BioShock

Moby ID: 29886
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

In the year 1960, a plane crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with a man named Jack as the only survivor. He has the apparent luck of resurfacing in front of what looks like a door to an underwater complex. Without hesitating, Jack enters the door and is greeted by slogans that praise the city of Rapture, a paradise of free will built in the 1940s by a business magnate named Andrew Ryan. However, even before he assimilates all this new information, the descent to this supposed paradise ends and he can only see ruins and chaos. Learning about the destiny of Rapture will be now Jack's main motivation while he tries to survive the horrors that free will can create.

BioShock is a first-person shooter with gameplay elements and storytelling technique reminiscent of System Shock games. Rapture, the once-proud social experiment inspired by the real-world objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, has been nearly destroyed, its inhabitants either dead or fallen victims to bizarre scientific experiments. The retro-futuristic setting incorporates elements of sci-fi with art deco and steampunk influences, featuring interior design and propaganda posters reminiscent of 1950s.

The game's plot is largely revealed through recorded messages left by Rapture's inhabitants before they were killed or mutated. Much of the plot development is therefore dedicated to reconstructing the events of the past, similarly to System Shock games. Limited usage of stealth, the possibility to hack security cameras and other devices, and character customization are the gameplay elements that further tie BioShock to its spiritual predecessors.

At its core, however, the game is more action-oriented, restricting the role-playing mechanics of System Shock 2 to abilities and upgrades that can be acquired and equipped by the main character. Most of the enemies in the game are Splicers, the deformed and insane citizens of Rapture. The protagonist has an arsenal of firearms to combat them but is also able to use plasmids, which act similarly to magic and deplete a special energy called EVE. Various types of plasmids may directly hurt enemies, sabotage their movements, or enhance the player character's defense. Combat tactics often rely on successive usage of different types of weapons and plasmids. For example, encasing an enemy in ice with a plasmid makes it possible to shatter it to pieces with a single shot; protecting himself with an electric shield, the protagonist can electrocute enemies and strike them with melee weapons, etc.

The player can only equip a limited number of active and passive plasmids, and also has an inventory limit for every type of item. Restoring and enhancing items can be found by exploring the environment or purchased from vending machines. These can also be hacked, similar to turrets, cameras, safes, and other types of locks. Hacking is presented as a Pipe Mania-like mini-game.

Plasmids, on the other hand, are mostly purchased by spending certain amounts of a mutagen known as ADAM. This mutagen can be obtained from mysterious creatures called "Little Sisters" - little girls that can be seen in most of the game's locations, accompanied and protected by very strong, genetically enhanced humans grafted to armored diving suits and nicknamed "Big Daddies". In order to capture a Little Sister the player normally has to defeat her Big Daddy. Afterward, the player has the choice of killing the girl, harvesting large amounts of ADAM in the process, or sparing her life. Depending on the player's moral decisions concerning the Little Sisters, the game's story will be concluded with different endings.

The Playstation 3 version adds a harder difficulty level called "Survivor Mode" to the game.

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Credits (Windows version)

464 People (423 developers, 41 thanks) · View all

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Creative Direction
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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 94% (based on 193 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 409 ratings with 17 reviews)

BioShock is a memorable trip into the bizarre and the surreal.

The Good
System Shock 2 was one of those game experiences that will stick with you your entire life. It did one thing perfectly: Isolation. You were on a spaceship, thousands of miles away from home. Everyone, save for a mysterious female communicating VIA radio, is dead. No other game has ever captured the dread and feeling of being trapped, isolated, and alone as well as SS2. It even beats out the Silent Hill games, and that is saying a lot. It was a sleeper hit, but a hit nonetheless, and the developers have returned with their latest title: BioShock.

