Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 163: BioShock

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

Back in 2007, Irrational Games wowed the world with BioShock, an FPS experience that bridged the gap between PC and console games with its role as the "thinking man's shooter." With 2013's Infinite closing the book on the series—and Irrational Games as a whole—and still no new Ken Levine game to speak of, there's never been a better time to revisit the recent past and a game that really kicked the HD generation into high gear. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, and Gary Butterfield as the crew dives deep into BioShock and decides if the world of Rapture is just as enthralling as it was over a decade ago. Now, would you kindly leave us a five-star review on the iTunes Music Store?

This week on Retronauts, would you kindly subscribe to our Patreon? Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. this one, Bob Mackey in today's episode, is all about the video game titled BioShok. Before we get started with that, who else is here with me today in the room with me? It's me, Jeremy Parrish, also known as your little sister. My little sister. That's how the listeners. Actually, the listeners refer to you as my dad.

Jeremy has the power to ground me. If I'm bad online... Okay, so call me Big Daddy. Big Daddy. He's actually, he's a big daddy. If I'm misbehaving online, make sure you let Jeremy know about it, because Jeremy will give me a stern talking to. He's had his ice cream withheld for D. dessert so many times. I don't get TV privileges

now. It sucks. Who else is here with me today? Everything's better. Downward's wetter. It's me, Gary. That's right. Under the sea. Wow. Wow. So great. So great. All the mermaids in the C. MBS. We're talking about Bioshock-T today, and you might be saying, your monocles have flown across the room. They've injured loved ones or

pets, and you're thinking, Bob Mackey, you've truly lost your mind. This game is new. I just played it, and I regret to inform you that this game is 11 years old, and that makes it prime retro nuts material. And if you go back through the history of retronauts, you'll find that even in the early years

the games you consider ancient weren't even that old when we were doing them then. Like, I believe, Jeremy, you did a N64 on the 10th anniversary of the N64 and the Krono Trigger episode was a mere 12 years after the release of Chrono Trigger. So 10 years is the cutoff point, kids.

That's the law. It's a hard, unbreakable, fast, rigid rule. No, no, unofficially. It's unofficial. No, it's real. It's real. So before you get too angry. I just want to let you know, it's an old game and you're old, and death is stocking us all. But before you die, listen to this podcast. It's going to be a fun chat about Bioshock. We're at your funeral. You can have it played at your funeral. Yes. Instead of having

a eulogy, just play this podcast. And your last, your last revenge could be boring everybody at your funeral. Like, who are these nerds? What is Bioshock? Turn your eulogy into a meagy. Oh, man, that's awesome. So I want to go over a few of the reasons why Bioshock is important and is worth talking about, especially in the context of when it was released, and I want you guys to chime in on my own reasons for this. I believe that in 2007, the experiences PC games and console games would give you were be very different. There'd be some crossover, but I feel like PC players are getting much different experiences than console players. This was one of the pivotal moments in which a PC style experience was being developed for a console, and that was a very, very big deal. How do you guys feel about that hypothesis of mine?

Yeah, I feel like the lines were really blurring in the middle of last decade, whatever, the aughts. Yeah. So, you know, you had the move to HD consoles and also the rise of Western developers who had really cut their teeth on PCs. So you started really getting this bleed over between PC game development and console development. At the same time, you know, games were reaching a broader market. And PC developers had to step back and say, you know, we make these really arcane. Cain complex games to be played with keyboard and mouse. And if we want to reach a bigger audience, we need to simplify them.

True. Yeah. And I also feel that the lines are blurring, the lines are crossing or blurring or whatever you wanted to say about this. But at this time, usually the case was a console to PC game port was terrible. And the PC to console game ports were the least ideal version of that experience. I'm thinking of things like DeusX. And probably, can you think of any other ones?

They weren't as common back then. a PC-to-consul port. Half-life for PS2, Friends. Does that really happen? Oh, that's how I played it the first time. Okay, wow. I was thinking of the Dreamcast version, but that was canceled. I guess they did put Half-Life on the PS-2.

A lot of them did get canceled, too. Like, a lot of shooters kind of issue over, so you'd end up to the things. But other types of games, like there's the prototype Balders Gate for PS-1. Yeah, you're right. Things like that. Like, a lot of that stuff, they did just kind of strangle it in the crib. You know, to borrow that old. For good reasons.

But it's interesting to think of this as towing. the line from PC experiences to console because the series kind of does that. Like if you look at this, and I'm sure this, we'll talk about this later, but if you took it, like it's something like System Shock 2 is too fiddly for that audience. I feel like, you know, people are not going to put up with that. And this is more fiddly than Infinite is. Like, there's a continuum between those things. And System Shock 1 is so much more fiddly than System Shock 2. Like, there's a fiddliness, like you're sitting in a bathtub after you've pulled the drain, you know, level of fiddliness kind of going down and it just got to the level

where it kind of straddles that line and works for both. Yeah, and I think we'll get into more of the design of Bioshock when we get to that section, but I feel like the design of Bioshock is there to streamline the fiddliness. You're talking about that the PC gamers like, like the means of input and the amount of things you can do in the world are

reduced. And save scumming, which was just like, you just do that in every PC game. It is now incorporated as a system in the game. So the problem with these PC to console game ports was, you could save scum, but saving on a console in this era took forever. And it wasn't just hitting the F5 and F7 to just jump back into where before you died.

So, yeah, again, to restate what we said earlier, the world of PC and console games are very different. Now, the switch is basically like Steam almost. Like, if you turn on the Switch's marketplace, you're looking at, like, the top hits of Steam that can run on a switch. So there is no real line anymore. Right, especially for Indies. Oh, for sure, yeah. So why a Bioshock is important also was it introduced the world. in a major way, he was making games a decade before this,

but he was really embraced as what would be considered the autur of a generation. Like, when this game was released, it was like, Ken Levine will lead us into the new glory ages of gaming. He is the super mega-brainous, Gene Brain Genius of our times. And he is anuteur like Hideo Kojima and people like that. I don't think that panned out as much as maybe he would have wanted, But definitely at this time, he was like on every podcast. He was guest writing columns for magazines.

He was considered just like, oh, this guy, this guy has got it. And he's going to make all the best games forever. So PC gaming always had that kind of a tour experience with it. But one of the reasons why Ken Levine was so big is because his game happened to make it over. Yeah. So he had that kind of cachet in PC gaming circles at that point. Yeah, like if you were reading Computer Gaming World, you would know about Thief and System Shock 2 and you would probably know the names like Ken

Levine and the War Inspector. War Inspector. Yeah. But those, I mean, PC games had a much smaller audience. Yes. And people that played console games weren't playing those games at all. Right. And he's kind of the first, you know, Warren Specter, his attempt to kind of move over into console dominance was less successful, right?

So like, DeiSX is, you know, depending on what day you ask me, my all-time favorite video game, hugely influential, big deal to a lot of people I know. I don't, I've, no more people who have seen UFOs than have played Epic Mickey, you know? I mean, that game did pretty well, just not necessarily with a core gaming audience. Well, and his name is not attached to it in the same way. It's not like, you know, people don't say like, oh, Epic Niki, that game that Warren Spector did, it's a master of design kind of thing, you know. It was very atypical of, you know, what you consider a war inspector game. Yeah. Ken Levine, we'll talk, we'll have a whole entire section about him next, but he was just like, you really can't call him a Wunderkin because he was 40 when this game came out because he'd been working in the games industry for a while.

But he was talked about all the time. He was celebrated. But I feel like what happened after Bioshock Infinite, he's looked upon in less kind terms, I believe, these days. We'll talk more about him soon. But my third reason why Bioshock is really important and worth talking about it is I think it was, it really kicked off the previous generation of gaming in a big way, where it was like, this is the experience that this era will provide.

It is Dead Rising sort of did that the previous year, but this is more of a prestige game that's like, this game is saying important things. It's very artful. It's very measured. Dead Rising is just a fun, goofy sandbox. But this game,

like the launch of the HD generation, like this is what's going to be happening from now on folks. How do you guys feel about that, that take? It's a hot take. It's a hot take. I'm dropping it. I feel like Bioshock was part of a wave of games. Yeah.

2007 was an amazing fall. Yeah, I mean. Mass Effect. You had Assassin's Creed. you had Bioshock, you had Orange Box. Yeah. You had so many just like huge games. Uncharted.

This had the luck to be first. In fact, it'd be uncharted by a day. Like, Bioshock was first and then it was uncharted. Yeah, it was at the very end of summer. And everything was being developed at the same time. So they had the luck. But it was like that summer was just like HD. I'm sorry, that summer and fall was like HD gaming is here and here's what it's all about.

But Bioshock was like the very first one across the finish line. True. Well, and it's a different kind of tone. because it has kind of a higher register. Yeah. You know, like, it aspires to a level of importance that uncharted, like, specifically doesn't on purpose, right? Like, you know, this is a fun, goofy adventure. You look at something like Dead Rising, which was, like,

Dead Rising is a super cool game that is kind of obtuse and not dressed in the skins of something that you really understand because of the kind of time mechanics and the save mechanics. This was barely more complicated than a shooter, enough to get a little bit of that crunch, a little bit of that fiddliness, but also dealt with, like, capital I issues. Yeah. It has a philosophy behind it in a way those other games did not. So in one way, it ushered in that age of gaming, like conscience, like AAA gaming, I feel like. I totally agree with you.

And another interesting thing about Bioshock is this could be the newest game we're covering on Retronauts in its own exclusive episode. I believe maybe Shadow of the Colossus might have been the last, the previous newest game as a 2005 release. Can you think of a newer game that we covered that wasn't just like, you know, Mario Odyssey, a game that's old but still kind of new that we've covered on here? No. Yeah, this could be the newest game that we've covered on Retronauts. And the funny thing is that when Bioshock released in 2007, that is when gaming podcasts were absolutely exploding. Everyone had one. One Up had like 34 gaming podcasts.

We've finally eaten our own tales. Exactly. It's finally happening. We're in a room of our own farts and we're spelling them. But I will say that if you go back, you can like basically now, it's, I mean, there have always been reviews in print and things like that. But you can now go back to quote unquote old games and trace the fossil record of criticism. You can hear people be super excited about things like Grand Theft Auto 4 and then like two weeks later just be like, oh, actually it wasn't so good. But I love that we're reaching this era of history now because those conversations, those off-the-cuff, unedited conversations are now, you know, 10 years old.

And you can see like the unfiltered opinions of people as these games come out. You can really appreciate the fact that games journalists are not in fact better than you. Exactly. And I'm not on any of those podcasts. Yeah, so I have made no mistakes. So before we get started here, I like to pick your brains a bit for your Bioshock experience. Both of you, I'll share mine after that, but where were you when the game was in pre-release? Did you know about it?

Were you psyched? Were you happy? Were you said? What is your Bioshock experience? Let's start with Jeremy. I mean, I was in the press sniffing my own farts on podcasts. Actually, I don't think I was on any of the podcasts where I would have talked about this. I was trying to make people listen to Retronauts.

As the Retronauts historian, I believe Retronauts was on one of several sabbaticals during this time period. It could have been, and I was trying to get Ken Levine on to talk about System Shock. I wanted you to talk about that. And 2K. was like, no, you can't talk about System Shock. We didn't make that. So I called them out. And that was one of the first cases I can remember of a journalist shaming a publisher. They weren't very happy about that.

But they were very not like angry, just kind of like, oh, why would you? do that. You're supposed, as a journalist, you direct your hatred towards gamers. That's what I heard. Right. I forgot. I'm sorry. I love that impression of 2K that makes them sound like they said that from a rocking chair on a porch. I mean, it pretty much was. It was like, well, that's not part of the marketing plan. That's not our property. We can't talk about that IP. As a journalist, your job is to help us sell our game, Jeremy. Come on. But no, that was back when I was in the games press and still somehow had enough time to play video games that I didn't review. So, you know, the one, the person who really sold me on this game was Andrew Fister,

who referred to it as the best game experience I've had since Super Metroid. Interesting. And as someone I highly respect and look up to, I was like, wow, if Andrew says this is that good, it must be really good. So, you know, along with like all the games I mentioned, Mass Effect, Orange Box, Assassin's Creed, that was one of the games. Oh, yeah, Mass Effect, too, as well. Yep. I also picked up Call of Duty. and did not really play much of it. Well, Calo Doe 4 was 2007. Boy, what a...

