Rapture Storyline

The game takes place in 1960 in a large underwater metropolis called Rapture.

History of Rapture
Built in 1946 by Andrew Ryan, Rapture was designed to be entirely self-supporting, with all of its electricity, food production, water purification and defense systems powered by undersea volcanic openings. At one point, it is learned that Rapture's population numbered several thousand at its peak during the early 1950s, composed of those people Ryan viewed as the best examples of mankind. A large and multi-tiered society grew among the people, catering different quality products to different levels of the society.

A scientific discovery upset the balance of the society. Two scientists studying ocean-floor dwelling creatures discovered a species of sea slug that could secrete stem cells. These could be used to enhance one's body, improving physical or mental capabilities, curing diseases and healing injuries. A young entrepreneur named Frank Fontaine invested early on in the research to gain control over the material. The substance, dubbed "ADAM", became so sought after in the society, that it became the dominant currency of the city. A "full-scale genetic arms race" broke out between Ryan and Fontaine as Fontaine's monopoly on ADAM threatened the current social structure. Ryan eventually won, but everyone in the city was permanently changed. During the war, it was discovered that ADAM could be used to modify one's body, combining technology and mutations to adapt and survive the conflict, but losing their humanity in the process. During the conflict, all natural sources of ADAM were destroyed, which eventually resulted in a major shift in the "ecology" of the city, as all inhabitants had become biologically dependent on ADAM to survive. On December 31, 1958, attacks with biological weapons lead to the downfall of Rapture's society, and the city fell into a state of disrepair.

Game plot

 * This section has major spoilers. Read at your own risk!

The game opens in 1960. The player assumes the role of Jack, a passenger on an aircraft that crashes into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean as he reads a letter from home that ominously begins "Dear Jack, would you kindly...", with the rest of the letter obstructed. The player swims for the only structure he sees, a lighthouse that serves as the above-surface entry point into Rapture, a grand metropolis under the water. Descending into the city using a bathysphere, he learns of the original prosperous history of Rapture through a pre-recorded film, narrated by the founder of Rapture, Andrew Ryan, but, upon arrival, the main character discovers that the once-prosperous city has decayed into a shadow of its former self. A man awaits Jack's exit from the bathysphere, but he is killed by a grotesque figure that is apparently insane. A man calling himself Atlas comes in over a short-com radio inside the bathysphere, asking Jack to take it with him with the words, "Would you kindly pick up that short-wave radio?" Atlas also informs Jack that he wants to keep him alive. After leaving the bathysphere and moving to safety, Atlas reveals that he has been cut off from his family by splicers, mutated citizens of Rapture that have either gone insane or answer to Andrew Ryan. Atlas believes that Jack is his only hope in reuniting with his wife and child. Jack explores Rapture with the guidance of Atlas until he discovers a vending machine containing hypodermic needles. When he injects one, Atlas tells Jack that his genetic code has been rewritten, and in a spasm of pain, the player faints. After awakening, Jack continues on through the city, learning about the various traps, enemies, and resources, until he is discovered by Andrew Ryan, who communicates with the player over a television. Ryan believes that Jack is either an agent of the KGB or CIA, but he claims to be invulnerable to the government influence of the U.S.S.R and United States and decides to destroy Jack.

Jack escapes Ryan's henchmen and continues to learn about Rapture and its people. Throughout the game, the player can pick up audio diary recordings that reveal small pieces of the plot by themselves but clear up significant mysteries when considered in full. Throughout his journey through Rapture, Jack encounters various sorts of splicers. Jack also experiences brief moments of psychic hallucinations in which he can see ghost figures walking about, talking, and interacting with each other. According to advertisements throughout the city, these hallucinations are the result of splicing oneself. Through various recordings and hallucinations, the player learns about Doctor Suchong, a character whose true role comes later in the story, Dr. Steinman, a plastic surgeon who unlocked many of the Adam's body-altering tricks, and Diane McClintock, one of Steinman's patients. It is revealed that McClintock became accustomed to Steinman's service, utilizing his talents to change herself more and more until she was driven to madness. Steinman likewise loses his sense of reality in his pursuit of Adam's darkest secrets, and Atlas informs Jack that Steinman must be killed.

When Steinman is dead, Jack delves into another corner of Rapture and learns more about the treasured Little Sisters and the dreaded Big Daddies. He stumbles upon Doctor Bridgette Tenenbaum, a victim of the Holocaust who survived because she helped the Nazis in their condemned medical experiments. Tenenbaum tells Jack that she was heavily involved with the design of the Little Sisters and Big Daddies. She informs him that the Little Sisters possess Adam, and that if he kills them, he will receive all of the resources that they have, whereas if he rescues them from their symbiotic relationship with the stem cell-secreting slugs, he will receive half their Adam as well as a gift down the road in return for sparing their lives. These gifts often include plasmid upgrades and other useful items comparable to what the player could buy with the additional Adam received from harvesting the Little Sisters.

