Return to Rapture: Celebrating the Legacy of BioShock on its 10-year Anniversary

"In BioShock we discover the city of Rapture; an Art Deco dystopia at the bottom of the sea. Rapture remains a watermark of “environmental storytelling”: a story told through the setting as you encounter it. Few fictional cities in any medium have ever been so lovingly rendered with such immaculate detail and history.

Imagine Rockefeller Center, with its imposing busts and Modernist frescoes, expanded into a glittering metropolis, decorated with flickering neon, and dropped to the ocean floor. The walls creak and moan like a ship’s hull. Aquamarine views greet me through every sweeping bay window and glorious domed glass ceiling. Dreamy light spills in, muted by the crush of water above. Schools of fish flash by. Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” echoes from a distant radio. Debris litters the corridors. Shops have been looted, beds overturned, and the abandoned remains of 1959 New year’s eve party tells me that something here has gone horribly wrong.

Rapture is the site for creative director Ken Levine’s unique critical perspective: a vision of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, taken to hysterical extremes. "

read article by Renee McDougall

Return to Rapture: Celebrating the Legacy of BioShock on its 10-year Anniversary