The first thing one will notice about BioShock are its beautiful visuals. I do not like the Unreal 3 engine much; most companies use it to make "realistic" looking games and they all look terrible. Yet when Epic Games and a few other developers have used the Unreal engine to create... well, something UNRealistic the engine looks awesome. BioShock is one of those games. BioShock's visuals are not just technically amazing, the art design is striking and incredibly defined. Combining the beautiful visuals with the ingenious art design makes BioShock one of the best looking games out there aesthetically and technically, even 2 years later.

The story is downright awesome. Like System Shock 2, Dead Space and the first and and fourth Silent Hill games, the games plot isn't so much about the protagonist as it is the world around him and having it all come together at the end explaining his purpose in the grand finale. BioShock's story is about the town of Rapture, and the story flows beautifully is excellently written.

The story reminds me a lot of something David Chronenberg would concoct, and that is HIGH praise because Chronenberg is my all time fav director. Chronenberg's films all have one underlying main theme: The loss of humanity by some bizarre means. Seth Brundle transforms into a fly, Max Renn becomes a killer programmed by a mind controlling TV, and the citizens of Rapture alter their genetic code to the point their bodies begin to degrade along with their minds. The story is extremely deep, and the various PDAs and other items that help fit the pieces together as well as provide insight into the lives of certain citizens in rapture are for once actually fun to find because the story is so involving. I will go as far to say that this story has impressed me more than any other story in a FPS game in a long time. There are too many memorable characters and scenes to count; one of my favourite being an insane artist who wants to make his "masterpiece" by killing his foes and taking a picture of them to "immortalize" them. It has all the grotesque, subhuman horror that pleases me as well as a great political and analytical allegory.

Rapture is a living breathing place. The story helps get you interested, but as you play on you'll feel like a real citizen of the accursed submerged city. Another thing that makes it like this is the games highly touted "Emergent AI." Believe it or not, this concept is executed quite well. The AI doesn't seem like anything special the first time around, but when the game opens its doors a little you'll see why its so impressive. Each entity "lives" in Rapture. Big Daddies go upon their business unscripted, and so do the splicers. Of course there are set-pieces, but outside of these every entity in the game is living in rapture and has a realistic and impressive AI controller.

The environment is also at your disposal. See that splicer standing over by that leaking oil barrel? See that body of water near him? Well, set the oil on fire and catch the splicer on fire, and as he runs to the pool of water, send lightning to fry him! Did you hack that health dispenser? Well, go ahead and let your foe run away and use it.. they'll just get a face-full of poison! The environment is one of the games best weapons, and using the plasmids to manipulate it is awesome and very entertaining.

The voice acting is awesome and helps put emotion and feeling into the story, only making the story even more entertaining. The game will tug several emotions with its excellent audio design. Beautiful music and excellent voice acting makes the game just as impressive in the audio department as it is in the tech department.

There are a lot of secrets to find. The game has replay value because you will miss a lot the first time around. There are tons of treasures to find in Rapture and its worth returning a few times to try and find it all, I'm normally not a completionist but finding these secrets are so satisfying that even I was compelled to do it. The games replay value also benefits from a good skill development system and the aforementioned emergent AI. Save for the set pieces, the game will never be the same when you do a replay.

The Bad
The games difficulty is inconsistent. The game is ridiculously easy thanks to the "VitaChambers" which respawn you with your exact inventory and if you were in the middle of a battle, the enemy will still be damaged. This keeps the flow and it is nice at times, but at others it gives you less reason to continue surviving because Death is never really a penalty. Yet other times, the game is hard as hell. Naturally the game gets harder, but the big daddies on the medium or higher difficulty will kick your ass left and right and sometimes battles with them are frustrating.

The game is somewhat short if you decide to do a bare bones playthrough.

Although skill development is here and it is well done, the game isn't as deep as System Shock 2 in regards to the RPG/FPS hybrid elements. There is no manageable inventory (Which is annoying when you want something in a container that also contains something you DON'T want since the game gives you no choice to just take one item instead of all of them.) and you don't have class choice, which does cut the replay value down a little.