Yeah, seriously. And let's see what else. There was a Nintendo game that was important. Oh, Metroid Prime. Mario Galaxy? Was Mario Galaxy? That was 07. Halo 3.

Like, that was a big fall, and I tried to play all those games. And Bioshock definitely was one that really clicked with me because it really felt like it had more of the things I liked about, you know, the Marathon games on Mac than Halo. did, even though Halo was the direct successor to Marathon. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it. And apparently the following year, I don't remember this at all,

but at E3, that was the Santa Monica terrible E3, where everything was all spread out. Is it E4 everyone? No, that was something different. I, like, apparently was walking around with Tina Sanchez, and we encountered

Kin Levine, and I was just like, wow, I really enjoyed this game. It was really cool. I thought I really liked some of the themes and the ideas that you put in here and was like being kind of annoying and and everyone else was like we got to go we got meetings to get to I don't remember this at all so I must have blinked it out of shame or your brain eradicated it anyway so yeah I took the forgetfulness plasmid and it's all good but yeah I really enjoyed the game and my opinion of it has changed somewhat as I've learned more about it and heard the creators talk about it but we'll discuss that later yeah definitely so

you're lucky Ken Levine didn't shoot bees out of his hands to get away from you I've heard he can do that. Gary, how about you? What's your, what's your Bioshock experience? I mean, this was something I remember, I think I first heard about, and this was kind of embarrassing, but I think it was from the video game magazine subscription you got with GameStop. Oh, Game Informer. I think it was from Game Informer, and it was on a cover of that where I first saw it. And the thing that sold me on it, they got me excited because I've always been a little bit unplugged from general kind of hype cycles was it was being billed as this like, you know, and I hate this term, but I didn't make it up. Thinking Man Shooter, you know, as a thing.

and that's so in my pocket as far as being like such a big death. Thinking men are allowed to shoot now? Everything's different now with the second. Thinking men don't kill people. Thinking guns do. They shoot the bad guys with the guns. They shoot the bad guys with the guns. Yeah, thinking good guy with a gun.

Just keep adding adjectives. It's like scribble knots. Oh, yeah, the Game Inform. I'm looking at the, come out in 2007. Yeah. They have, they made a cover for that, it looks like an old issue of colliers or whatever. Yeah. It's a very, like, old-timey, a periodical design for that issue.

Super cool. And that was definitely. definitely, like, right in my, my pocket because of DASX. Like, I, I wanted that. I hadn't played System Shock 2 at that point because it was during the golf when that was incredibly hard to get running and get a hold of. Yeah. But I always heard those games compared to each other.

So I wanted to play a game that was, you know, essentially like a vent crawler, like an 0451 game, but with flashier superpowers in this really cool setting. So I was just very, very psyched and got a hold of it and loved it. And I've actually, like, stuck with the series pretty hard. Okay. Even, like, I don't, I'm not a big fan of info. infinite, but I liked it when it came out. And, uh, Bioshop 2, which we're not going to talk about yet, of course, but just throwing, I'm going to see how many times I can say,

everybody play Bioshock 2. Nobody listening to this has played it. I haven't played it, but I've heard it's amazing. It's so good. And it's funny to see how so many of those people are now like making so many great things that were on that Biashok 2 team. Yeah, Minerva's done. The DLC for that is like a dry run for gone home with Bioshock stuff that happens in it. So, yeah. As for me, I was really dragging my ass when it came to the last console generation. I, I was not making a lot of money. I was in grad school, and I really couldn't justify buying a new console, but I was covering video games because being a teacher wasn't paying me enough. I still wanted to be relevant, so I eventually was like, I have to get a 360, I have to stay relevant, and I want

to keep playing these new games, and Bioshock was the first game I bought with my 360, and I loved it at the time. I still like it now, by the way, and I had been thoroughly spoiled for me, by the way, by everybody, because this was like, I think winter of 2008 when I got it, but despite knowing the spoilers, I really enjoyed it, and it really was like nothing I've ever played. And I didn't play System Shock 2. And at that point, I don't think I even played Deus X. So it was like a new experience for me, for sure. So I want to talk about Ken Levine and Irrational Games.

So Ken Levine is the mastermind of BioShok. He's not the only person who had creative input, of course, but he was definitely the face of the game. And I mean, we want the narrative. of the one genius behind the thing. So he was sort of put in that position. Maybe he embraced it a bit. I'm not sure.

It's up to you to figure it out. As I say, it's up to the player to decide. I'm not going to make a stance on anything. But what are you guys laughing at? But basically, he was man of the year in gaming for like 2007. You could not open a magazine or listen to a podcast or just be in the gaming world without knowing or hearing about Ken Levine. And like a lot of game designers from his generation, he shares a lot of game.

a very common story in that he wanted to make movies. I feel like it's a very common story because in a positive way, there was, so the positive spin of this is like there was no go to school to make games thing, a ladder or whatever you want to call it. So they had to figure out what to do with these stories they wanted to tell. And people like, I believe, like, is one of the Final Fantasy guys a drama, is it Tokita that was a drama major? Yeah. Well, I don't know if he was a drama major, but he had a background in theater.

Yeah, like a lot of these guys were in theater. of these guys wanted to make movies or writing screenplays. I'm sure Kojima was trying to make movies or trying to figure out, like, how do I do these things? He's such a big movie fan. But there was no pathway to making games. So a lot of these guys just ended up in gaming because they couldn't find a way to tell their stories via traditional methods at the time. Right. It's like the light side version of the David Cage situation. I mean, I think Ken Levine can do good things. A lot of the times I feel like with David Cage, and by the way, I am not a big fan. Actually, I really dislike David Cage in his games.

And I feel like, oh, in the case of someone like him, I was like, oh, you got in when the bar was low enough to get in when there were no real standards for storytelling. And I'm sure David Cage has done some cool experimental things, but I'm just thoroughly unimpressed by everything he's done. Okay. I want to give him some small benefit of the doubt, but you know what, Gary, you're right. I've been following him, like, from it with a morbid curiosity. And this has been Cage match. He is like, he's the Uve-A bowl of video games. You know what, Jeremy, Ova Bowl can make a movie.

I'd say he's the Tommy Wiso of video games If you give, I want Tommy Wysot to have David Cage's career The shit he would make would be so much more interesting Yeah, yeah Please, please, I've come to terms of my hatred of David Cage We had a tense confrontation to E32012 It's going to be okay And I'm not lying by the way, ask me, ask me privately

How he got started in games was He was hired in 1995 At the very prestigious and influential But ultimately unprofitable looking glass studios Especially at this time If you would ask PC gamers Like who are the best studios, they would definitely say looking glass.

And what is the, so, Gary, I think you're a big fan of these kind of games. Is it called the 0451 genre? Well, I mean, sort of. That's a loose term. Can you explain that? I mean, I believe. Yeah, what does that mean? So it's another phrase for immersive sim.

Yeah. It doesn't sound like you're describing SimCity or the Sims. And basically, there's a couple of core, just different design philosophies that are shared within this. Like having multiple ways to approach a problem. having a world that feels like it exists so levels don't feel like levels they feel like you're in the shopping mall and it's designed like a shopping mall,

you're in the apartment building and it has things that make sense. There are toilets, the flush, and people can go to the bathroom, things like that, and that the world doesn't necessarily stop for you. So as opposed to most video games where people are kind of standing stock still like chest pieces

waiting for you to come into the room and reveal them like cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light, like they are doing a thing. So those are kind of the three things that I consider to be the core of that. Yeah. What does that number mean?

It is an Easter egg. It is a popular code, like door code, that these games all share. Yeah, I think like the first thing you have to hack with numbers in this game as 0451 as the, and that was first shown up in Deos. I first showed up in Deos, I showed up in before that as 4.51 in either System Shock 1 or Thief. And I can't remember. And I'll get yelled at for not remembering. It's sort of like that number you see all the CalArts guys put in there. animated movies.

There was all the classroom they worked in with Brad Berger and all those people. Or like, what is it, 1131 in X-Files? Yeah, right, right. So he was hired in 1995 at Looking Glass Studios to work on the design and like the lore and world of Thief the Dark Project. And the Thief reboot is kind of bad, but the Thief games were super, super immersive, super influential and just very, very unique for their time. I feel like they're a little too crusty for me to get into.

They're not as friendly as I would want them to be in a modern context. But, Gary, have you played any of these thief games? I know they're spoken of in such, like, glowing terms. I never could get into them. By the time I found them, they just were kind of impenetrable to me. The third one I played to completion, the first one I bounced off of, and I'm partway through a playthrough of the second one. The first two are both very good, but the first one still has a little bit of that holdover. 2.5D kind of maze design

to levels. The second one is just like a very legitimate, you know, immersive sim. Like the spaces make sense. And those games are really are very, very good. It's a really interesting contrast when you look at those and you contrast them with something like Metal Gear as approaches to stealth. Yes, yes. It's very body conscious stealth. Like you have to be, you know, you make noise. You're a being

with weight and when you step, you make noise. When you part of you might peek out of a corner, like you have to, you're very aware of those things. You feel very heavy and in your body in those. Yeah, I've watched lots plays of these games, and they're fascinating to watch, but I just feel like I would just fail all the time. They don't have all of the outsets that something like the modern Hitman reboot would have where it's fairly easy to get out of trouble when in Thief games is like, no, no, just reload.

You're dead. Right, right, right. Yeah, you want to ride that quick save, quick load button when you're playing them. And that's part of why they didn't come to consoles. And when they did with the, boy, not the... A 2013 reboot? Not the third thief game. Yeah, there was one on Xbox.

Deadly Shadows, which we covered for Watch Out for Fireballs for our show. And that one made a lot of concessions to being a little bit easier. The levels are smaller, and if you hit a level transition, you can get out of trouble and things like that. So you don't need the quick save and quick load quite as much in that one. I didn't know about that. So he developed Thief, The Dark Project, and then he left to form Irrational Studios. And at Irrational Studios, the first thing he was, worked on was a sequel to the original System Shock. So he formed a new studio to make a sequel to

a Looking Glass Studios game while Looking Glass Studios still existed. I'm not sure what the politics of that were or why that was necessary to form a new studio. But System Shock 2 is very much has all of the DNA of Bioshock. It's basically a more complex Bioshock with the exact same twist almost, correct, in terms of the thing that's guiding you is actually your enemy? Or am I thinking of, is it established that the AI that's guiding you is hostile all along? It is established that the AI that's guiding you is hostile the entire time. Okay. It's much more, it's less talking to the player. So it doesn't have that level of the twist, but the twist is similar in those two games.

And it's very much you, in System Shock 2, there are classes, but it's sort of like you also have like magic powers in a way, like the plasmids. And you can, you can decide to, you know, hack or sneak or do combat. And it's all aboard like a post-crisis setting where you're trying to figure. out what happened here and there are audio tapes. It is very, very, very much what Bioshock would eventually be. That's something I probably would have mentioned in the like 0451 games. Like that, the archaeology of people that have been there, like learning people's stories by walking through environments is part of that genre and one of my all-time, like, favorite things that games can do. Environmental storytelling. And like, as you said, Gary, like these are the roots of what

you would call like a walking simulator where it's like, strip the mechanics out, just let the rooms and let the remaining documents tell the story to the player. Yeah. System Shock 2 was a kind of, it was a critical darling. Like I could not stop hearing about the game when I couldn't play it. It drove me nuts. But fortunately, not a great seller. So they really wanted to make System Shock 3, but they could never get permission from the publisher.