With Tenebaum's information in hand, Jack continues on and learns about the city's treacherous and ruthless businessman-turned-mobster, Frank Fontaine, and some of his underlings. It is revealed that upon the discovery of Adam, Fontaine immediately began hoarding the precious resource until his fortune and power comprised a monopoly large enough to challenge even Andrew Ryan. Initially, Ryan sympathized with Fontaine because he had forged Rapture for the very purpose of allowing its citizens to pursue their dreams unchecked by "parasites," or others who try to steal or destroy one's work because they are either unable or too lazy to come up with their own. However, as Fontaine's influence grew stronger and stronger, he became involved with smuggling and other illegal activities, and Ryan eventually realized the only choice was to rid Rapture of Fontaine and his ilk. Jack learns about some of Fontaine's officers, among them Peach Wilkins. Through audio recordings, Wilkins confesses a disloyalty to both Ryan and Fontaine, complaining that he will be killed by one if he stays loyal to the other, and vice-versa. Jack finds Wilkins and conducts research on his behalf in order to progress through Rapture, but upon meeting Wilkins with the research in hand, he is ambushed and defeats Wilkins in combat.

After dealing with Wilkins, Atlas informs Jack that he is very close to the bathysphere where Ryan is keeping Atlas's family hostage. The player eventually comes upon a glass walkway overlooking the bathysphere, and Atlas appears down below. He attempts to open the bathysphere, but the walkway suddenly goes dark and objects fall down, obstructing the player's view of the outside. Ryan's voice comes over the radio and taunts Jack, telling him that Atlas will be killed while the player helplessly remains in the walkway. Atlas actually manages to escape, but the bathysphere containing his family explodes, evidently killing his wife and child. Atlas is incensed at Ryan's sadistic decision to destroy the bathysphere only when they had come so close to rescuing his family, and he declares that the only option now is to kill Ryan.

Jack fails to meet Atlas at this point, but he continues to Arcadia, an underwater forest with grass and trees--Rapture's counterpart to New York City's Central Park. He learns a significant bit of Atlas's past. It turns out that Atlas was actually a fairly aggressive political activist in the past who gained many followers in his opposition to Ryan's increasingly totalitarian government. Atlas admits that what Jack learns about him won't all be good. Jack also learns of Professor Julie Langford, the scientist who helped Ryan construct Arcadia, and as he fights through the area, Ryan unleashes a poison on the forest. Atlas and Langford, who is still alive, are both dismayed, for without Arcadia's trees, Rapture will have no source of oxygen. With Langford's guidance, Jack manages to locate chemicals and machines that reverse Ryan's efforts to destroy Arcadia; however, as punishment, Ryan uses his power over Rapture's security system to lock Langford in her office and kill her with poisonous gas.

Atlas informs Jack that there is only one place left in the path towards Ryan. Jack travels to a Ft. Frolic, an entertainment complex controlled by one of Ryan's most mysterious, creepiest, and, according to Atlas, craziest security officials, Sander Cohen. In fact, Cohen is more an artist than anything. Jack finds plaster sculptures of human beings that actually turn out to be people Cohen ordered into certain positions as works of art. Cohen even has an entire underwater walkway encapsulated in ice as one of his projects. Eventually, after fighting through more of Ryan's goons, Jack finds Cohen, who asks the player to help him complete his "masterpiece." After killing and photographing the bodies of a few splicers, Jack confronts Cohen himself. After dealing with Cohen the player sets off to Hephaestus, the closest portion of Rapture to the underwater volcanoes the city draws its power and heat from.

At Hephaestus, Jack battles through Ryan's toughest splicer armies yet and encounters the entrance to Ryan's home, which is sealed shut by a magnetic defense mechanism that can be stopped only with an Electromagnetic Pulse device. Before Jack eventually builds and utilizes an EMP against the magnetic doors and advances on Ryan himself, Ryan activates a self-destruct bomb that causes great panic in Atlas. Surprisingly, Ryan also stops taunting the player and admits that he no longer has the capacity to challenge Jack or Atlas, but he also says that he will not let anyone take control of his city. The story undergoes an enormous twist at this point. One of the audio diaries in the area reveals a recording of a conversation between Suchong, the scientist heard about earlier, and a young boy. Suchong notes that the boy has a very cute dog, and then, apparently working on some kind of psychological test, he asks the boy if he would kindly break the dog's neck. The boy resists the order at first and cries, but at Suchong's insistence, kills his dog against his own will.

Just a brief moment later, Jack enters into a room that Ryan has evidently just left and finds droves of newspaper clippings on the wall, and written in blood are the words "Would you kindly," without any actual request. Jack moves on into another room to find Andrew Ryan casually playing golf behind a reinforced glass window. At this point, the player loses control of Jack and must watch. Ryan repeats the words "Would you kindly..." many times throughout his monologue, alluding to the idea that it has something to do with Jack's past. He informs Jack that he doesn't really have a family back home--that everything about his family was actually made up. Jack experiences a burst of black-and-white picture flashbacks of his home and family, and then he remembers being given a revolver through the mail, bringing it onto the plane, and hijacking it in order to ensure it would crash near the entrance to Rapture. Then Ryan tells him that he is actually an assassin Fontaine engineered with the intention of eliminating Ryan. Ryan demonstrates Fontaine's psychological control over Jack by giving him various orders beginning with "Would you kindly," such as walking back and forth across the room, sitting down, and standing up. The player has another flashback in which he recounts every single time Atlas has ever told him to do something starting with the words "Would you kindly," and he realizes that Atlas was commanding him the whole time. Ryan doesn't seem to find any value or use in ordering Jack not to murder him, however, and after explaining everything, he tells Jack that the difference between a man and a slave is that a man can make his own decisions. He comes out of his room and orders Jack to beat him to death with his own golf club, which Jack is forced to, due to the would you kindly trigger phrase. As Jack kills him, Andrew repeatedly taunts him, "A man chooses, a slave obeys!"