The PC version has some more glitches and bugs than the other versions, and DRM is a pain.


The Bottom Line
I'm pretty much speechless. Sometimes, unanimous critical acclaim is actually founded. This is easily the best shooter since Half-Life 2 and a great spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Its a unique game and a ton of fun, with an incredible design philosophy and technically impressive styling. Well, what are you waiting for? If you haven't played this yet despite it being around for 2 years, then go out and play it now!

Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009

Would you kindly stop patronizing me?

The Good
BioShock polarized opinions shortly after its release, mainly because it had claimed to be something it really wasn't: a true spiritual successor to System Shock games. The game was seen by some old-timers as a herald of simplified gameplay for the masses, an unworthy stepchild conquering innocent hearts with shallow splendor. I must state that I share that sentiment; but first, as always, the good part.

BioShock is one of the most stylistically impressive games I've come across. Call it Art Deco or whatever, but in fact it is a unique "Rapturian" style. Most of the things you see in BioShock can only be seen in this game. Everything - every character, building, piece of furniture, photographs, clothes, machinery, random objects - is homogeneous, everything is designed in such a way that it suits the lush, decadent theme of the game. Rapture is instantly recognizable. Take a look at any BioShock screenshot and you'll know immediately it is from BioShock. There aren't that many games that can boast such an achievement. The game simply screams style, and from the first screen to the last you are invited to an unforgettable art gallery.

Then there are sound effects and music, truly an experience of its own. The insane babbling of the splicers, the eerie recorded voices of dead people on audio diaries, the distorted screams coming from unexpected places, the creepy child voices of little sisters, the menacing, blood-chilling humming of their protectors come on top of old music - forgotten and desolate, like Rapture itself. Very old swing tunes, the kind of jazz that feels like it should be stored in a museum - comfortable and strangely sad, vulnerable music, which turns so scary when you realize to what it serves as background. You listen to this game as much as you look at it. And if you do both, you are immersed into a strange, beautiful, disturbing world, with a magical atmosphere that draws you in with unseen force.

The contrast between the cozy "retro" world depicted in the game and the terrifying, desolate reality can be quite scary. There is something very majestic - and oddly touching - in the ruined city you'll explore. You can fall in love with Rapture. It is beautiful, yet it is also horrifying. All this marvelous work, all those visions, the ideals, the energy, the genius of its creators - everything was destroyed. Using an excellent gameplay device that did survive from System Shock, the scattered audio diaries tell you about a world and people that don't exist any more. You travel through places that were once full of life and have fell victims to destruction and decay.

The much-advertised Big Daddies and Little Sisters may not represent the epitome of choice-based gameplay, but they do add an interesting twist to the routines of the genre. Basically, we are talking about a substantial amount of tough optional bosses with a bit of a schematic "good and evil" decision pattern through in. Like everything else in the game, those characters are nicely tied into the story, and your treatment of them will eventually affect the ending.

As mentioned above, recreating the story of the past using gameplay-related means is an essential feature that was faithfully carried over from System Shock games. If you've played those you know what I'm talking about: instead of developing from cutscene to cutscene, the story is hidden in the notes left by different characters, and it's up to you to unravel it. This is retroactive storytelling, and it works great. The story itself is pretty good, though its formal structure and even a major plot twist were basically ripped out of the second System Shock 2.

The Bad
I won't go into promotional issues here, but even without all the hype similarities with System Shock games can be felt just from playing BioShock. Sadly, many of those similarities are superficial: the developers of BioShock apparently failed to understand what made its older brothers work in such splendid ways.

System Shock games were wonderfully open-ended. The space station in the first game and the abandoned ship in the second were large, generous locations you could explore at your own pace. Not so in BioShock: granted, the levels are reasonably spacious and there is optional stuff to find almost everywhere - but they are still levels. Free-form exploration was one of the chief reasons for System Shock games feeling like RPGs. BioShock doesn't feel that way at all: it's just a fairly linear shooter with some fancy magic spells.