They couldn't get the okay. So they developed a lot of things before Bioshock. And they're all very different games. So Tribes Vengeance, it's a multiplayer shooter. I believe it's like a sequel to Star Siege Tribes. A friend of mine, like in the late 90s was playing Star Seed Tribes. It seemed like the craziest thing, like an online shooter. and it was one of the very first ones.

SWAT 4, which was a part of the SWAT series, obviously, a first-person shooter with a little thinkier, the thinking man shooter in a way, if you can go back to that. And Freedom Force 1 and 2. Very, very fun, tactical superhero games where it's sort of like an RTS where you can pause and the environments are very much part of the, you have to work your way around the environments

and all the superheroes you're playing have different skills that can interact with each other and the environments. They're all very cool, cool games. A little too hard for me, but I'm not good at those kind of games. But Gary, you said you've played Freedom Force 1 and 2? Yeah, I love those games. I play both those games a few times. And those are really phenomenal.

Like, just really, they're essentially just role-playing games. Like, you go through and you level up and you get new skills, things like that. But they take the skin of, the easiest point of comparison I always use is like Warcraft 3 if you only had heroes. That's right, yeah. And there's really nothing else like them. I mean, maybe Company of Heroes is sort of like that, where it's an RTS, but there are very few units, and you can pause and sort of work out plans in advance, but it is sort of its own thing. And people have been clamoring for a sequel to that, those games forever. And they're all playable on Steam, by the way.

They're very cheap, too. So check them out if you've never played them. So we'll get to the development of Bioshock soon, but I want to talk about the decline of Irrational Studios. So, Bioshop Infinite, and we'll talk a bit more about this later. And this could be a fun episode, too, but famously troubled development. It's student development for six years. It was shown off way too early with features that would never be in the final version of the game. After, a year after the release of Bioshock Infinite, basically, Irrational Games, quote-unquote, restructured.

And they went from, like, 90 employees to 15 that were chosen by Levine. And so after the restructuring, there was no real announcement of anything for a while. But last year, they rebranded as ghost story games with a focus on smaller, more narrative-focused games. But it's funny that in that five years, there's been no absolutely no Ken Levine game at all, like nothing. He's made, I mean, he could have prototyped things. He could have created things that were on release. But it's funny to think of him in 2007 as like, what's he going to do next? He's the latest, greatest dude.

He's going to bring us into the golden age of gaming. But then he's just disappeared. I mean, he's online. I'm sure he's working, but there's nothing to his name. And that's kind of part of the reason why I think some of his reputation tanked a little bit, just because, not universally, but a lot of critical consensus turned against infinite, but also if he's in a situation where his work isn't speaking for him, there's nothing but for him to speak for him.

Yeah. And he's one of those guys who needs to be a little bit less online and shut up on Twitter because it makes him look like a real jerk. It's one of those people where, and I'm sure I am that person for lots of people out there. It's like, I followed you on Twitter and now I really dislike you. Yeah. Yeah, but you're cool. Yeah, I'm always right and I'm cool.

Exactly. We're cool, though, is the difference. We're cool. Yes, I really, so somebody out there in the future, I absolutely need to read an oral history of Bioshock Infinite development. I heard it's like it was just intense and grueling and just politics and hatred and people being flown, like a new team being flown into finish it. I've heard all of these like crazy rumors and unsubstantiated things about the game, but it seems like Ken Levine did not make a lot of friends during the development of Bioshock Infinite. Yeah, absolutely. You can see kind of the margins of that.

If you look up on YouTube, a bunch of kind of amateur YouTube documentarians have done videos that are showing the different states of Bioshock Infinite as it has shown off. And you can just kind of see just by how radically different those are that things weren't going well. Like even if you didn't know things were going well, those are just such very different games. And it's really easy to kind of project and imagine what it would be like to work on a team where your direction has changed quite that often and quite that drastically over that long a period of time. Definitely, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I'm always touchy about things like, especially in the games industry where workers have like no rights. I'm always touching about things like layoffs. And I remember, I don't have any quotes from this. I remember he did not, he was not very sensitive to the people he laid off when it happened. The messaging was like I've selected my chosen, the chosen ones. Yeah, it's definitely like the good people got to stay and everyone else goodbye. But like even it's like I believe former one up one up alum Sean Elliott from GFW Radio. He went to Arcane Studios who makes amazing. games like Dishonored and Made Prey, which is pretty much System Shock 3.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, you're totally right. And I think Dishonored is sort of the sort of evolution of the console-friendly 0451 game that now Bioshock feels a little primitive after playing Dishonor 1 and 2 back to back over the past few years. So the mass layoffs happened in 2014. I have a quote from Levine that says what his new focus will be. He says, quote, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and more direct relationships with gamers. In many ways, it will be returned to how we started, a small team

making games for the core gaming audience. But again, it has been four years, and we have seen none of these smaller games. But people that worked on Bioshock and Bioshock 2, they have made those smaller games. Gone Home, that's an example of, that was Bioshock 2 talent, I believe, correct? Yeah, that's Biosec. Steve Gainer and Carla. And Walking Dead, the Teltel series, correct? There's like a bunch of Indies, too. The fellow is. name is escaping me, so I feel a little bit bad, but who made Eldrick and Neon Struct is a Bioshock 2 or Bowshock 1 alum as well. And that wrote like the flame in the flood or the flood in the flame.

Like he was, I think, I talked to him briefly when that game was being previewed and I, and he told me like, yeah, I was one of the guys who had to finish Bowshock Infinite and I was like, I know you can't tell me anything, but I need to know everything. And he didn't tell me anything because he probably signed NDAs and I'm just a dude. Like he doesn't need to tell me anything. But yeah, like these people, I'm not going to say they all landed on their feet, but I'm glad that they, they are out and they're doing stuff. And again, you're right, Gary. Like, it seems like, oh, dude, like all of these people left. So where are the games now? Like,

they're making good games. Where's your game? And it just kind of feels a little gross. If he was saying, you know, if Ken Levine said, I kept the best in the brightest, which implies everyone he didn't keep was not the best in the brightest. And then they all went on to do pretty incredible stuff. Yeah. It just feels kind of gross. Like, we don't know the whole story. We never will. He might be a perfectly good dude in real life. All of those. you know, general kind of asterisk you put whenever you get a bad feeling about somebody you don't know. But it does kind of add up to a bad feeling, I think. That gave me a distaste for him the way those layoffs were handled. And I also feel that we'll get to this eventually.

The toothless centrism of Bioschuk Infinite is very much what is destroying everything today. And I didn't like it at the time. And that was when it was like the Obama years where like, everything's fine. When things, we're not fine. We were just like, oh, we can just sleep in now. But now it is the both sides shit that I think is the most negative force in everything. And I feel like that is all over that game. You're not personally blaming Bioshock Infinite for the current state of the world. Bioshock Infinite got Trump elected. Okay.

No, no, no. I'm not saying it influenced anything, but it is a reflection of an attitude. I feel that is very destructive and very, I feel it's also very disingenuous. Yeah, for sure. It aged like milk. Yeah. Like it was the wrong kind of thing. And the funny thing.

So it's yogurt now? Yeah, it's bad yogurt. Yeah, it's not that good Fajé. I'm hoping to get you guys a creative yogurt by the end of this podcast if I bring it up multiple times. But it's not, when you look back on the response to Bioshock Infinite, and when I think of what I liked about it after when I was watching credits roll, it had nothing to do with that stuff. Like all of those parts, that game is structured in a very specific way that it beats and switches to talk about what it really wants to talk about in a way that feels like it probably mirrors the development. Like at one point, it was this what it is. the surface. It was this game where it was about how both sides were right and there were

sides. And then halfway through, there are no sides because it's dealing with these higher order, multiple universe things that don't have to do with that. Yeah, I think it's like, and I feel the same way about Bioshock 1. It's trying to, it's trying to talk about too many things. There are too many ideas and there's no central like, central like thesis. Both of those games have, and we'll talk about when we get deeper into Bioshock 1. Both of them have sets of choices, one of which is really brave and cool and innovative for the time, the other which, which is kind of stock standard or worse. But it was going to say about Infinite is like when people liked it, I think they liked

the cosmic stuff at the end, the reality stuff at the end. Nobody liked it because it was about centrism, right? Yeah. If you played the Biotchok Infinite DLCs, which I recommend people do not because they're necessarily good, but because I've never played a DLC that felt more like, we listen to everything you hated about this. and are retconning all of it. Wow, yeah, I didn't even touch them

because the game left a bad taste in my mouth. Like, if you can watch a video, like Noah Caldwell, Gervais. Oh, he's great, yeah. Yeah, he likes his games a lot more than I do, but he's one of my favorites. And he did a video on the DLCs so you can at least get the content.

Yeah. But a lot of the things that were like, you know, when you think about it, there's no difference between Comstock and Fitzroy, except for how they spell their name. You know, those kind of like, both sides are the same. Just get backpedled. Like, they make Fitzroy worse.

They're like, oh, she shot a kid because of X. Like, we have reasons. And it apologizes, like, a lot of people didn't like the violence in Bioshock Infinite. You're supposed to be a real guy, but you're chainsawing people's skulls in. It's so off-putting, yeah. And then in the DLCs, you can't hurt anybody. Like, there's like a stealth one where it's like, you know, violence is not the answer. And they go out of their way to say that.

So they're really interesting kind of patches to the thematic work of the game. Okay, yeah. I mean, I have the remastered versions, and that comes with all the DLC and all the games. So I definitely want to play the – I'm tempted to revisit Bioshock maybe to write about it or something like that just to see that – just to see revisit what I view is a real mess and see how I feel about it now. But, yeah, the DLC does sound very interestingly. The barrier let's see one I heard is very good. Yeah, it's definitely worth playing. It's interesting.

It's interesting that you refer to them as patches on the themes because that's not something you really see. You see like tech patches or like level design patches, but not like here's a morality patch. Yeah. I mean, the closest thing I can see to that, and it's not so much a morality thing, but the, um, isn't the dishonored DLC where, you know, one of the big downpoints of dishonor that people didn't like was that you play a voiceless protagonist for no real good reason. There's no reason for Corvo not to be more of a character. Yeah.

And when they did the DLC with Dowd, like he's a much better developed character who has an arc. And there's kind of, he's not a cipher. That's the closest thing. But this is way, way, way more extreme. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I feel like Levine lost a bit of his spark, uh, because so, uh, I feel like the reaction of to Bioshock Infinite, and I'm not trying to say games journalists are crooked or, you know, whatever, but there's very much a narrative of this, we, this has to be good, so of course it's good, or like we were told this was good.

So, I mean, the hype, you could not escape it. It was, it was this thing that we were shown at every three. We couldn't wait for it to come out. And I feel like these scores are really overinflated for Infinite. it. I trust everyone had an honest reaction to it. But again, like, in retrospect, I would change almost all of my review scores just because it's like, then they would all be more, more negative. It ends with such a gut punch. Yeah. It ends with a moment where if, like, you're seeing credits and then being forced to collect your thoughts, like it's a lot to think about. It feels extremely

rich. And like, there are parts that are, but you kind of forget about a lot of perfunctory mechanical things you have to do to get there and a lot of story beats that don't work. And how bad the last segment. There's a lot going on there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about this game more later, but yeah, Infinite. I feel like the bloom was off the rose relatively soon. It had a huge, amazingly positive reception, but in the months to follow, people were just like, you know, it was kind of like just a bland shooter. None of the cool systems were in it. It was sort of like, they simplified everything. Like, Bioshock simplified System Shock 2, and then Infinite simplified Bioshock where you, it was just a shooter. There were none of the cool 0451 things in the game.

And even down to like level design. Like it's very corridor like level design, you know, a lot of you didn't really have different ways to approach situations, which is such a core value. And I honestly think a lot of that is because of the publisher, and we'll talk more about 2K later, but I feel like they had a negative, a negative, they shaped these games in a

negative way where they could have been more pure and more, had more of the creator's intent behind them, but I will say, so I think the bloom was off the rose, so in the months to fall, infinite, the people were starting to be like, yes, that wasn't very good. I mean, you were right, the ending is a gut punch, you're like, whoa, oh my God, but then when you reflect on what you actually did to get there.

