It’s insane how deep you can go when you start looking into the Bioshock video game series for its little hidden details! I love this series so much but even I found out even more stuff that made me determined to go back and play it all over! Like what, you ask? Check it out!
1. If you’re really THAT curious, because of course a Bioshock fan is, you can find the Rapture lighthouse on Google Maps using the coordinates 63′ 2′ North 29′ 55′ West.
2. If you were wondering what the creator, Ken Levine, sounds like – go no further than the Circus of Value vending machine!
3. Originally, Bioshock was going to be a roleplaying game but developers realized they were giving players far too many complex pre-requisites in order to progress. By changing it up to an action platform FPS title, they took a lot of restrictions away and brought the fun back in.
(2K Games, Irrational Games)
4. Deep within the files of Bioshock is a texture file that has Jack’s passport image in it which shows he actually has a last name: Wynand. Theories are that the last name is taken from a character in the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead. Since Bioshock is has such heavy inspiration taken from Ayn Rand’s books, is anyone too surprised?
5. The lack of seeing Jack actually aided in the game development and its change in direction. Originally, more and more mutating Plasmids were supposed to mangle and change your appearance and turn you closer to a Splicer. However, upon realizing how useless this would be to the player if they couldn’t SEE Jack regularly, they dropped the concept.
6. For those who were unaware of the inspiration of the phrase ‘Would You Kindly?’ which was the special trigger phrase in the game, it was taken from The Manchurian Candidate where a trigger word would essentially switch on an assassin to carry out a plan.
(2K Games, Irrational Games)
7. A Bioshock movie was almost made and directed by Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame. It ultimately didn’t work out once they felt large scale primarily-CGI films were no longer hot in theaters. The movie that showed them this? Watchmen. Ontop of that, Verbinski wasn’t a fan of being forced to make it a PG-13 film as he felt the content was impossible to shoe-horn into that rating.
8. August Sinclair’s visual model was none other than I Love Lucy’s Desi Arnaz. There’s some explainin’ August will have to do…
9. Splicer models were actually taken from the imagery of early plastic surgery gone-wrong when plastic surgery was still in its infancy. Trust me, you don’t want to Google it. Heck, the Splicers are terrifying enough and pretty spot-on.
(2K Games, Irrational Games)
10. The code 0451 is not a one-off but was used in every Bioshock title as well as System Shock. The theory is that it is a reference to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Crazy, right? Well, given how many literary inspirations are in the series, perhaps not TOO crazy!
