Highlights
- The BioShock series has a complex and intricate storyline that involves time travel and alternate realities, which can sometimes be confusing for players.
- The first game, BioShock, takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, where a civil war breaks out.
- BioShock 2 follows the decay of Rapture and introduces a new protagonist, Subject Delta, who battles against Sofia Lamb and her cult to save the city. BioShock Infinite then takes players to the flying city of Colombia and involves multiple realities and a final time loop that connects all three games.
The BioShock series is a landmark in gaming, and its worlds have enthralled fans since 2007. While initially self-contained and smaller in scale, as it continued to expand its lore and settings the BioShock franchise diverged into a complicated story containing multiverses and branching timelines. Beginning with a strange underwater metropolis and later a floating city in the sky powered by reality-warping forces, it now has an incredibly complex history and storyline stretching across its three main titles and their DLCs.
Dealing with time travel and alternate realities inevitably runs the risk of becoming too complicated, with contradicting plot points threatening to poke holes in its consistency and undermine the entire story. Though they can at times get confusing, the following are some of the most notable major events in the BioShock timeline, and how they relate to the overall canon so far.
The World Timeline of BioShock Explained: Rapture to Colombia
BioShock's tale begins in Rapture, one of the most recognizable and beautiful settings in gaming. An impressive city hidden deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, it was envisioned by business tycoon Andrew Ryan around 1946 and completed in 1951. Meant as a haven away from the surface world for creative and ambitious citizens where "the great need not be constrained by the small," Rapture is thematically a deconstruction of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. In the story, however, it's the discovery of a fictional species of sea slug exploited for its "Adam" (a genetically mutating substance able to imbue humans with superpowers) that sets Rapture on a downward spiral culminating in an economic collapse and city-wide civil war.
Andrew Ryan's main competitor, conman Frank Fontaine aka Atlas, collaborated with scientists to harvest and refine Adam into plasmids. As a disturbing byproduct of the process, Little Sisters were created—young orphan girls implanted with the slugs in order to optimally incubate precious Adam. They became the living embodiment of the greed and corruption fueling the city's society; an immoral consequence of its ideology. To protect the sisters from unscrupulous citizens, hulking diving suit-clad monstrosities known as Big Daddies were created and mentally bonded to them, further casting Rapture into a nightmarish state of affairs.
As the two titans wrestled for economic and political dominance, an arms race ensued. Combined with the addicting and genetically altering properties of plasmids, most of Rapture's populace became irreversibly violent and unstable splicers. After a tense year of sabotage tactics, the clash came to a head on New Year's Eve, 1959. Bombings erupted through Rapture, devastating infrastructure and what stability remained in it. This is the state the player character, Jack, finds Rapture in 1960. During the course of the game, Jack is revealed to be the artificially created "son" of Ryan and implanted with mind-control conditioning by Fontaine. He confronts and eliminates both, rescues a group of Little Sisters, and returns safely to the surface.
BioShock's Timeline and World from Rapture to Colombia, Explained
BioShock 2 picks up in 1968. Rapture is barely functioning and Sofia Lamb—the last surviving member of Rapture's inner council—and her cult have taken control over what remains of it. Lamb is attempting to realize her version of Rapture's utopian dream by injecting the combined genetic material and memories stored in all its Adam into her daughter, Eleanor. The player takes the role of one of BioShock's iconic Big Daddies, Subject Delta. Delta is telepathically linked to Eleanor, as she was previously his Little Sister.
BioShock 2 reveals Lamb forced Delta shoot to himself in 1958 to break his bond with Eleanor. In a coma ever since, he is brought back by Eleanor when she decides to escape her mother's plans for her, with his assistance. Like Jack, Delta battles his way through the decaying remains of Rapture, confronts Sofia and frees Eleanor, though expires in the process. The fate of Rapture is left somewhat vague, though it can be assumed it is left to sit in sunken silence.
Though released last, BioShock Infinite is set years before the previous two and takes multiverses and alternate timelines to extremes. In a version of 1912 America, a quasi-religious sect based on the Founding Fathers occupies Colombia, headed by self-styled messianic figure Zachary Hale Comstock. Colombia is a steampunk-style flying city that seceded from the US Government. Like Rapture, it teeters on the verge of a conflict between the downtrodden working classes and its wealthy elites, due to Comstock's racist and xenophobic views.
Booker DeWitt is a down-on-his-luck PI hired by the Luteces, two mysterious twin siblings, to find a woman named Elizabeth being held prisoner in Colombia. When he does, a number of important details are quickly revealed: The Luteces are the same person of different genders and scientists who discovered a way to cross realities and create Colombia; similarly, Comstock is a darker version of Booker from another universe, and Elizabeth is their daughter. Since she apparently exists in multiple realities, Elizabeth is able to create tears to others, some of which led to Rapture. Hopping through more tears, Elizabeth and Booker eliminate Comstock and the city's unrest, but there is still an unresolved issue.
Booker turning into Comstock hinges on a decision from his past. Realizing the only way to prevent him becoming Comstock is to never make this choice, Elizabeth takes them through one final tear. They pass through Rapture, before emerging at the exact moment in time of Booker's choice. He then allows multiple versions of Elizabeth to drown him, severing all timeline branches where he turns into Comstock, and leaving a single version of Elizabeth. If BioShock Infinite's ending seems overly confusing, its Burial at Sea DLC episodes then tossed a final wrench into the works. The last Elizabeth arrives in 1958 to Rapture to remove the last Booker/Comstock from the timelines. In the process, she encounters Fontaine/Atlas as he is engineering Jack, bringing the events of all three BioShock games full circle in a classic time loop.