You're like, huh, well, wow, I don't know if I like this anymore. And then the next best thing since Slice Bread came out, which was The Last of Us. And that was like, immediately, like, Bioshock Infinite was like shoved away. It's like, this is now the best thing ever. And these are the people that will bring us to the new era of gaming. And it's like, I'm playing a movie and all the things you hear whenever something is like the last. Frankly, I don't like Nottie Dogs games. I'm like, dudes, just make a movie if you want to make a movie.

I just hate all of the artificiality behind them. I hate how, like, everything feels like a museum where I can't touch anything. They're all just, they're, they're too cinematic, and I think they're too simple. And I understand why people like them, and I'm sure the stories they tell are good. But The Last of Us definitely overwrote Infinite as, like, this is it. This is the hotness. I don't know. Do you guys agree with me?

Being in that moment, I feel like the last of us, just like all eyes were on it immediately, and everyone just left Bioshop behind. I hadn't thought about that, but you're not wrong. Thank you. I'll take that as a positive. Before we get into the production of a BioShok, I need to ask you guys, how do you feel about Ken Levine? Do you think he needs to rebrand himself?

Again, he's not spoken of in the kindest terms these days, especially as thankfully gaming journalism is giving us different perspectives and more varied perspectives. And I feel like people are not especially kind to Ken and for reasons both deserved and undeserved. Like he needs to put something out. Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, I mean, more than rebrand himself,

I think it would be, I would feel mildly embarrassed by proxy if he underwent a rebranding situation just on kind of Twitter. Levine Infinite. Yeah. Welcome. Everybody gets here. I would just really like him to put out a thing. And then I can take a look at that and be like, are these kind of sneaking suspicions I have that this dude is maybe not a good dude?

Are they true? Yeah. Or is there actually something there? And I just want to see that he knows how to, in a purely, like, not even just a philosophical way. Like, I want to see that he knows how to make a game again. You know, like we just talked about this. I'm not trying to bring it up. but Infinite, I think, is so much worse as a game than Bioshock.

And Bioshock as a game, which I really like, is a little bit like simpler and less ambitious gameplay-wise than Sysham Shock 2 or Freedom Force. Like, I want to see if he can make, I want to see him do some mechanic stuff. It's not what he wants to do. He wants to move towards this narrative thing. But the last thing I remember hearing about what he wanted to do with it was this kind of ambitious feeling, like, robust, full-featured-adventure-kind-of-thing-shaped narrative.

So maybe there will be a mechanical angle of this, which will renew my faith that, like, even if he's not a great dude, he knows how to make a game. Yeah, and I feel like the best parts of Bioshock are the parts without, sorry, the best parts of Bioshock infinite are the parts without mechanics. So I really want to see his narrative-focused game, especially since people have made that a new genre now, the walking simulator. And I feel like I love the intro to Bioshock before you couldn't kill anything. I mean, there are some hamfisted things like, do you want to hit the racist button or the not-racist button? That is like your eyes are going to roll out of your head, folks. But I have to say, like, I love just how the world is great and how they bring you into the world is great. But the things you're asked to do in the world are very boring and uninspired.

Production of Biocsholk, let's get into it. So Ken Levine was always trying to make System Shock 3. And the initial concept started in 2002, and it was always based around these three factions in the game that would exist in Bioshop, but they would not have the inner place. they did in the original concept. So the original concept was three different factions, which were drones, carrying a valuable resource, protectors that would protect the drones, and harvesters that would try to

steal the resource from the drones. So, of course, you know what I'm talking about little sisters, big daddies, and splicers. They don't do those things in the game itself, but that was their original role. Like, splicers in the game are never trying to steal things. They are. Except in that one level. Well, I think that they're implied to be. Like, that's what they do.

And then if you, you know, in the lore, in two, they explicitly do as you're trying to do those things. So I think that that is what's happening. You don't interface with it that often. You're right. In the fiction, that's exactly. They're trying to steal the atom, the atom's magic juice or whatever from the Little Sisters. And you see dead bodies of Little Sisters. But only in one level do they attack Little Sisters.

So, but, yeah, mechanically, it didn't pan out as they originally intended. But the original's- The level where they attack the Little Sisters doesn't work out mechanically. So you see why they dropped it. Yeah, it's not, I mean, it's not fun at all that level. So this game concept went through a few original story ideas. The first one was in which you played a cult deprogrammer, a board of space station taken over by mutants. And obviously, this is very similar to System Shock, like, the abandoned Space Station or Spaceship is very system shocky.

And apparently this would have been a much more political game than Bioshock. I believe you would be sent in to this cult by, like, a senator or a politician or something like that. I don't know a lot about this version of the game, but they went through a few themes. Do you know anything more about it, Gary, you're nodding? No, I just, I remember reading about that as well. And I read about that on everyone's favorite source, Wikipedia. And I just love that Senator was hyperlinked, and I thought it was going to hyperlinked to the character.

And it was just like, the idea of a senator. Yeah, it was just the idea of a senator. What is a senator? But I love that idea of the cult D programmer, though, because I love when you see these kind of iterations and you see things that were carried forward. Like, you know, like, there's definitely a cult aspect to the splight. And there's things that happen in the narrative. And there are like cults of personality around Fontaine and Ryan.

Yeah, 100%. So you have those elements. Like he was able to carry some of that stuff forward. For sure. So the next story idea was the world was a World War II lab. It was unearthed in the 20th century by scientists. And there were three genetically mutated factions fighting each other. And I assume that would be like the drones and the protectors and the harvesters.

So that idea was in place then. And this version of the game also had the third. things that would end up in Bioshock than things that were also in System Shock like the magic powers, the plasmids, the ghosts you see who are playing out past events, the audio tapes left behind where characters are telling you what happened before they died or what was happening in the room you're in or something like that. And those are exactly in System Shock 2 as well. Oh yeah, yeah. So internally, the environments were considered bland. They were too bland. This abandoned World War II lab. And Bioshock would gain its current

aesthetic when Ken Levine was walking around New York, he was walking around Rockefeller Center, looking at the great Art Deco architecture, the giant statue of Atlas, does that ring a bell for anybody? And he was like, this could be the look of the game, not just the look of the game, but the actual story of John Rockefeller, who Rockefeller Center was being built. The government was helping fund it. And then the Depression happened. And then he stepped in and was like, I will finish this building. I'm a powerful industrialist. And I don't believe it was called the Rockefeller Center before. started building it, by the way. But yeah, it was like these great robber barons and

the power of their money and how they could just build societies when they were just untouchable by law and they were just forces of nature. Like, what if that was the villain of a game? What if this person not only built a building but build a whole like society and what would happen after that? That was how he was inspired. And one of the things I think about with Bioshock, which is, you know, kind of by many people considered to be an actual like kind of serious commentary on objectivism, is that it kind of begins and ends there. Like the commentary is just that. Like, if you had one of these monsters build a whole world, it would suck and be full of

monsters. Yeah. And that's a good point. You're right. You know, I'm not down with objectivism, but it doesn't say anything more nuanced or actionable than that. Yeah. Going into this game and now, like, fully understanding what it's about and the politics

and everything like that, I was interested in seeing how it would explore the themes of objectivism, the themes of capitalism, but it doesn't go from. farther beyond the villain is an evil rich guy and corrupted by power. And I feel like that is the stock villain since the Bible, like the evil rich guy. And like the way it articulates is a little bit different, right? So like an evil villain, like Darth Vader wouldn't have pay toilets. Exactly. You know, so there's ways that are that are specific to it, but it doesn't say anything about him. It's just what if there was the world and they let the world kind of paint the character. And the conclusion you come to is like,

he's a real hypocritical prick. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's kind of where you end up. And it's what if there was a hypocritical prick with a lot of money? And there are things in the game that are an extension of his views on objectivism and capitalism, the villain where everything is unlocked through vending machines and things like that. But that is such a stock video game thing that you don't really think twice about it. Like only after playing, I was like, oh, it's kind of funny that I have to pay to get health in this game or I have to pay to, you know, upgrade my weapons and stuff like that. And it means of making it's very funny when I think about that in relation to Infinite, where in Infinite, you do the same thing and is not about the. So the idea that I go to a vending machine and buy the ability to shoot fireballs in a society that's just a normal society is so ludicrous. It doesn't make any sense.

Sorry, Jeremy, do you have something to say? Just that, you know, the concept behind the game, the commentary on it is one of the places where actually interacting with the developers kind of made me like the game less. Because when I played it, I was like, oh, wow, so this is, you know, kind of a lampoon of objectivism and libertarianism and, you know, just. taking down industrialists and robber barons, a peg. And that's pretty interesting. I haven't seen a game that really does this and takes a political stance. And so I was doing an interview on a junket before Bioshock Infinite's launch, like a year before it came out.

I think I was on that trip with you. No, it was a trip to L.A. Oh, okay. And I was there on my own, I remember. And I asked one of the guys who I was interviewing, like, you know, the original Bioshock took a pretty bold stance to decry objectivism and, you know, like making fun of Ayn Rand and so forth, do you intend to do anything like that in this game? And I don't remember who it was.

It wasn't Levine. It was someone else, but he was like, well, we weren't really making a commentary in the game. It was really something that we want to leave up to people to decide. You can draw your own conclusions. I was like, really? And the red dot from the PR sniper 100 feet away disappeared. Yes. Yeah. It was really just sort of wishy-washy and disappointing. I was like, this game would be more interesting if they would stand up and say, yes, actually, we do think that this is a stupid philosophy. Yeah. And we're happy to tell people that they're wrong for thinking that way.

And because they don't say that, there are idiots that have Andrew Ryan quotes in their signatures. Like, he's stupid. He's wrong. Also, they're the same people that think Tyler Darden Fight Club is cool. But yeah, Jeremy, that frustrates me as well as someone he used to do a lot of interviews. where I remember, like, I did an interview for the game, Deus, X, Mankind Divided, which is a great game. It's a fantastic game of this, of this sort of subgenre of shooters. And the theme is, the theme is apartheid. And, like, what is that when it comes to robots? And I believe it was like, bought, they even use the hashtag like, bought Lives Matter or whatever. Something like that. Oglies.

Thank you. Thank you. And I started my, I started my little app to record the interview. And I sat down with one of the lead designers. I'm like, so you're using a pretty heavy theme. What are you trying to say? Like, why did you think of this? And what are you trying to say?

And again, Jeremy, same answer. The players will decide what I'm trying to say. I turn off my recorder and I just humor him for the next 20 minutes because I'm like, I'm not getting anything out of this. And that interview never went live. So, yeah, don't you got to take a stance, guys. It's cool. It's cool.

It's just, it's so frustrating. I always want there to be people to understand that, like, you do turn people off by doing that. Like, they're being neutral because they're afraid of turning people off. But a lot of people look at that kind of thing. Like, I know a lot of people, and this could just be biased by, like, the crews I run with or what have you, that won't, that are less likely to play a thing because it has that answer. Like, oh, this doesn't have a perspective. That's dumb. This is what's wrong with video games.

I don't want to buy it. If you would come out with a perspective, you might gain as many people as you lose, you know? Yeah, and that's why I feel like even in Bioshock that has strong themes, there's no, there's no, there's no. mission statement. There's no message. There's no thesis. It just presents the themes and plays with them. But it doesn't really want to like, like, just figure out a thing to say about everything that's happening. Right. Except for the, the meta theme, like the, the really successful one. That's the one thing that works. Which they feel safe about doing and is really, really well done. It's cool.

It could have been, you know, I think it justifies its existence as an interesting setting, you know, that creates. Like they took this character. They followed him to a logical conclusion with what world he would make. What would happen then? and made a stage to do this much cooler thing on the side. But it didn't have to be either or, I guess. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, you know, I think publishers are worried about turning off people by taking a stance. But if you're taking a stance that a bad thing is bad, you're turning off people who are, you know, attracted to something bad.