And even as such, it's not that good. I always had a feeling that the designers wanted to make something more out of it - a deeper, more tactical game with more choices during combat. The fact is that you do have choices - but they don't mesh well with the game's mandatory fast pace and linearity. Since you cannot circumvent your enemies, the preferred alternative would be then blasting them to pieces in a fast and furious way. Instead, you'll have to micro-manage your plasmids and fiddle with your abilities just to get rid of yet another brainless splicer.

You are therefore overwhelmed by your possibilities, and that makes the game too slow, and hence overly repetitive. You'll be doing a lots of things at the same time - fighting enemies, hunting for items, buying things, etc., and most of those activities won't be new and fresh anymore. Also, those activities feel artificial and disjointed: the game conveniently pauses for you when you attempt to hack a turret - and when it's done, you are confronted once again by a flurry of chaotic enemies seemingly taken out of an arcade game. By the way, hacking is handled like a minigame, which is a poor choice per se, especially when it's easy and monotonous.

There is surprisingly little variety in enemies. It's basically the same splicers from the beginning to the end. Sure, there are several variants of them who behave quite differently, but in the end they are the same mutant humans over and over again. During later levels, the enemies become more powerful, but they still look the same and even have the same names. They just gain more health and take way too long to kill. This doesn't really contribute to the difficulty - it just increases the tedium, which is so out of place in an action game.

Resource management is a valuable game mechanic that modern games like dumbing down so much. Collecting only makes sense when the collected item is scarce and when it takes a while to complete the collection. In BioShock, you have no problem packing machine guns and grenade launchers, but you can only carry nine healing items and five hundred dollars. Ammo is too plentiful and dollars are scattered around when there is nothing I want to buy.

The ubiquitous vita chambers are, in all seriousness, a game-breaking flaw. In this game, you are essentially immortal. When you die, you always respawn with half your health intact, while your enemies are politely waiting for you to come over and finish them off. This kills any remnants of challenge and suspense the game might have still had. I clearly remember a Big Daddy fight where I literally emptied a gun into him, got killed, emptied another gun, and so on, until I emerged victorious. There was zero skill involved; I felt the designers were simply patronizing me. I cannot fathom how the designers could let such a fatal defect slip into the final version of the product.

The Bottom Line
It's not hard to see why BioShock enraged those who were craving for a true third coming of System Shock. The full truth is even sadder: Bioshock doesn't really work that well even as a simple, straightforward shooter. It is undeniably a beautiful and atmospheric game, but it is hardly fulfilling.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2016

not the review you've been waiting for.. so buy or rent Bioshock, I don't care

The Good
+ great story - would you kindly get your foot outta my ass? + great visuals - water, that most intangible of elements, looks like water + atmosphere supports the story - immersive environment makes the 50's look hip again, no thanks to Marty McFly's dad + stuff blows up great - all underwater secret cities should have full tanks of flammable propane lying everywhere in case a video game gets made there

The Bad
- way too easy - Bioshock has an invincible "god" mode - it's called default - the movie will be better - could have had more varied enemy selection, like that gigantic walking spider-thing mech from DOOM, but that wouldn't have "served" the story - once again, the best weapon in the game - the crossbow - is also the most low-tech; development time spent on hells-yes plasmids may have been better spent on crowd favorite "2x4 with rusty nail hammered through it"

The Bottom Line
Analysis: Bioshock and Compromise

Sometimes, some things are just too good for their own good.

While that seems to be a contradictory statement simply on its own, it makes sense (but not too much sense) when you consider there are many things that haven't enjoyed any success when it is fully conceivable that they should. Critical success does not necessarily mean popular success; sometimes art is made that is so advanced that the current generation can not accept it (the term avant-garde comes to mind). The public can only handle so much.

