Why is rapture in bioshock infinite

Last December, BioShock 4 was finally confirmed to be in development, over 7 years since BioShock Infinite released back in The locations of the BioShock games are some of their greatest attractions. The first two were set in Rapture, a failed Libertarian utopia at the bottom of the ocean. Infinite was set in Columbia, a white nationalist city in the sky. There are some good reasons, however, that BioShock 4 should take players somewhere entirely new. When BioShock Infinite was originally released, 2K did not reveal that it took place in the same universe as the first two BioShock games, and in one sense, the studio was not lying.

It is revealed late into BioShock Infinite that the lighthouse Booker DeWitt enters to ascend to Columbia, just as Jack enters a lighthouse to descend to Rapture, is just one in a multiverse of linked realities.

Story is still good, but the gameplay is a bit dated. And no one ever claimed it was the best FPS of all time. The only enjoyable experience to be had after the main game is over is a very interesting Museum mode. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis April 13, Is Rapture in BioShock Infinite? Why is Rapture underwater? Why is it called BioShock Infinite? What is the chronological order of the BioShock games? Is System Shock in the same universe as BioShock? Instead of abiding by the traditions and moral systems imposed by those institutions, values such as ambition, scientific reason, and free thought were to guide the inhabitants in their pursuit of achievement.

This would-be utopia had its flaws. In Rapture's purely capitalistic society, there were no publicly-funded social programs, and everything within the city was privately owned and came with a price.

This included the city's food, healthcare, sanitation, and even its oxygen supply. Even police and fire departments were subscription-based private companies such as Poppadopolis Police Department and Fontaine Fire Fighters.

There were less restricted norms for businesses and labor, with nothing but competition and customer's choice balancing the market. This allowed many industries to flourish at first, but also led to unscrupulous business practices. This system alienated Rapture's less fortunate citizens, who, as their situation deteriorated, began to resent Ryan's society as cold-hearted and elitist.

Andrew Ryan's hostility and growing paranoia towards "Parasites", and others he suspected of undermining his vision kicked into motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Rapture's downfall, and Ryan's as well. Rapture began as a dream of Andrew Ryan's long before its construction. Ryan had begun contemplating such a place at least a decade before a viable location was chosen. He had escaped Belarus just before it became a part of the Soviet Union under the rule of Communism and had worked his way to become an industrial mogul in America.

He had come to view workers' unions, left-wing collectivists, politicians selling altruism, and organized religion as Parasites ruining man's life on Earth. He explored the idea of a closed-off society, of collecting achievers and those who believed in the empowering of the individual and allowing them to flourish in some remote location uncontaminated by the rest of the world. When the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War, and the USSR was on its own path to nuclear weapons, Ryan foresaw the inevitable destruction of humanity in a war ending in nuclear fire.

Ryan wasted no time in contacting like-minded individuals and marshaling his resources into realizing his vision. His city, Rapture, would be built on the seafloor in the North Atlantic, with a suitable location being picked in between Iceland and Greenland. One of the first involved was Sullivan , a trusted man who was already in Ryan's employment at the time.

With Sullivan's experience in law enforcement, he was made head of Rapture's security. Ryan gathered many construction experts and secured the architects Simon Wales and Daniel Wales to draft the design for many of Rapture's buildings. Many, like Bill McDonagh , shared Ryan's ideals and saw Rapture as a new start where they could rise above the impairments of the parasite-ridden world. Beginning in late , Ryan contracted a series of companies to begin the construction of Rapture at the selected location between Iceland and Greenland.

Ryan and his associates secured the manufacturing materials in secret so as to avoid attracting unwanted attention. These resources were then transported by ships like the Olympian thousands of miles across the North Atlantic to the project site.

There, the materials were submerged to the ocean floor via a giant State-of-the-Art submersible platform nicknamed "The Sinker. Eventually "The Sinker" was permanently anchored on the sea bottom. The major construction period continued until the end of the s, with smaller projects continuing in and around the city until Rapture's construction was fully completed by As Rapture's economy and population grew, new construction projects were financed, and the city expanded into a sprawling metropolis.

From its initial opening to inhabitation in onwards, Rapture flourished. Newly built with the latest technological marvels from the surface and possessing an active and growing economy supported by capital, idealism and a new population, Rapture seemed well on its way towards becoming the free-market utopia Ryan had envisioned. Compared to most of the surface world, Rapture could indeed be seen as a utopia, with everyone having the right to freely reap the rewards of their own labor.