Is that necessarily a thing you don't want? No. Like if you... Hey, Jeremy, their money ain't bad. I guess. But, I mean, just like in the news today, there, there are. There's a lot of commentary on how the Republican Party is like, oh, crap, like, we have all these candidates across the country who are anti-Semitic and openly racist. How did this happen?

Well, maybe because you didn't actually push them away, but you kind of embraced them. And then all of a sudden, they become part of you. Like, you have to draw some lines occasionally. We mentioned this on an earlier podcast we recorded today, but it was also like a surprising and also depressing breath of fresh air when Bethesda was like, yeah, kill Nazis. Nazis suck. And people are like, what? can they say that but it was

it's in the extremely conservative mainstream game space that was considered like almost shocking you know so a lot of the themes Levine borrowed for this game were taken from some of the big

dystopian and utopian writers like Huxley orwell and of course Ein Rand I want to know more about what Ken Levine thinks of Ein Rand because she is I have I'm not super happy with Levine but I think she

her writing has just shaped some of the worst people imaginable over the past, I don't know, what, 80 years. Like, the worst human beings are way into her. Like, there's, there's a common theme in terms of, like, especially in politics and business. Like, if you're an Ayn Rand fan, I will not give you the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, I've, like, if you go on a date and you go to someone's house and they have a copy of Atlas Shrard, you should leave. Uh, yes. Yeah, yeah, it's a, yeah, I don't, you don't, uh, you don't let your friends do it. Take the book. Maybe you can save them. Maybe they haven't read it yet. And eventually in a couple generations, uh, they'll die out,

Because then they won't have the book to read. They can't teach their kids. And I feel like this is getting super political this episode, but deal with it. But I feel like Ayn Rand does trick a lot of people when they're young. Like I, as a young shithead who was like, everyone's stupid but me. And if you're stupid, you can't figure out the world, then screw you. And I feel like people read her stuff as a teenager and it sort of ossifies their empathy and their brain in a way that sort of ruins them for the future. Like, I feel bad for a lot of the people who fall for that.

Yeah. And it's funny that she ended up a. in her final years, what she would consider a leach on the state. So way to go. Way to go, Einrand. Just imagine Einrand, like, walking up and hacking a circus of values to get a stale twinkie. I love that. Someone make a fan art of that.

That would be great. 2K had some major reservations about Biostock. That was a common theme I saw in the development history of this game, reading all about it. They were really ringing their hands about, like, oh, we just want a shooter. We really just wanted a shooter. I mean, that's what they would get with Infinite, but with this one, they had so many reservations about these RPG elements because at this time especially, this was like the glowing Arrow era of games where HD development was scaring the shit out of everybody, so every game had to be super frictionless and super accessible. And if you got frustrated for more than a minute, they would consider that a horrible mistake. It wasn't until games like Dark Souls and Minecraft came out around 2011 that that started to flip where it's like, okay, we don't need to.

Like, we can create games that are difficult and are unexplained, and people will love them. So I feel like it took a long time for us to escape from this very frustrating era of game development. And one of the things that made the team really worry is that they had an awful playtest in the final stages of development. So early to 2017, they had sort of a focus group playtest. Everybody hated it. The game was too dark. No one knew where to go next. And so they went into mega crunch mode.

And I feel, unfortunately, like a lot of the story of Bioshock is developers like kill. themselves with work, just to get this game out. They overhauled a ton of elements. In fact, one of the major elements they overhauled was some of the voice acting. I believe Atlas was a Southerner, and they changed him to an Irishman because they said he sounded like lecherous or whatever. Yeah, it sounded like a lecherous Colonel Sanders is the quote. I love that quote.

And really, that's what KFC uses as their mascot now. It is an electricist. Yeah. Played by several people. Yeah, pretty gross. The chicken bag. I'm more of a fireman myself. Excuse me?

Is Colonel Sanders thirsty now? Yeah, I don't, yeah, you just get that gigantic bucket. Is that one of those places that sells a bucket of coke? Like, I think you get like a bucket of soda. They don't put chicken in the buckets, say, more, but they put coke in the buckets. Okay, yeah. So this is also the, like, one thing that really helped this game sell and sell to a lot of people was we are also in the era of every game has a demo. Remember that time on Xbox Live where it's like every game had a demo?

That never happens anymore. It rarely happens. I think in terms of demos, I can think of one, like, like Octopath Traveler maybe. Yeah, that's why that game sold well, because it was the only one of the demo, and people are like, yeah. And you could invest in the demo to, you know, pay off in the main game. And I believe, like, Bravely Default had that too.

But it rarely happens now. But when that demo came out a few weeks before the game, everybody was talking about it. Everyone was playing it. It was a great marketing tool. Of course, you have to have a good game to have a demo to sell your game. You need a good demo, and that's very hard to do. But that really helped build the hype. I did not have an Xbox 360 at this time.

Did you guys play that demo at all when it came out? I didn't. I just jumped straight. in and played the real thing. Yes, but that was an amazing, amazing demo, and it really helped build the hype and make that the game of 2007. But when we get back, we will talk about the actual game, everybody. We'll see you on the other side of this break. When you think about the things you do everything you do every day, brushing your teeth probably isn't at the top of your mind. that's so important to your health, it should be. That's why Quip wants to help you brush better.

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Have you seen that dude? I've seen his musculature. He benches. It's impressive. He benches all the time, bro. So Bioshock. It was released on August 21st, 2007 for the Xbox 360 and PC, and more than a year later for the PS3, that is definitely putting us in the time of the PS3 being a real stink box, you know, back in those days where it was troubled, and now the tables have turned, and Sony is on top, and Xbox 1 is sort of figuring out a path to the future, and I think they're kind of on the right track, but yeah, that's definitely like this era for sure, where the 360 came first. Things haven't changed that much. I'm still just playing portable Nintendo systems.

It's true, but you're a freak. Oh, God. I got a PS4 pro. I'm living in the future. But let's get into the story of this game. So the year is 1960. You are on a plane. You're holding a gift box.

The plane goes down in the ocean. And so you swim to the only available chunk of land. It's a nice little island with a lighthouse in it. And you find out that lighthouse is the entrance to rapture. An underground utopia built by a wealthy objectivist named Andrew Ryan. That's subtle. What is that a reference to? I love the idea of him holding a gift box because how different would this game be if you had an edible arrangement, like in the plane?

A cookie bouquet, if you will. Yeah, I mean, and so this is where... A cookie bus. I'll bring a cookie opus with me. So, yeah, this is where it gets interesting because if you think about, so the meta commentary is like you, the player, you as the character are being manipulated into doing things, but you as the player are also being manipulated by knowing what a game is and by being told what to do in the game. So as the character, there's no reason for you to go get in the bathysphere and go underwater. You're not given a reason. Your character doesn't talk to himself.

There's no like, you're not trying to escape from anything, but you end up down in rapture. Like, arguably you're just trying not to drown and this is a place to be. But you move forward. Like you have a series of progressive yeses that you do that are kind of unreasonable. Yeah. So like when you get down there and you get into the city and you see that's real scary, you think you're just kind of in a bad situation. And then when Atlas pops in and. says, you know, find a wrench, like, reasonable.

I'm going to go find a way to defend myself. Find a plasmid and, like, just jab this into your arm is less reasonable. Become an atom addict. Yeah. Adam and the addicts. I was more into ecstasy. Sorry. So when you get inside, you are contacted by Atlas, a friendly Irishman, and one of the few

sane survivors in the, in the world of rapture. There's like five of them who aren't like crazy mutated madmen who are just atomatics and just wandering around screaming. Initially, he wants you to help him and his family escape from Rapture. And as you travel deeper and deeper into Rapture through both audio logs and the environment and through Atlas himself, you learn about what happened to Rapture. It's delivered to you on all fronts, both from, you know, narrative and in terms of the environment.

So that's what this game is doing in Bioshock. Well, and in a macro scale. So, like, you're learning, you know, essentially the tragedy that befell of the place, but also you're getting a, you know, two dozen really, like, pretty great, tragic little short stories about individuals who live there. Yeah, yeah. And you're doing it in a really interesting way, which is, like, being in the place they're at. Like, seeing, you know, seeing them, like, oh, okay, I see, you know, this audio log mentions

getting into a fight. Here's where a lamp is next to a broken mirror. Yeah. And then I walk over and here's a couple that is on a bed and one of them is facing the other one. You know, they're both dead because, you know, they died from this thing. But, like, oh, this is the fight. Like, you see, you know, it's a really interesting. cool way of storytelling, and this game is full of it.

Like, it happens constantly. I just remember a very funny tweet. I just popped to my head of it. It's a picture of a skeleton on a toilet. It just says environmental storytelling. But this was, that was kind of new. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, that's the joke now.

It's just like, show a skeleton doing something. And it's like, now we know where they are. The skeleton is sleepy. Yeah. I mean, previous, like, this is being kind of glib, but previous level design is like, here's a, here's a factory and there's a bunch of crates in the factory, break open the crates, stuck behind the crates. I mean, the joke, like, time to crate was the FPS joke where this sort of thing was not done

as thoughtfully, you know? Right, right. And this is, it's just, you know, this kind of thing happened in system shock, but it didn't, system shock too, but didn't have quite like the graphical fidelity to show, you know, this kind of level of detail of story. Yeah, we're in the HD era so you can like read signs easier. You can, you can look into things in an easier way. Like, everything is delivered on a much higher level of clarity. So with the HD era, you can tell more stories visually because that detail is not lost on the player. And the level design is based around this too, where they do a really clever thing, where

they tie getting narrative gains with mechanical ones. So all of these levels, which are not just corridors, like these are relatively real feeling spaces most of the time, have tons of these little diverticula that you can go into and you have multiple reasons to go in. And, like, I want to hear about this poor family that, like, lost their daughter who became a little sister. And then we're faced with seeing their daughter as one of these monsters who didn't recognize them. Like, that's great. But also, here's health kits and ammo and things I need in there.

So you're incentivized in multiple ways to push every boundary of the level that you're in. Yeah. And a lot of the, I mean, eventually it gets a bit contrived in terms of these audio logs where it's like, in the beginning, you're like, oh, well, I know why you're recording this. This is something you want people to know. or it's like a confession or something, but at times it's like, you didn't need to record. You didn't need to record this. What's happening? It's like, this is just for me, but you have to, you have to bend the, you know, the laws of reality in this world to buy all of the audio laws.

Right. And I feel like there are characters who emerge through the storytelling that you never actually meet in game. They are figures. Like, you don't ever actually meet Dr. Steinman, do you? No. No, no. Dr. Steinman is a boss. Oh, is he?

Yeah, I think of the Suchong. Oh, that's it. I mean, or O'Dano, O'Donah is a great character who is like the engineer who is like, this is a terrible idea and is left to more or less just deal with the fact that this is an engineering nightmare and turned against his masters. Like he's one of the few decent people and you get to know him really well through a series of audio logs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it is nice that there are these characters who exist in Bioshock but not within the game. They're just within the world.

And it really does make it feel less small. Like there's always the economy of storytelling that you have in movies and games where, you know, if something is mentioned, you know, the whole Chekhov's gun phenomenon, it's going to show up. It's going to be important. But they actually took the time to create these characters who were just there to flesh out the world and not be, oh, here's someone you're going to meet later. And I think that also helps with the reveal, you know, eventually of who the villain truly is. Because you hear about this character and you're like, oh, he must have died or something, you know, it must be like Su Chong. And I'm I'm never going to meet him. And then when that character does appear, you're like, oh, well, okay. Well, let's talk about the big turn in this game that happens about, I would say, like, 70% of the way through. So at a certain point, like Atlas in the beginning is like, you need to help me find my family. Ryan appears to kill his family who's waiting in a bathysphere. But it turns out that Atlas is actually Frank Fontaine, who it talks like basically.