This may seem to be critical of the average layman, who can't be faulted for being who he is, a man--a laying man, at that. In that case, to put it another way (other than saying the public can only accept so much), beauty is the beginning of fear. You know that new sports car? That fancy expensive one, the one you fantasize about? If you buy that, you're going to worry about it all the time; you're going to worry about it being stolen, scratched, towed, and even targeted by malicious flying birds and their gooey excrement. You know that hot, attractive girl? The one you fantasize about all the time? Once she becomes your girlfriend ("oh yes, she will be mine") you may find yourself constantly worried that someone may steal her from you. Again: beauty is the beginning of fear, and some things are just too good for their own good.

While these two points aren't necessarily the same, the same point can be made: the public can only handle so much. So, that's where Bioshock lands, firmly on its capable and talented feet and stooping low to bend to the lowest common denominator so that even the most lay of the layest of layman will "get" this game.

Bioshock is a beautiful game that takes place in the undersea city of Rapture. Based on the philosophies of Ayn Rand, Bioshock is an exploration of Objectivism gone catastrophically wrong. In the game, a charismatic leader named Andrew Ryan founds the city of Rapture as a capitalist haven safe against influence and pressure from outside political and religious powers. Literally shut off from the entire world at the bottom of the ocean, the Objectivist experiment of Rapture fails due to internal problems; this is suggested due in part to Objectivist dogma where the scientist, artist and capitalist aren't constrained by ethics or morality.

This is quite an interesting basis for a story; furthermore, Bioshock would continue down the "interesting path" some more and spin a tale of betrayal, deceit and domination. However, the fantastic research and writing that went into making this video game comes at a price: it's too good for its own good.

When applied to video games many gamers could only shake their heads in disbelief. "How can a game be too good?" they may say. I suppose this can be someone asking how vanilla ice cream can be too vanilla-y, or how someone can have sex too often and have too many orgasms. Well, I can't complain about vanilla ice cream nor about orgasms that are too good to have, but there is something to be said about Bioshock: its story and game play are terribly unbalanced with each other. Bioshock can't make up its mind whether it wants to tell a story or let you blow things up; stuck as a compromise, Bioshock delivers an interesting story in a way only video games can tell at the cost of overpowered game play that is too easy even for the average layman.

The story is too good for video games. I admit this sounds insulting to all video gamers and layman everywhere, lying down, but when the news broke that Bioshock is getting the Hollywood treatment with "name" director Gore Verbinski attached, who made alot of money and fame making movies about a ride at Disneyworld, I suspect the excitement was mostly over the fact that the great story in Bioshock would finally get told properly - in another medium that can tell stories well.

How can a story be too good for a game? Well, the high quality of a story in a video game can be detrimental when the developers emphasize the importance of the story over everything else; what this does effectively is subvert every other aspect including game play, difficulty, and enemy selection. You know (you laymen guys), everything that makes a video game a game.

First, the game is entirely too easy. Of the three difficulty levels, the hardest level is about the same level as most other games' mild medium difficulty level; compared to a hardcore game like Ninja Gaiden, Bioshock's hardest difficulty level is on par with the former game's easiest difficulty level. Other elements add to this ease: the game pauses when selecting weapons or plasmids, basic enemies (splicers) are all the same and so similar strategies can be used against them throughout the game, weapons are upgradeable to over-powered status, after halfway through the game money becomes so easy to make that a 500$ maximum capacity is forced on the player (unlike my wallet in real life), a map and a directional arrow points to the objective so that getting lost in a level is an impossibility, and furthermore no penalty is ever exacted on the player for dying - the player is instantly resurrected at a Vita-chamber to redo a level until ultimately he succeeds.