When Jack finally kills Ryan, Atlas comes back over the radio and informs Jack that he must take Ryan's genetic key card from his body and put it into a machine to stop the city from self-destructing. Jack obeys, and Atlas collapses into maniacal laughter before revealing he is actually Frank Fontaine. He derides Jack as the slave that he is and tells him that he never mixes friendship with business, implying that he no longer wants Jack alive. He tells Jack that he'll soon see Ryan in the afterlife and activates Hephaestus's security systems against the player. A Little Sister emerges and guides Jack to safety before he falls unconscious.

Jack awakes in a refuge for Little Sisters run by Tenenbaum. Tenebaum informs Jack that she has removed some of the mechanisms that allow Fontaine to control him; however, she also says that Fontaine still possesses most of the "keys". She tells him that Suchong helped design him, and that his office will have the answers Jack needs to gain freedom from Fontaine. Jack embarks on a quest to destroy Fontaine at this point. Fontaine uses various methods to hinder Jack's progress, such as saying the words "Code Yellow," which slows Jack's heartbeat down. When Jack drinks a portion of the required antidotes, it relieves him of Fontaine's control but screws with his ability to decide which plasmid he uses. Eventually, Jack finds the entire antidote and regains control of his plasmids, and from there, his crusade takes him through Suchong's office, where he discovers the secrets of the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters. Jack learns that the Big Daddies, as mechanical and alien as they may appear, are actually genetically-enhanced human beings inside suits. He eventually finds out that Suchong is dead. Suchong apparently died while attempting to discover how best to make the Big Daddies protect the Little Sisters; in an audio diary, Suchong slaps away a Little Sister while tinkering with a Big Daddy, and this inadvertently sets the Big Daddy off on him. Later, Jack finds a corpse that seems to be Suchong mashed into a table by a detached Big Daddy drill.

Tenenbaum later claims that the only way to Fontaine is through a series of doors that can only be unlocked by Little Sisters. Unfortunately, the Little Sisters do not trust anyone except for Big Daddies; in addition, there are still many splicers loyal to Fontaine between Jack's current position and his destination, so, to kill two birds with one stone, Tenebaum proposes that Jack find all the equipment needed to suit up as a Big Daddy. Following a tedious search through more laboratories, Jack finds and dresses up in the necessary components of a Big Daddy suit in order to escort a Little Sister through the passages only they can unlock.

At the end of the voyage with the Little Sisters, Jack comes upon the elevator to Fontaine. Fontaine announces over the radio that he's never actually tried any genetic enhancements. Now, however, he decides to use all his hoarded Adam to his advantage, and he tries every splicing technique he knows of. When Jack emerges from the elevator, he finds a Fontaine that is not recognizably human strapped to a metal device with several large tubes of Adam pulsing straight into his body. He is roughly twice the height of a normal human being and possesses fiery, iced, and electric skin, as well as many deadly plasmid attacks. Jack eventually defeats Fontaine with the help of the Little Sisters. When Fontaine is about to kill Jack, the Little Sisters pounce on him with the hypodermic devices they use to suck Adam out of corpses, and they subdue Fontaine.

Depending on player actions before this point, one of two things will happen. If during the game the player rescued every Little Sister, Jack passes out when Fontaine is dead. A cut scene takes place in which Jack takes the Little Sisters to the surface and raises them, allowing them a normal life, and become the family Jack never had.

On the other hand, if during the game the player killed any Little Sisters, Tenenbaum states that Jack is overcome with his lust for Adam and snatches the nearest Little Sister when Fontaine is dead. The first person view ends and Tenenbaum begins a monologue in which she discusses how disgusted she is with Jack for his cruelty and lack of control, implying that he killed the Little Sisters. She has 2 voices for the same video, if you harvested all, then it is hostile, but if you harvested some, she carries a melancholy & depressed tone. At the same time, a silent cut scene takes place in which a naval submarine surveying the downed plane's crash site is surrounded with bathysphere pods from below. The sailors on the submarine's deck gawk as the dozens of bathyspheres pop open and splicers jump out. The splicers slaughter the submarine crew, and the camera shows what appears to be a nuclear warhead on board before the game ends. However data in the game files suggest yet a fourth ending possibly gained by leaving all the little sisters alone. This ending consists of Tenenbaum praising Jack for his kindness and showing scenes of the little sisters having grown up, coming to the conclusion that the reason you did this was because it created you a family which Fontaine had mocked you for not having as you were heading toward the final confrontation. The final closing out scene of this ending is the old hand of Jack being held by 4 youthful womens hands.