Frank Fontaine. Hey, Dad, Mother Goose. I'm going to lay a golden egg. I'm going to steal your eggs. I love eggs. I mean, it becomes just pure comedy at this. I don't know if that's what they were going for, but it's like this is just a Joe Piscopo doing Frank Sinatra. Sit down, Jr. Daddy's here.

You know, it's a real Frank Sinatra. I mean, they gave him like right out of the movies, right out of the movies of this era gangster voice. But yeah. I will say this game is not great for sensitive portrayals of accents at all. Yeah, that's true. My old wee wife, you know, all that stuff is also not. That is true. He is very much...

That at least you can justify by the fact that it's a fake Irish. Yeah, yeah. He was trying to... It's like, you know, Mr. Scott on Star Trek. He doesn't sound authentically Scottish because he's just an American guy. I love the idea of the protagonist questioning that and being like, oh, this isn't actually your real voice. Like, keep going.

Keep digging because this Frank Fantine voice cannot be it. That's a man with a thousand voices. But yeah, so Atlas, the guy who was guiding you throughout the entire game, it's actually Frank Fontaine. And in the past, before you showed up, he staged a coup against Ryan. Ryan by basically using this resource known as Adam to create genetic soldiers to take over rapture. And I think there was like a war of escalation between them in which Ryan was doing the same

thing and it eventually affected the entire world of rapture. Is that correct? Yeah, more or less. And Frank Fontaine lost it. Like lost that war. Was not winning. And he assumed dead too. Yeah.

He was assumed dead and came back. What's really interesting in one of the few ways this game actually does something really interesting with its kind of like objectivism setting is the way. Atlas came back and became a force was by answering the problems of an objective society. So, like, you know, he, you know, the early audio logs with him where he says, like, you know, the problem, this is a beautiful idea, but somebody's got to clean the toilets, right? Yeah, exactly. So he did it, like, people who were down there, you know, in the lore.

So Andrew Ryan hired a bunch of people to build Rapture. And then they didn't have marketable skills because it was built and they were all really poor. Yeah, yeah. And Frank Fontaine was like, I'm going to give these people bread and giving them a little bit of kindness in this environment where kindness is kind of outlawed, just gives me immense power, you know? And if there's anything that they do with that theme, I think that's the closest thing to it. Yeah, I mean, if you look into objectivism, like selfishness is a virtue, basically,

and any sort of altruism is just a waste of energy. Like, look out for number one. No, you're right, Gary. Like, that was the, like, so I said earlier, there's not a lot of commentary on this, on capitalism or objectivism, but I do like, there's a little bit in that, like, who's going to scrub the toilets? I really like that. That's one thing that did stick with me. and I wish there was more exploration of that but there's just a little bit in there I want to see more and in fact I found out like I really I really want to be in this world

before it went to shit and apparently there's a novel that came out in 2011 that explores right before this crisis I don't know if you've read it I'm sure I'm not sure if it's good but I kind of want to read it now I haven't read I've read a synopsis but one of the the DLCs for Infinite does as well okay you get to see the pre you get to see the society

I really want to say yeah it's cool like I mean we didn't really talk about it and I don't want to, we don't have to spend that much time on it, but it's worth noting just how cool of a world this is. Yes, yes. I think that's a big reason why this game was such kind of a sea change and so popular, is it's such an imaginative. Sea change?

I get it. It's so imaginative and just unlike anything else you would play in a game. So when this game, like near the last third or last quarter, when it gets kind of bad, it gets bad because it starts becoming a regular-ass video game level where you're going through foundries and shit. Yeah, yeah. Up until that point, like, you were in just such an amazing setting. You know, going down, the first time you go out, look out a window and see the city and then the whale coming through like, you know, a bird or like a cloud is just breathtaking.

I will say, yeah. Yeah, the part that sticks with me most is, I guess, toward the foundation where there's just like glass domes, basically. And so you're totally surrounded by ocean. And isn't there like a big daddy outside the station that gets in, or the city that gets in, or the city that gets up? inside somehow and you have to fight with it. He just, yeah, he comes over. I don't know if it's the same one you eventually fight with, but you see kind of a non-interactive Big Daddy come through and repair

something on a wall and then you're on it and then keep going. Yeah, I mean, even though the use of the themes has appointed me upon this play-through, I feel like, oh yeah, this setting still speaks to me, it's still very cool. But back to the story, so you are actually Andrew Ryan's illegitimate child. I believe he had like with a dancer

or like a singer or like a lounge singer or something like that. Yeah, he was cheating on his chain. And you were genetically altered to like age in a super quick way. So you were basically sent to the surface to be a Trump card in case Atlas needed you to take out Ryan or needed you for something. So you were basically Manchurian candidate style brainwashed. You are the one who blew up the plane. You went down into Rapture because you had to go and eventually you kill Andrew Ryan. And that's still a cool scene in the game. That is actually a little bit of a commentary on his own principles where he's

like, I am not going to run away from you. I will decide this is okay. I'm okay with you killing me. And it's a really cool scene. Yeah, there's, I mean, that that scene works on a lot of levels. It's also a commentary on video games, which I think would work better if the designers of the game had wanted you to have a lot of player agency. But apparently the whole big, uh, the whole little sister like save them or kill them thing was mandated by the publisher. As opposed to being like, a decision that emerged organically from the design is something they had to put in there because the publisher was like, you need the player to have some sort of choice. And to me, that kind of makes the whole, you know, a man chooses

a slave obeys thing feels a little hollow because the one choice you have in the game isn't something the designers wanted to be there. You should, it shouldn't be there for a lot of reasons. Like, one, it's really shallow in the way the video game choices often are and that they're just binary. You know,

it's just like be absolutely good or be absolutely evil and they round up, you know, one or the other. Yeah. You know, so that shouldn't have been there. And two, I agree with you that it kind of undermines what's happening. It's cool that they're drawing attention to the fact that like you've been doing all of these silly-ass things because there's road in front of you when you're playing a game. You know, it's an interesting, like, comparison.

It lines up really interesting with like spec ops the line where they're making you do things that are not fun in that game and then saying, like, the way to win that game is not to play. Yeah. The point of their point is like, hey, turn off the system if you don't want to be this bad person. Everything's bad because you're here. This isn't that. This is before that where it's just, this is what video games are, is you jumping through a series of hoops and the choices are illusions, which is real novel at the time.

You know, it would have been stronger without that choice. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, going back, I mentioned this series earlier, but going back to the System Shock thing, like the big sort of competing series with System Shock was Marathon by Bungy. And that is something that factors heavily in there as well, because you're the cyborg who's basically jumping through the hoops according to these robots or, you know, these computers who keep taking control of you.

And there's like three of them jockeying for control over you. And when you come under one's influence, you, like, all you can do is follow its instructions. And there's like environmental storytelling and terminals where you can read and get backstory. And eventually you discover, like, if you piece everything together, that your main character is a cyborg who was created for a specific purpose and that the computers do have control over you. And the very final scene of the last game is the last surviving computer basically saying, you've served me well. but, you know, it's time for me to let you go. Like, you can be your own entity now. So, you know, Bioshock kind of gets into that same territory, but in a much more visceral way.

Yeah. And you're talking about the publisher mandated changes. One of them was multiple endings, which Levine from the beginning was like, this game is going to have one ending. But the way the ending changes is very stupid. And people will complain about it at the time where it's like if you, when you see a little sister, you have to take out the big daddy protecting her. And then you can choose to rescue her or harvest her. If you rescue her, you get some resources. If you harvest her, you get more.

Ultimately, mechanically, I believe it doesn't factor in that much. It doesn't matter that much. It doesn't matter that much, especially because at the end of the game or toward the end of the game, if you've been protecting the little sisters, what's her face, the doctor, like, gives you some sort of huge perk. That actually happens throughout the game at intervals. So you don't have to wait until the end. Yeah, they give you gifts. So it is a difference.

If you actually sit down and do the math, you'll get more at them from heart. harvesting. Yeah. But you get unique plasmids on top of a little bit of extra, Adam, if you don't. So they end up being kind of six and a half dozen the other. And the way that they work that, they round that morality in the ending is if you can harvest one. That's it. Yeah. You can try it. If you want to see the really terrible cut scene, it's definitely you're reaching down a little girl's throat and pulling out a slug and chugging it. Slugging it. Slugged chugging USA. If you want to see that, you know, and it doesn't actually show that, but if you want to see what's like, you can do it once. But if you do it twice,

you're a monster. Yeah. And that would have been a much more interesting gray area because the way Alice justifies it to you is he says, like, one, you know, they're really no longer human, which isn't a good argument. A better argument is you might need to do this to survive. Like if you get into the practicality argument, like that's not something I buy, like you don't, ends don't justify the means, but it's an argument, you know.

But if you go down that road even a little bit, your history is greatest monster. And in the end, you go up to the surface and rain tear and become an overlord. Yeah. With your new atom powers. That doesn't really check out for me. Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah.

I feel like it would have been more interesting if they had penalized you for helping the little sisters to like make the altruistic choice genuinely difficult. Yeah. Do you want to do something that your morality says you should do even though it's going to cause you a disadvantage? But that doesn't really happen. You're right, Jeremy. That's great. I mean, in a Randian world, helping people would have punishments in the ideal Randian world,

like being altruistic or being selfish, that would be really interesting. And it would have been interesting also if, you know, like it seemed like you were being punished and then toward the end, something interesting happens or there's some benefit that you couldn't have counted on. But the way it's parceled out, I don't know, it just. It feels like a gameplay concession to me. They didn't want to make it not fun to do the right thing. Like gamers in general, I mean, this is a whole thing I can soapbox about, but like want to be a, do the good thing.

They're obsessed with like what's the good ending, the right way to play like a game in a thing. and they're not really forced to make those decisions very often? I don't know that I agree with that because I know a lot of people who are like, oh, I always play video games evil. Like, I just want to see how bad I can, how bad I can meet. I don't know very many of the other people. And I know a lot.

And I, like, I can't stand that. Like, it just, it's an anthem. You know what, though? Like, I thought that of myself, but one game that does it really well is is Fable 2. Like, in those games, which are very flawed, I feel like they want evil to still be fun, like a fun evil, Not like people are weeping as you kill their mothers

And you're being scolded out all throughout the game So like I feel like being evil In a lot of games carries like an emotional burden Like the game is scolding you Characters are sad, you're hurting people It's not fun, it's not fun Unless you are a sociopath Cotor makes it fun to be dark side

Okay Like you get a really cool robot companion Who's like, let's kill all the meatbags And you get great superpowers and stuff like that But this is not that We talked a bit about the theme earlier, and I feel like, again, they don't go too much into objectivism or capitalism

or a lot of these isms. They are presented in fun ways and surface level ways. I mean, like, playing through this game out and listening to all the audi logs, I'm like, they are more interested in telling you about these C-slugs than they are about the ideologies behind it. They are more interested in building this

science and lore than they are in exploring these isms, I feel ultimately. Yeah, I don't know if I would agree that they spend more time on it, but they spend more text on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're forced to kind of see, like when you go into a room and it's like this is leaking and it's barely keeping together, that's the commentary on what

they made. Right. You know, but they spend more time teaching you the sci-fi thing about it, which ultimately, like, feels like it doesn't really need, is that, is not that interesting? I don't want to know like, I feel like ultimately, I don't want to think to, like, the slugs, I feel are like an asinine idea. Yeah.

There could have been a cooler explanation or just no explanation, you know? Like, why did it need to be slugs? I don't get it. Just a genetic, like, breakthrough. Yeah. You know, that they found that, like, would have been fine. Like, and you could have even tied that into the grander themes of, like, the morally compromised scientist who had the ability to do this kind of genetic stuff were attracted to this place because they had no oversight.

Yeah. And they just made a breakthrough. Okay. And then it would have tied in the theme and you wouldn't have had slugs. The slugs are pretty silly and they never do anything interesting with it in the series. And you don't even see, you don't even see Slug 1 in this game. You do. You can find them outside.