Secondly, the game play is so unbalanced that not long after beginning you become a unstoppable powered tank. The average enemy soon doesn't have a chance against the player, and in fact by the game's end you are pretty much just as powerful as the end boss. It appears the makers spent a lot of time designing cool ways to blow things up real good that they forgot to give you a suitable opponent; while it may be argued that Big Daddies are tough mini-bosses, the truth is they don't appear often enough and once you learn the technique how to take down a Big Daddy quickly it actually becomes routine quite quickly. In fact, one of the biggest challenges in Bioshock is cycling through your weapons and plasmids regularly to use them all equally, whereas in most cases you'll stick with one familiar weapon and upgrade it to make short work of all splicers and Big Daddies.

The fact of the matter is that the game has been designed to be overly simple and easy for the simplest of laymen to ensure that absolutely anyone and everyone can make it to the end - to ensure that this story gets told, from beginning to end. In four (and a compound) words: great story, bad game play. This is the antithesis of most games that have a bad story but great game play. Video games have traditionally not had great stories because usually they have been about game play, the meat, and back bone of video games.

Consider all the audio diaries scattered through each of the levels. When put together they weave together the complicated social tapestry of Rapture, a blend of unbridled ambition and treachery and despair. An interesting part of the story... that isn't an integral part of the game. In fact, listening to these audio diaries will commonly displace you from the immersion of the game, and in fact distract you from attacking enemies. These side-stories are entirely skippable for those who wish to simply blow things up.

And that's a problem too: as a straight-forward first-person shooter, Bioshock is strangely unsatisfying for not having unbalanced game play. Bioshock looks beautiful, sounds realistic for sound effects and dramatic for voice acting and has period songs of the era, and is a high class offering that should be a great video game - but it isn't as much fun as DOOM to shoot monsters and blow stuff up.

This is where Bioshock deviates from the norm (watch out, lying-down people everywhere!). As a game, it isn't much fun or challenging, but as a story and as a work of original art, it is fascinating and nuanced and fresh. As a top tier well-hyped video game with enormous production values, it's clear that sacrifices were made to this game to make it enjoyable and accessible to everyone; to anyone who has studied art knows, art is something that is for anyone, but not everyone. Bioshock could have been something really special and extraordinary, but instead we have something that allows the basest fan boy to blow stuff up.

This isn't to say Bioshock doesn't understand its medium and the limitations thereof; on the contrary, the single most genius fact of the design of Bioshock is the use of linearity. Long a bane of video game design, Bioshock whole-heartedly embraces linearity as the basis of the shocking twist at the game's mid-section. Without explaining it completely to encourage people to play it for themselves, the linearity of the game and lack of choice is used to turn the entire convention of video game stories on its head. This same type of head-turning convention was last used to great effect in "Shadows of the Colossus" (2005), in which, without the use of speaking script, the player realizes in horrifying dismay that the colossus you are slaying aren't evil - the sad, melancholic music that plays upon killing a colossus is in stark contrast to the happy, heroic music that plays when you finally mount them.

This perspective as a gamer progressing through levels to satisfy an objective only to realize, after the fact, the real ramification of what you have done can only lie within the realm of objective-reaching video games that feature a challenge/reward system that films, TV and books can't compete. However, films - the film adaptation of Bioshock, for example - aren't limited by the conventions and devices of video games and so aren't constrained in storytelling: films don't have power-ups, crates to smash and tutorials telling you how to cycle through your weapons. Unlike a video game, films have a set, finite duration of time and will finish whether or not you can kill the end boss who has cheap-ass attacks. Movies tell stories; video games are stories unto themselves that depend upon your mad video game skillz, layman or otherwise.

It is with this sad fact that the Bioshock movie, if it ever gets made, will be much better than the original video game and become the best video game adaptation ever made. This is not so surprising since Bioshock isn't as much a video game as it is a delightful story set awkwardly as a period piece masquerading as a first-person shooter. While it’s confusing that this story wound up being told first as a video game, it shouldn't be surprising that this video game was made as a first-person shooter - it's these fps games that get bought. Getting bought means money. And money is an end in itself that ensures compromise over integrity.

