t produce it fast enough. Tenenbaum discovered that implanting a slug in a person’s stomach would produce a large quantity of ADAM when the host was forced to regurgitate, leading Fontaine to establish his Little Sisters Orphanage, where young girls were subjected to the procedure.

When violence between supporters of Fontaine and Ryan escalated, Little Sisters were sent out, under the protection of Big Daddies, to extract ADAM from any corpses they found, enabling even greater production of the substance. Big Daddies are people who have been grafted into diving suits, their minds so riddled with ADAM that they have only one purpose in life: defend their Little Sisters at all costs.

When you defeat a Big Daddy and obtain ADAM from its Little Sister, you must choose between saving the child or harvesting her. The former nets less ADAM than the latter but grants bonuses for each third girl you save, along with the promise of a long-term reward. That decision has a major influence on the game’s ending.

Civil War

Fontaine became a leader of Rapture’s poor, who viewed him as a martyr when his death was reported in 1958. A man named Atlas replaced Fontaine at the head of the resistance, and on December 31, 1958, a new revolt began, with forces on both sides engaging in all-out civil war. When you arrive at Rapture, Atlas contacts you via radio and guides you to safety. He continues to communicate with you, giving you goals to achieve. But can you trust him?

Should you find yourself stuck at any point during your journey, visit GameFAQs and peruse its list of walkthroughs. You’ll even find an analysis of the game’s plot. Just watch out for spoilers.

“To be honest,” says Levine, “[game developers are] still in that early silent movie phase where we’re trying to figure out exactly what we’re doing, how we tell a story, how we present gameplay that’s married to storytelling, that’s not a parallel process. I think BioShock is a good example of trying to move the ball down the field.”

He adds: “When they had silent films, they had these very artificial elements of title cards. You’d have storytelling in a world that’s very organic and then here’s this title card that tells you what’s going on. It’s clearly not part of the action, it’s on top of it. Cut scenes are our title cards.”

While BioShock occasionally uses cut scenes to push its story forward, Levine says he prefers “mise-en-scene, which is basically setting the scene for a player where they can see what’s going on in the world. You see that all over in BioShock: the world tells you a story and you can see what happened there just by looking around.

“For example, finding a couple dead bodies intertwined on a bed with some pills around them, and an audio diary to tell you what happened to them. And you can follow that story with other diaries and visuals found throughout the world. It allows the player to become a private detective investigating what happened in this place, rather than being told by the designer, and I think that’s more rewarding.”

Seeking Videogames’ Rosebud

Asked if videogames will ever see — or have already seen — their version of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic watershed film “Citizen Kane,” Levin replies: “‘Citizen Kane’ is a great film. It’s hard having seen films made after ‘Citizen Kane’ before seeing it to appreciate what it did when it came out. I was born at a time where I could observe the entire evolution of videogames, and I think you see some key components in the storytelling of videogames over the past 30 years.

“You look at games for me that were important, like the Atari 2600’s Adventure. It was a very simple game but it told a story: you do this sequence of events that lead to the finality of getting a gold chalice. It was a very simple story, but it was done at the player’s pace, it was done without words, it was done entirely in the context of the game, and I think that was a big step. You didn’t need any artifice.”

Trying to recapture that 1979 success in the modern world of videogames wasn’t easy, however, and Levine recalls an early setback during BioShock’s development: “Several months before the game shipped, we found a group of people off the street to show it to. We put it in front of them and, frankly, they hated it. The proudest moment I had working on the game was the next day: the team came into the office and we all sat down and said: ‘Alright, why do they hate it? What can we do to improve the game?’

“The thing about these groups is they’re not going to tell you how to fix your game. They might make suggestions, but they’re not game designers, so to release the demo several months later of basically the same area of the game and have an incredibly enthusiastic, ecstatic response to it was so rewarding. That, I think, is one of the things that helped sell BioShock to the world.”