Oh, okay. They're like tiny little collectibles that give you 10 atom when you, when you pick them up. And apparently, slug jug. Slug jug. Slug jug. So the, yeah. I missed all the slugs. I'm sorry, I get that Chivo.

You got the zero slugs. I am not a slugger. I will say that, like, playing through the game, I love the setting, but one thing I'm kind of tired of in retrospect, so in Fallout does this a lot. Like, a lot of the, a lot of the theming in this game reminds me a lot of Fallout, especially in three and four, where it is the post-war, very ultra-capitalist optimism set against an apocalypse, where it's like the smiling cartoon characters in, like, you know, a destroyed setting where that ideology destroyed the place. And like that sort of dramatic irony

is kind of overplayed right now. And I was kind of kind of sick of it. But I mean, this is not very fair to BioShack. But that's a very common thing. How could we have known that real life would turn out that way? It's true. I'm wearing my MAGA hat right now. The game is broken up into distinct levels, each with their own theme and each with their own purpose in the setting of rapture. And I believe, like, each one is focused around one MPC, living or dead, most of the time living. There's people like Dr. Steinman and Dr. Tenenbaum and Sandra Cohen, yeah. They're kind of like, it's a little bit like, you know, the inner circle of Andrew Ryan. Yes, these people, these architects that headed up different parts of Rapture when they built it.

And who are less insane. Often. Yeah, often. And sometimes more, like significantly more, you know, in the case of Sandra Cohen, which, like, I want to camp out on a little bit. Oh, for sure, for sure, yeah. I mean, so these are all, like, distinct levels with the beginning and an end. You can return to older levels, but I don't really know a good reason to. Unless you miss, like, audio logs that you watch.

Yeah, yeah. It's just, I guess, to miss collectibles or to make the game world seem more coherent and connected instead of just leaving something behind. Yeah, it's an immersive sim thing where it wouldn't make sense for it to be a one-way street, so it's not. That's true. Most of the objectives in the game involve finding a certain number of items within the level or, like, making it to the very end. The Sandra Cohen one is interesting, Gary, because it's the one major outlier. And I think it is the most memorable part of Bioshock because I believe it could exist independently as like a short experience and you would still get the same effect because it's it's all about like it divorces itself from the narrative almost completely and just like this insane guy and you're doing all these things for him. It is for frolic.

Maybe Gary, you really want to talk about this. I could tell. Yeah, I really, I really love him. No, I mean, it's a great, it's a great level. He's such an interesting villain because he's really unhinged and it's from a perspective of art. Yeah. You know, so like the evil artist archetype is not something I feel like you see all that often. And there's just tons of detail in that.

Like it is like, you're right, it is like its own little miniature world. Like when you go through the different spokes of that level and learn about these people who are kind of his disciples, like he's like a mini Ryan and their relationship with them and what he was getting out of them and what they were getting out of him, these kind of unhealthy relationships of this decadent. Yeah. You know, who like you believe it's like a true believer. Like, he's the only one of these characters you can run into who's not a good guy who you also don't have to kill. Yeah, that's true. You know, you complete his task and you can let him live. And if you do, you get a really neat little scene that's very on brand for him later.

Yeah, I say let him live. You can kill him later. But that's interesting, Gary. He's like the one NPC who's not in like a little enclosure. Like, it becomes, I mean, the contrivances of this game can be explained away as if being a commentary on games. Because ultimately in Bioshok, your main verb is kill. There's no talking. There's no negotiating.

but everyone you meet is like in those little places at the airport where you can smoke. Yeah. And sometimes for no reason, like Dr. Tenenbaum is like in her little zoo enclosure. And you should be able to talk to her. All the boys in the bubble. Yeah. But I guess I makes it more almost shocking when Sandra Cohn just strolls out at the end. And you're like, oh my God, can I look at this guy?

Can I walk up to him? What's going to happen? And it was so cool to be like, can I kill him? Yeah. Can I not kill him? Like it as just an equally exciting possibilities for somebody who's kind of presented as like a boss. And I wish there were more opportunities like this in Bioshock or more differing kinds of gameplay and experiences like this because I feel like it really stands out for sure. Yeah, I agree.

We talked about the 0451 genre like DASX and System Shock and things like that. Like this game really wants to do this in a very console-friendly way and that is not a pejorative. That is just like let's mainstream this. Let's streamline this. So you have all the options or you have like the broad version of options as you would have in System Shock like sneaking and hacking. in combat, but they are very, very direct into the point. There's not a lot of nuance to them. And ultimately, my disappointment is you just, just combat's easiest way.

Like, just, I mean, you can be stealthy. You can hack, but ultimately, killing is the most efficient and least tedious way to play this game. Like, I think I would half agree with that. Like, I think stealth is really underplayed. But hacking, it's more like you have all of these different options of approach within combat. Yeah. So it's like combat is going to be the main thing you do, but you can. can, by hacking, you're going to save resources.

It's going to be a lot easier. And then the other thing that's really no worthy about this. And this is a point that I crib from Aaron Signal, another video essay guy. Yeah, he's great. He's really good. But is that, like, Bioshock is about these independent systems. So it is a really brave and cool thing to make the most powerful monster in this, something that's non-hostile that you can utilize.

That's true, yeah. Tricking splicers into shooting a big daddy and eventually hypnotizing them or hypnotizing splicers and getting them to attack a Big Daddy, things like that where you have security splicers and Big Daddy's, all three of which are different axes that you can play against each other. I do like that. Ultimately, I feel like the Big Daddy fights in preview coverage and in initial impressions of the game, you're like,

oh, these are very deep fights. You can lay traps. You can do what you're talking about, Gary, like turn enemies against each other. For me, I was like, oh, I stunned them with lightning and then shoot them six times with this type of ammo and they're dead. Like, because it was the most efficient way to kill a big daddy and because I would get through that battle with losing zero health, I would do that every time. And I feel like they shouldn't have made it that easy because I would have loved to try to do the traps because in the beginning I did in this play through. I'm like, well, setting the ground on fire barely hurts this thing.

It just makes it matter and I have to run away. But I really wish they made combat less viable for every situation or at least they made direct shoot you in the face combat a less viable answer for almost every problem in this game. I had a real different experience with, sorry to cut you off, Jeremy. That's okay. Like, had a very different experience with fighting them in general. Like, I did have to utilize more of my tools. But I would say that this is, that is a number one argument for you to play Bioshock 2, which Yes, it's a great game.

The big thing is they, oh yeah, you have played it. Yes, not for eight years, but for people who like that, that part of this thing, if you want that kind of trap setting, ambush setting, like thoughtful, I'm facing a very superior foe and I need use all my resources. That whole game is all that. Yes, yes, exactly. And I feel like Bioshock 2 was delivered. on the promise here, which was not fully, they did not fully deliver on it.

But yeah, you're right. And like, you're basically are periodically, you enter these rooms in which you have to set up a bunch of traps and then you just basically hit a button or whatever. Like a tower defense thing. Yeah, tower defense is what I was thinking of. It's almost like that. But yeah, I feel like that was a much more successful way to implement this, these kind of ideas. Did you have something?

Oh, yeah. You know, I feel like one of the, you kind of mentioned safe scumming and how this was consolized. We haven't really talked about the Vita chambers. Yeah. But I kind of feel like they take the teeth out of this game unless you just pretty much turn them off because they don't work like saves coming. It's not like if you die, then the game resets to the state you were in when you visited the last vital chamber. It actually just respawns you.

So, you know, if you just want a brute force a difficult boss, all you have to do, except in like one or two cases, you know, the final boss. You just keep dying, keep throwing yourself at the boss or the, you know, the big daddy or whatever. whatever, and you'll come back and it'll have its health whittled down. So you can play as clumsily as you want. And I guess, you know, that's a concession to make the game easier and more friendly, but I don't feel like it works in the game's favor. That feels like a real publisher compromise where it's like, again, this era, it's like we need everyone to be able, everyone who plays this game has to be able to finish this game. That feels like that was like a mandate of this time for an expensive game like Bioshock. The one clever thing about Bita Chambers is that when you go to

Ryan's office and you kill him at his command, there's a vita chamber behind his office. And if you look, it's been disconnected. So he deliberately disconnected his vita chamber so that he would not be regenerated when you kill him. So it's a really subtle thing, but it's more of that environmental storytelling. And it really does underscore the theme and make that scene even better. The game tries to explain that in the narrative where it's like you have Ryan's DNA and only he can use those and only he can use the bathyspheres and things like that.

So they try to justify it, but it does feel like a real concession. I think they say anybody in the DNA ballpark. Ballpark, yeah. It's cool ballpark. It's funny, though, when you talk about the ViacChangea. So you couldn't originally turn them off. Like, they patched that in because people complained about it. And what's weird is that in Infinite and in System Shock 2, you had to pay to use them.

Like coming back costs money. And if there's any game where coming back to life should cost money, it feels like it should be Bioshock. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That should have been some sort of punishment. But, again, they are like, if you buy this game, you need to be able to finish it. And they had a story they really wanted to tell. Yeah, it's a publishing thing, but also, like, we want you to get to the Wood You Kindly moment because we think it's really dynamite and, like, it is we want you to get there. I can see that, too.

They want to push people towards the end. So other little systems, I think, especially over time, people forget about all these little things that were not in Bioshock Infinite. One of my favorite is the research camera where you take pictures of enemies and over time you build up your level of knowledge about them. You unlock, as you get more research on them. them. You do more damage to them. You sometimes unlock plasmids. You sometimes get things. It's a really cool feature. Taking straight from Metroid Prime.

Exactly. Really? What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the scanning. The scanning, yeah. Except you're not like scanning. Dark Cloud 2. Yeah, dark cloud too. Oh, man. Oh, I love that. I like that. Octobath Traveller. Well, kind of. I don't have time for that. I need to play 1D8 Path Traveller.

The Uno Gates. Unopath. But yeah, the camera's really cool. Like, again, like whenever I bring up the camera no one remembers it. I feel like we just forgot about it. I don't remember it. Yeah, the camera is so cool. Also things like crafting is in Biashok. You find supplies

to make special weapons and, you know, traps and things like that. And all the little perks. So you have like a little, like four rows of like different perks you can have all plasma base. Like you can you turn invisible. What's that? Oh, tonics. Yeah. They're called gene tonics. And there are so many little

perks where you can customize your character the way you want them. I don't remember if Infinite has those or not. It doesn't. Instead, you have clothing that's randomized. Like, you might find a hat that gives you a thing,

but they're random with what you get. Yeah, it's so bad. I forgot about that. Like, that's one of the things when I talk about this being something that straddles the line between traditional console games and PC games.

Or like, when we talk about that, one of the big things is this is an, like a shooter with builds. Yeah, yeah. Make a build. And that's one of my, I need that in games.

Like, it's very hard for me to play a straight-laced shooter that doesn't have that because I want to express myself through play. And there are a lot of different builds. Like, you can play with wrench and invisibility and electroshock and upgrade those things to the, you know, all the way. And you, that's a viable. It's viable, yeah.

You know, there are a lot of different ways to. So when I talk about it having that 0451 philosophy within combat, that's part of it. I see that, yeah. I mean, you'll get some of those tonics. You'll be like, well, what good is this? But if you get the two that really accentuated, it's, it could be super powerful based on the build you want. But yeah, that would eventually be lost in the sequels. Other things going on in this game are hacking, of course.

And if you want to know what to hack, the answer is everything. You will play that damn pipe game a lot. And you will eventually get very good at the pipe game. And to the point where I'll like, can I just pay money to not play the pipe game? And you can. Start having pipe dream dreams. Yes. But yeah, that is something.