While we may never know to what end Bioshock was compromised, it's clear that the result is an unbalanced game that has a better story than its gameplay. For being innovative and challenging as a work of art in the field of video games is noteworthy, but laymen should now understand why I enjoy playing Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad more than this game. Chicks in bikinis using samurai swords to slice up zombies - now that makes a fun game; the movie... (Oneechanbara: The Movie (2008)) not so much.

There's hope for you yet, Bioshock.

(If you've made it this far, I'll divulge the fact that I already did a review for Bioshock for PC - after only having played it for a few hours. If you look it up here on Mobygames, you'll see - quite gratifying to me - that I wasn't that far off the mark from the mark. Once again, thank you Mobygames for making my reviews arguably the most read/voted unhelpful!)

Xbox 360 · by lasttoblame (414) · 2009

[ View all 17 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
initial Mac releases Cantillon (75064) Feb 7, 2022
Gameplay feature: New Game+ Cantillon (75064) Jun 22, 2021
German PEGI (uncut) Steelbook Cover Art Zerobrain (3053) Oct 15, 2010
Yikes. Indra was here (20768) May 16, 2009
They're doin' it for themselves Slug Camargo (583) Mar 21, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

BioShock appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

German version

To ensure that the game wouldn't be put on the infamous list of BPjS/BPjM indexed games, 2k Games released a slightly modified version of the game and the Collector's Edition with only the German language on the disc in Germany. The changes include less blood, some changed cutscenes and no wounds on burned bodies. This version got rated "Not free for minors" by the German rating organisation USK.

Hacking

The hacking mini-game (which can be performed on a variety of devices including safes, security cameras, item dispensers, robots, etc.) is basically a slightly altered version of Pipe Dream.

Reception

According to Wall Street Journal Take Two's shares increased by nearly 20% after early favorable reviews of BioShock.

References

In Farmer's Market cantina, you can find a piece of cheese that resembles Pac-Man, even with the dots!

References to the game

BioShock was parodied in an episode of "Die Redaktion" (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. It was published on the DVD of issue 12/2007.

Soundtrack

On August 24, 2007 2K Games released a 12 track compilation with songs from the orchestral score composed by Garry Schyman. The compilation can be downloaded for free here: http://downloads.2kgames.com/bioshock/BioShock_Score.zip

One of the songs that were included on the Bonus EP in the Collector's Edition, was made by Moby. It's a remix of "Below the sea".

Water

2K Games had to hire a water programmer and a water artist to implement the pools and the pouring water around Rapture. This involved modifying the Unreal 3.0 engine to create realistic water effects.

Awards

  • Games for Windows Magazine
    • March 2008 - #4 Game of the Year 2007
  • GameSpy
    • 2007 – #2 Console Game of the Year
    • 2007 – #2 Xbox 360 Game of the Year
    • 2007 – #3 Game of the Year
    • 2007 – #3 PC Game of the Year
    • 2007 – Best Art Direction of the Year
    • 2007 – Best Sound of the Year
    • 2007 – Best Story of the Year
    • 2011 – #2 Top PC Game of the 2000s
    • 2012 – #2 Top PC Gaming Intro
  • Mac|Life
    • December 2009 - Editor's Choice Award

Information also contributed by Agent 5, Apogee IV, [bakkelun](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,70962/), [Emepol](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,12364/), [PCGamer77](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,1717/), [Scott Monster](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,35225/), [Sicarius](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,70866/) and [WildKard](http://www.mobygames.com/user/sheet/userSheetId,16566/)

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Game added by MichaelPalin.

OnLive added by firefang9212. iPhone, iPad, PlayStation 3 added by Sciere. Macintosh added by Zeppin.

Additional contributors: Sciere, Maw, Zeppin, Jason Strautman, Patrick Bregger, Starbuck the Third, FatherJack, firefang9212.

Game added August 23, 2007. Last modified March 23, 2024.