However, despite its apparent success, cracks soon began to emerge within Rapture's society, specifically, between the social classes. Being a pure individualist, laissez-faire society that rejected market restrictions, labor laws, and even altruism, Rapture subtly became a breeding ground for greed, elitism and other negative aspects related to capitalism.

It wasn't long before a growing wedge was driven between the upper and lower classes of the city's society. Being devoid of any social programs, labor unions, charities and or any such organizations aimed at supporting the less fortunate elements of society due to Andrew Ryan condemning such programs as "parasitic" , the poor of Rapture were left with little to no means of improving their economic standing, and many found themselves lying hungry on the bunk beds of dingy flophouses.

The economic system of Rapture alienated the city's working class who, as the social gap widened, began to resent Ryan's society as cold-hearted and elitist.

Andrew Ryan's hostility and paranoia towards so-called "Parasites", and others he believed were exploiting Rapture's freedoms resulted in him issuing an edict, ordering that all contact with the outside world be severed. This was intended to ensure Rapture's safety by keeping the city's existence secret from the surface world, which was now in the midst of the Cold War.

Things seemed to take a turn for the better at some point between and when Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum discovered ADAM [7] , a chemical substance that, if refined into a special serum called a Plasmid and used alongside an actuating chemical called EVE , would allow the user to alter their genetic code without any limits whatsoever aside from their own imagination, allowing the user to change themselves according to their own design and needs.

This development led to a huge upswing in productivity and ADAM soon became an integral part of Rapture's society, ushering in a golden age of productivity and creativity. While it enabled its user with incredible potential, ADAM, like other powerful drugs, also turned out to be extremely addictive.

After repeated usage, the consumer would slowly develop an extreme dependency, forcing them to take more ADAM to satisfy their cravings. Without a steady supply of ADAM, the withdrawal symptoms could drive a user insane. Users quickly got hooked and the demand only increased as use of the wonder drug became more fashionable across the city.

Worse yet, the unstable nature of the genetic alteration required users to consume even more ADAM with every subsequent dose just to stave off gradual degradation of the body and breakdown of the mind. This craze enabled a man named Frank Fontaine to build a criminal empire through smuggling goods from the surface, allowing him to obtain the funds to finance the creation of a sprawling ADAM industry.

The mass production of ADAM only served to exacerbate Rapture's addiction to the chemical, with it soon becoming vital for Rapture's continued function. As a result, Fontaine's power and influence over Rapture increased greatly and he soon begun to draw up plans for exploiting the class struggle to overthrow Andrew Ryan and take over Rapture for himself. Despite initially admiring Frank Fontaine's success and citing him as a prime example of the kind of individual Rapture was aiming to create, Andrew Ryan soon began to suspect Fontaine of various crimes, including the ongoing smuggling problem.

With Fontaine's growing criminal influence over Rapture's less fortunate inhabitants and his monopoly on ADAM production, he was becoming a powerful rival, and was beginning to threaten the social order of Rapture. Things finally came to a head in when Ryan attempted to arrest Fontaine but Fontaine, resisting arrest, was killed in the ensuing shootout between his followers and Ryan's forces. After Fontaine's apparent death, Ryan, with the support of the oligarchic Rapture Central Council assumed control of Fontaine's corporate assets.

The population's worsening addiction to ADAM soon brought with itself a gradual deterioration of order, followed by widespread civil unrest. This was further worsened when a revolutionary named "Atlas" rallied the masses who had flocked to Fontaine's poorhouses and instigated a guerilla war aimed at overhauling Rapture's society. This forced Andrew Ryan to take drastic measures to restore order, as seen by his resorting to increasingly authoritarian means to maintain control, including dissolving the Rapture Central Council and installing himself as the city's despotic ruler.

Ryan began issuing ever more restrictive laws to limit people's freedoms and introducing increasingly harsh punishments towards "problem citizens". On December 31, , a massive working-class uprising—the New Year's Eve Riots —was launched by Atlas, with revolutionaries carrying out attacks against many upper-class locations, such as the Kashmir Restaurant. This soon escalated into an all-out civil war between Atlas and Ryan, made worse by the mental degradation caused by ADAM addiction in the city's population.

Traditional projectile weapons were used, and were soon joined by Plasmids , first by Atlas' splicers and later employed by Ryan's supporters. As the conflict went on, a Plasmid-fueled genetic arms race took shape, with both sides using more and more Plasmids on themselves to gain an edge against their adversaries.

As was quoted by Bill McDonagh in one of his audio journals , the conflict hinged not on who could build the best guns and the biggest bombs, but who could become "less of a man and more of a monster". The bulk of the conflict lasted for around four months, with the continuing violence causing great destruction to cohesive society and serious damage to the infrastructure within Rapture.