I wish there were different kinds of mini games to play when you're hacking. But again, you will get very used to doing this. And it's just a cool way to power through locks and make items cheaper and things like that. Yeah. The existence of Bioshock is completely devalued the prospect. of ever getting a pipe dream remake or pipe mania because why would you

like you can just play Bioshock and you will end up doing all that hacking it's one of those things too just before we move on to those subsystems like and again I'm kind of a broken record but like the hacking and the research camera are two things that are like masterfully built upon in the sequel.

Both of those are much improved versions of this that I feel like get to the core of why they're cool and just nail it. I'm glad I have remastered out because I really want to play Bioshock too again. I just have really good memories of it. So we're running a little along. I'll get through some of this remaining stuff.

So splicers, they're the four, I think there are really four enemy types in this game. They're like the thuggish splicers who are the melee attack dudes, the ones that shoot guns at you, the ones, the spider slicers that crawl on the ceiling and throw hooks at you. And Houdini splicers, which teleport and throw fireballs at you. I think there are just four enemy types. And they're introduced well and they're used well, but I feel like we talked about the last fourth of this game being not so good. that's that's uh one of the reasons why it's not so good is because there are no new enemy types after after the four and and i think to make up for that they just give them a lot more

hit points a lot more um a lot more health and it's always a much more fun approach yeah yeah it's like by the end of bioshock i was like unloading four shotgun shells but i'm a fully upgraded shotgun into a guy before he would die i'm like that is that is that sucks i really hate that's exactly how they do it it's not good you know it's not good at all like you know one of the things I like about those enemies a lot is that, um, that mid-century kind of aesthetic that we talked about earlier, like is carried through with the dialogue and like barks of the enemies. Yeah, they have so much unique dialogue. And they're all like off their rocker. You know, like it's, it's these society types, these like, you know, New England society types who have found themselves temporarily

embarrassed through, through Adam addiction and are just, you know, oh, is that the cleaning man, you know, as you are creeping around. Like, there's so much flavor to that I think is really good. I did really like that. I don't think we got a lot of that before Bioshock. I see that a lot in the games to follow, but not really before. In System Shock 2, they're mutants. Yeah. It's just like, you know, who is there? And it's scary, but it's a much less unique flavor.

Yeah, and you get the feeling like some of these people are still trying to live their normal lives despite being, like, insane. Yeah. There was a lot of that in Head Hunter Redemption for PS2, which I reviewed for EGM, and it was like, wow, these people are, they keep talking to me. Also, Crackdown, which came out in 2007 before

Bioshock, to me that was the jumping off point. The enigmatic Dr. Wann. Yes, the internet. Like, all those people had lost to say. Yes. So, we're almost at a time. Is there any other design stuff we're forgetting? We talked about, you know, the creation, the production, Ken Levine, the themes.

Any other design things that really stand out for you guys before we wrap up here? I think just as far as, like, mechanically, that lack of enemy variety touches on the game in ways you wouldn't necessarily expect. So there's only, other than Big Daddy Encounters, which I really love, there's one boss fight in this, and it's atrocious. It's terrible.

Like, it's really, really bad. The final boss you mean? Yeah. And because instead of that, what they do at climactic situations is kind of have waves of enemies. Like, there is a limited verb set for adversity in this in a way that like a new unique bespoke splicer would have been really good. Yeah. Especially in that last section where it's the same enemies you've been fighting.

They have more health. And then it ends with an escort mission, which is just very tedious. Yeah, it's not very good. and is just kind of dumb. Like you're turning yourself into a big daddy and like using the vocal cord scraper to like make your voice the same and stuff. It feels like that should be a more invasive surgery than just like, I got the boots on. That's another thing that, you know, they did better in Bioshock too.

Yeah. Like they took that idea and we're like, what if we make this good? Yeah. And I forgot like a large portion of that back half or the back quarter of the game is you looking through a fish bowl in the center of your screen because you have the helmet on. It's like you didn't need to go this far, guys. But, yeah, I do feel like if the game were to end shortly after Andrew Ryan is killed, like you kill Andrew Ryan and then you just chase Fontaine to his quarters and you have that bad boss fight and it's over.

That would have been a much better experience, but boy, does it drag. I would like some of the stuff from that, like, everyone says that the game gets really bad at the last third and it gets worse, but there are still good things that I wanted to see there. Yeah. But it's things that draw back to the first half of the game where you're seeing the origins of this world. So like you go through the nursery, like you see the process of how they're raising little sisters. And that's really cool. That is cool.

I do like the psychological conditioning they're doing for the rooms and stuff. Like, I still want that, you know, but you could just, they just had to rearrange it. Yeah, yeah. I just feel like after, after Ryan dies, there's not a lot of enemy variety. And a lot of the story is just Fontaine taunting you in a very cartoonish way. Tontane. Yeah, tauntane. Yeah.

But, yeah, so we talked about everything related to Bioshock. And my final question for you guys. We didn't talk about everything. What is it, Jeremy? Would you kindly explain what means to say, would you kindly? Oh, that's right. We did kind of skip over that a little bit. Yeah, we did a bit.

I think maybe because I'm just thinking it's self-evident to all of you, but maybe you don't know. But what you kindly is something that Atlas says a lot before he's Fontaine. And it's something that's actually on the package that you're carrying on that plane that gets you to explode the plane. And that is like the Manchurian candidate code phrase to get you to follow instructions. And the commentary is like that is what game design does. You implicitly follow these instructions. You don't question them because you can't. Like there is no other option in most cases.

And we just, we already cover this in the broad strokes, but just in details, like, the scene with Andrew Ryan, where he starts controlling you is an emotionally, like, brutal scene. Like, he treats you like a dog. And the way he, you know, literally doing dog tricks, like stand, sit, jump, you know, telling you those things. Yeah, like run over there. Come back here. Because he can. And the, it's such a great bit of characterization because the two things is, one, he's disgusted with you. Like, he believes his self-made man, like, you need to be self-actualized.

and you are the exact opposite of that as a character and a player, and he is disgusted. Like, he's not fearful. He doesn't hate you. He's grossed out by you. And when he, when he says, I'm not going to try to stop you from killing me, like, there's an element that I pick up on where I think he's trying, he wants you to break free of the programming. Like, he's rooting for you, like, for you to not be the slave that you are, you know. And it's a really, really cool scene with that.

Like the creeping tear and then having the expression. And then when you cave his head in with the golf club, like, it is my. modeled in a way that is really grotesque. Yeah, it's an intense scene and a very violent scene, and it's played out very well. But yeah, it's one of the rare cases where video game violence is like, oh, that meant something. Yep. And then it happens every time you kill somebody in Infinite. Yes, yes.

Every single time you kill somebody is exactly that much detail and a close-up on their skull cave. Yeah, really turn me off from Infinite. Oof, infinite. Yes, so is that everything? I mean, we're about to wrap up here. But, yeah, my final question for you guys is, like, what is the legacy of Bioshock? What do you feel like the lasting legacy is? Do you think there is a possibility for that brand to return?

Is it tarnished? I want to hear your thoughts about it just to wrap up here. I think, sure, it could return. I think, you know, people have fond memories of the series and give it time and people's frustration with infinite will fade. But I think its legacy is kind of a subtle one. I don't think, you know, there are lots of Bioshock clones on the market. It's more like, you know, you said with the, the,

the character, like the NPC dialogue, things like that. Like, there were lots of design ideas and elements that were picked up by other games, but I don't think anyone has done a good job, you know, of sitting down and saying, like, what was really great about Bioshock? What was truly meaningful about this game and building on that? Aside from, you know, some of the people who worked on Bioshock, too, and then went on to other projects, like, you know, there's a lot of great stuff there. but outside of that group, it's hard to say that other developers really set down and were like,

I get it and I want something that works in, you know, on this level, but takes it to the next step. It parcels it out, I think. So, like, you look at something like Gone Home, which has so much Bioshock DNA in it early enough, and it took a portion of it. And you look at something like Dishonored and that took a portion of it. Like, dishonored doesn't really have anything to say as much as I love it, right? Like, it doesn't have this big thematic thrust. So I think that, like, the cool thing that Bioshock did was open the door for, like, dishonored and prey and the, you know, the new DASX games and stuff to make those.

But again, to your point, Jeremy, is they're not going holistically for this kind of grand philosophical statement. They're taking bits of it, you know, and taking, so they're not just taking the bits that all the bits that work. They're taking some of the bits. I agree. I feel like it's unfair to judge Bioschuk too harshly based on, you know, its age and the condition that it was made under and the publisher to. demands, but I feel like it did open the door for things like the Deus X reboot and the sequel and Dishonored One and Two where those games were allowed to be more daring. They're allowed to be more challenging. And especially with DeoSX, it's like that you talk to people, you

can hack, you can stealth. There are so many options that Byoshock was a little too afraid to make super apparent or super viable when they really just wanted. The publisher's like, no, we want a shooter, emphasize shooting. Shooting should be the number one thing you do. But I feel like as publishers got more comfortable in the age of Minecraft and Dark Souls, they were like, no, players can not kill their way out of every situation. Players can figure out how to get out of things. And I think even things like the popularization of fallout in a mainstream context gave people more inspiration to have these creative solutions.

And something that's interesting to think about, again, and we've talked a lot of smack about Bioshock Infinite, but one of the things I think it did was like by saying that the the surface level concerns of this game are fake and dumb and the real thing is this quantum reality stuff, it closed off a world where we might have seen an iterative sequel as opposed to a revolutionary one that was just like, here's a crisis in a really interesting setting that has a loose thematic core and gets better in combat levels, which I would have been down for, like a Bioshock 3 that is taking those surface elements, I still would have been pretty into.

And Infinite essentially says, you're dumb for liking those things. They just went away. You got invested in this world. We're sweeping it off the table to do this quantum stuff. Yeah. You know, and that I think closed the door on the future of this as a franchise. Like, they don't own the rights to it.

You know, they still could. Yeah, I believe ghost story games or whatever they're called now. They are still a 2K thing. Okay. So presumably, Ken Levine could do more Bioshock stories.

And I think, like, I would love to see a walking simulator style game in Rapture. Like, I don't know if it had the same effect on me now. That Rapture has been kind of overplayed and everything. But I feel like, Yes, tell more stories within that world that don't involve combat. Like, that would be so cool and interesting.

I would do Rapture VR, and I'm not a VR guy. Yeah, yeah. Like, I would love to just explore that city and have that be the product. Like, walk around at a party and rapture and just like listen to conversations and stuff. Like, that would be a really cool thing to do. But who knows what he'll bring out next? Who knows if it will be in the Bioshock universe? Maybe he is just burned out on that stuff.

But I really want to see if he can show us that magic again. So, yeah, that was Bioshock, everybody. I hope I convince you that it's old, if anything. That's what I set out to do. It's officially 11 years old as of this date. You're listening to it on probably. So before we go, Gary Butterfield, thanks so much for joining us. You've got a lot of podcasts all over that internet of ours.

Tell us about them and how we can help you out. It's true. Thank you very much for having me. This is a lot of fun. I'm roughly one half of duckfeed.tv, which is a podcast network that does a lot of different shows. Of most direct interest to listeners of this show would be watch out for Fireballs, our Games Club podcast that takes a game similar to this and kind of, this mixed with like a book club, like talks about the context, but then also just says the things that happened in the game,

which means we end up with like four-hour episodes, which isn't great. People love them. People do like really long episodes. Like we're still roughly one-fifth the length of an average giant bomb episode. This is a very long episode, too, by the way. But yeah, you can check that out. We have a bunch of different podcasts. And if you like us, if you want to support us, you can go to patreon.com slash duck feed TV.

And you're going to be at Portland Retro Gaming Expo along with us. 1,000%. And you're always there. You have to be. I live there. Yes. He actually lives in the convention. I know.

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Even a dollar a month would help. Just say, hey, guys, thanks a lot. So go to patreon.com slash retronauts and help us out. Why don't you? Jeremy, where can we find you? On the Internet, I'm out there. You're GameSpite. Oh, that's right.

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We'll see you next week with a brand new episode of Retronauts. Don't know. Thank you. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.