Trivia / BioShock

• Acting in the Dark: When going in to record Atlas, Karl Hanover was given no other lines other than his own, and had absolutely no idea what his character even looked like, so he had little knowledge as to what the game was actually about. He also did not know about the true meaning of "Would You Kindly", believing it was just a Verbal Tic of Atlas's.
• Creator Backlash: Ken Levine admitted on Twitter that he regrets making Frank Fontaine naked during his boss fight at the end of the game.
• Defictionalization: For a while, Google had◊ Rapture◊ when searching the 63° 2' N, 29° 55' W coordinate on their map services.
• Denied Parody: While the name "Andrew Ryan" is similar to "Ayn Rand", and "Atlas" is a reference to the novel Atlas Shrugged, Word of God claims that "Frank Fontaine" being a reference to The Fountainhead is just a coincidence.
• Diagnosis of God: Brigid Tennenbaum has been confirmed to have been autistic.
• Executive Meddling: Dr. Tenenbaum gives the player gifts for saving Little Sisters instead of harvesting them because the game's publishers pushed back against the original plan of saving them making gameplay more difficult by reducing how much ADAM could be obtained in a good playthrough.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The Belarusan-German Brigid Tenenbaum is voiced by Anne Bobby, who is American.
  • Dr. Yi Suchong is from Korea, yet he's voiced by the Japanese American James Yaegashi.
• Fake Russian: Andrew Ryan, who is originally from Soviet Russia, is voiced by the American Armin Shimerman.
• Inspiration for the Work: Ken Levine cited Syriana, The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and The Manchurian Candidate as influences for this game's tone and story. The character of Frank Fontaine in particular is heavily based on Usual Suspects' enigmatic Keyser Söze.
• Killer App: It was a console exclusive for the Xbox 360 in 2007, and alongside Halo 3, Gears of War, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, helped cement it as the FPS console for that generation.
• Orphaned Reference: The crawlspace behind a stall in the Farmer's Market contains two corpses hanging on meathooks. This was supposed to relate to a plot about a serial killer operating around the time of Rapture's fall that never went anywhere.
• Reclusive Artist: Karl Hanover hasn't appeared in any other media aside from this game series, and his online presence is nonexistent. He did do an interview on a website called The Gaming Liberty in 2014, but the site has long since shut down, making it impossible to view it without the Wayback Machine. He would finally be interviewed once more in 2022, which can be watched here.
• Referenced by...: Andrew Ryan's "I chose RAPTURE!" speech is sampled for the RAVON song "Rapture".
• Two Voices, One Character: Atlas and Fontaine have different voice actors in order to avoid having the audience guess The Reveal that they're the same person ahead of time (though Karl Hanover isn't credited in this game due to not being part of the American Acting Guild at the time). Hanover would later return, now voicing both characters, in the sequels.
• What Could Have Been - BioShock underwent many, many changes from the time it was pitched to the final product.
  • The original pitch still had the Zeerust idea; they wanted it to take place on land, however, in a series of interconnected controlled environment chambers created by 1940s Germany.
  • The laboratories would be full of mysteriously dead human bodies, being overrun by strange, insectoid life forms called Gatherers, who collected genetic material and body parts, the Protectors for the Gatherers, and predatory Aggressors. These eventually developed into the Little Sisters, Big Daddies and Splicers, respectively, when the developers decided they wanted a more "human" angle. The concept art book for BioShock shows off some of these life-forms; particularly striking is one insectoid being half-fused into a human body using its arms and legs to walk and fire a pistol.
  • One of the intermediate steps toward the setting of Rapture moved the story to a Research, Inc. style laboratory- the idea that the splicers were the remnants of a genetic arms race solidified at this stage, but between a staff of scientists recruited for brilliance in particular fields rather than the broader array of "elites" in Rapture. This iteration had the splicers falling into a number of different themes or factions, such as one set that had incorporated machinery into their bodies as well as obvious genetic alterations.
  • One of the stages between the insectoid Gatherers and the Little Sisters had them take the form of chipmunk-like creatures, which introduced the Creepy Cute element further emphasized in their final form.
  • Among other things considered was the ability to alter the controlled environment, such as raising the temperature in an area and giving yourself a plasmid that protected you from heat exhaustion.
  • According to the original pitch of the game, you would have played as Carlos Cuello, a "deprogrammer" assigned to infiltrate a mysterious cult based on a remote island and "rescue" a wealthy heiress being held there. The game would have also included a much more in-depth weapon creation system, based on the superpower creation system in Freedom Force. Some of the weapons you could make included a triple-barelled automatic shotgun, a silenced railgun, magnetic grenades, a sniper rifle that shoots acid-coated bullets, and a chain lightning taser pistol.
  • The original game had Jack mutate more and more with plasmid use, and would make players decide if they wanted to become a hideous freak like the splicers to survive, or refuse, keeping their humanity at the cost of less safety. The final product encourages you to use more ADAM and EVE.
  • The weapon mods originally looked like they were cobbled together with random household junk MacGyver (1985) style, as a means to emphasize how Rapture was supposed to be a mostly weapons-free society. Levine decided that the weapons ended up looking "dorky" and thus changed the mods as to still look hand modified but "by someone who knows what they're doing".
  • Ken Levine envisioned Morgan Freeman as the voice of both Atlas and Fontaine, but had to give up on the idea due to budgetary concerns.
  • Frank Fontaine's voice actor, Greg Baldwin, was originally asked to voice Atlas as well using an American southern accent. Playtesters immediately distrusted him, so the developers instead got Karl Hanover to voice him with an Irish accent instead. Hanover also apparently tried his hand in voicing Fontaine, but he was replaced with Baldwin in the final release to prevent players from making the connection between Fontaine and Atlas (though Hanover would officially voice Fontaine in the sequels).
  • According to Hanover, Atlas was going to be Australian during early production on the game. After Hanover was signed on however, however, he and Ken Levine played around with the voice up until it became the stereotypical Irish accent viewers know him for today.
    • Another notable iteration of the character would have had an American south accent. Play testers didn't trust this however and the voice was changed to Irish, but this version of the character helped inspire Sinclair for the sequel.
  • Greg Baldwin noted that had he'd been asked to do so, he would've tried to give Atlas an Irish accent himself.
  • Dr. Julie Langford was originally going to be a man named Holden Langford, but was changed because Ken Levine believed the game didn't have enough female characters. The art subtitles still mistakenly read "Holden Langford" for every sign in her lab.
  • The mobile phone demake, specifically, the top-down Java ME adaptation, was originally intended to have an episodic release due to device limitations. Completing the first chapter gives players a code to be entered in later chapters, presumably for the player's inventory to be carried over. The subsequent chapters were however cancelled for unknown reasons. That being said, those on high-end devices were luckier as versions of BioShock for low-end phones cut down practically everything apart from "Welcome To Rapture"; finishing the latter takes players to an end screen message urging players to buy the full console and PC release.
  • For the game's German release, robotic versions of the Little Sisters were created as a potential substitute in case the German censors objected to the option to harvest the Little Sisters, but this ended up being unnecessary. The Robotic Little Sisters would appear (as static props) in the Minerva's Den DLC for the sequel.
• Word of Gay: The producers have provided confirmation of this for Sander Cohen, after years of fan speculation.

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