The spoilers

Do not read the following if you have not finished the game, and for God’s sake, get the game even if you think you don’t want to.

Who is Andrew Ryan? In a world full of parasites and slaves, where Washington says the sweat on your brow belongs to the poor, where Moscow says the sweat on your brow belongs to everyone, and where the Vatican says it belongs to God, Andrew Ryan is the man who created an enclave for those who work, for those who want to earn their way through life. Andrew Ryan is why we have Rapture and thus, why we have BioShock.

Andrew Ryan is also the instrument through which Irrational’s writers have created a scathing attack on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Ryan is Irrational’s take on John Galt, who is Ayn Rand’s hero of sorts in her philosophical novel, Atlas Shrugged. Rand, a fanatical laissez-faire devotee who is sure that government’s job is only to provide civil police and military protection, argues that society is full of people who take things from those who earned them – like looters who do it by force (like government), or moochers who do it by begging and claiming to be needy, which is apparently the majority of the population. Galt, like Ryan, creates a refuge for the productive members of society, where they can all work for themselves, unimpeded by moochers and looters.

Galt is part of Ayn Rand’s Atlas, who is the Greek Titan who in mythology holds up the world on his shoulders. Rand argues that the small but productive segment of the population is Atlas, and if Atlas should shrug, the world would tremble. And indeed in her book, the productive tire of fighting against the moochers and the looters, against collectivism, and simply give up and begin to disappear, and society does of course begin to crumble as this is Rand’s fantasy world.

Ryan, having created Rapture, creates this refuge for the productive, those who want to own the sweat off their own brow. Irrational argues though that Rapture, like Galt’s own enclave, would fall into a familiar pattern. There would have to be those at the top who own companies and enterprises, and those at the bottom, because no matter how talented and skillful everyone in Rapture is, there always needs to be someone to “clean the shitters”, in the poetic words of Frank Fontaine. In this perfectly free society, someone needs to gut and clean fish for food, someone needs to take care of trees, sweep the streets, and if everyone in Rapture is one of these productive people, none of them imagined they’d be doing it. Everyone wants to be Andrew Ryan, no one wants to be the janitor.

Frank Fontaine is a con artist, a common street thug with an uncommon ability to take advantage of people. He is the first to fully utilize plasmids and Adam, he begins to plot to take Ryan’s power from him, because like everyone else in Rapture, he came to be Ryan and not to be someone who cleans shitters. Unlike everyone else however, he has a plan of how to do it. Fontaine gathers the dissatisfied, the oppressed, the struggling, the poor, the ill, all under his banner. He strengthens his position by smuggling with the outside world, which simultaneously provokes Ryan because it exposes Rapture to the moochers and looters of the world (or in his words, the parasites). Thus a war ensues, a war where everyone makes use of plasmids and weapons and bots and Fontaine loses, is presumed dead, and Ryan is left to rule over the ruins of Rapture.


It is here that the player enters and is immediately thrust into the irony of the situation. Atlas contacts him. Who is Atlas? Frank Fontaine. But why choose the name Atlas? Why does Frank Fontaine, in the end of the game, look like the picture of Atlas on the cover of Atlas Shrugged? Because in the city of Rapture, Atlas isn’t the powerful and productive who are being oppressed by the masses. In Rapture, the Atlas who shrugs are the people that Fontaine gathers to his banner – the oppressed, the poor, the weak. Those who provide those vital functions the city needs, just as Rand’s Atlas was the society of the productive and powerful who were being robbed by the moochers and looters. Rand argues that if the productive leave, society will struggle. Irrational argues that if the weak and oppressed rebel, society is destroyed.

That by itself is a stunning achievement for a game, to argue philosophy in such a way, through the game. And Irrational wasn’t even halfway done.