During the first few hours, without any tedious text crawls or out-of-context narrated exposition, Irrational manages to impart a great deal of evidence as to what happened to Rapture.

Transmissions from Rapture mastermind Andrew Ryan increasingly demonstrate the society's immense hubris. Scattered audio logs from cirizens of Rapture tell the stories of individuals before and during the decline--in these tales are nestled nuggets that refer to greater events or suggest a more overarching social dysfunction. Different types of advertising reveal how inhabitants spent their money--and, therefore, what they strove to acquire and what their desires had become. Lingering Rapture residents clinging onto their last scraps of sanity provide a distorted but illuminating link to life prior to the end, while photographs depict crystallized images of the Rapture of ideals. Even the graffiti scrawled on the walls contributes to the richness of the world. It would be nearly overwhelming were it not so endlessly engrossing.

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Ken Levine: First off, BioShock is not only ambitious from a visual standpoint, we have really set a demanding goal for ourselves: we intend to redefine what gamers expect from a first-person shooter. We want BioShock to do for FPS games what Gran Turismo did for the racing genre, or GTA did for the action genre: To raise the bar for features, user choice, open-endedness, immersion, story and setting, and replayability. Imagine going back to Ridge Racer after Gran Turismo, or Driver after GTA. You can’t. What goes into this? Well, starting with the environments and look of the game, a huge amount of work. To be honest, we blew it the first time around. The first prototype we took to Take 2 really didn’t work. Fortunately, they let us go back and try again. To me, that’s the real difference between having a decent budget for the first time: second chances.