Andrew Ryan

"Now you've met Andrew Ryan... the bloody king of Rapture."

- Atlas

Andrew Ryan is the founder of Rapture and the owner of Ryan Industries. He is the main antagonist throughout most of BioShock. He only appears in person in the Rapture Central Control level.

History
Ryan was born Andrei Rianofski in Minsk in 1892 to a rich family that were important figures in the Russian government. As a result, he was witness to the murder of his entire family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. He was then sent to a work camp in the Gulag until he escaped in 1919.

His experiences under Soviet rule led Andrew Ryan to his personal philosophy: the modern world was created by great men who strove to make their own way. Anytime "parasites" gained control of such a world, they destroyed it. After his escape from Russia, he traveled to Britain where he enrolled as a student at Oxford University. He later emigrated to America in 1927, believing it is a place where a great man could prosper.

For a time, he was devoted to his adopted country, grateful for the wealth and fame it awarded his intellect and determination. It was there he founded Ryan Industries, a manufacturer of steel products and weapons. In the stock market crash of 1929, Ryan was barely affected. In 1932, he was named by "Life Magazine" as the youngest billionaire in the country.

However, the social programs adopted in the 30s increasingly tested that devotion. His experiences in the "worker's paradise" made Ryan despise the ideals of Socialism, believing that those who benefited from others were parasites. In his mind, one could only own what one earned. For instance, he once owned a large forest as a personal retreat, one that many groups envied (one of them saying that it "belonged to God" as Andrew Ryan put it). Eventually, the government attempted to nationalize it as parkland. His response, before surrendering it, was to burn it to the ground, thus keeping the parasites from taking what was his.

The final straw for Ryan was the destruction of Hiroshima with the Atomic Bomb. In his eyes, the Bomb was the ultimate corruption of his ideals — science and determination harnessed for destruction, creating a weapon that gave the parasites the ability to destroy anything that they could not seize.

Ryan's response was to use his entire fortune to build Rapture; a community where "the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small," in the only place he felt the parasites could not touch — the depths of the Atlantic ocean. He used his company called Warden Yarn on the surface to order metal for his city. Meltzer hinted for a yarn company that was a lot of metal. Ryan filled his city with several thousand of the world's best and brightest, and for a time, it was everything he dreamed it would be, a paradise of freedom and wealth.

There were two major flaws in his plan, both related to the reason he built the city in the first place.

First, by filling a city with ambitious experts, trained geniuses, and breakthrough artists, Ryan set up a top-heavy class system with most Rapture citizens feeling that essential jobs such as food processing, cleaning, simple maintenance, etc. were beneath them, and thus were often ignored. This led to widespread dissatisfaction when these jobs were neglected and an eventual economic collapse throughout Rapture. The social conditions resulting from the economic collapse allowed Frank Fontaine to establish the influential but undermining Fontaine's Home for the Poor and also allowed Atlas to rise to political power and openly challenge Andrew Ryan's leadership.

Secondly, in order to keep Rapture safely hidden from the parasites, he strictly forbade contact with the surface, inadvertently creating a market for smuggled goods, which in turn led to the rise of the one thing Ryan had been unable to imagine — a brilliant and determined man for whom freedom, wealth and comfort were not enough. A man who could only be satisfied by control — former mobster Frank Fontaine.

Fontaine's life prior to becoming a citizen of Rapture provided the skills that allowed him to dominate the small black market in smuggled goods the city's forced isolation made possible. The wealth gleaned from that small black market funded Bridgette Tenenbaum's research into a mysterious sea slug, making him the primary distributor of ADAM. As Rapture was completely isolated from the surface world, few were aware of the chaos of the post-war reconstruction era, and Fontaine was easily able to sway the lower classes with promises of revolution. With black-market wealth, ADAM-based biotech, and duplicitous propaganda, it took him less than three years to acquire the power to challenge Ryan openly.

The idealistic Ryan was totally unprepared for the brutality of armed conflict as opposed to the genteel honor of economic competition. As Rapture fell into chaos due to the machinations of first Fontaine and later Atlas he grew ever more desperate in his efforts to protect his utopia. Out of obsession with his enemy, he became his enemy.

His war with Fontaine was paid with the very freedoms which made his city prosper. His decision to alter plasmids so he could control their users with pheremones reduced its population to slaves. Eventually, he abandoned each of his ideals until he was nothing more than a tyrant spouting monologues of self-determination while smiting his enemies like a spoiled god. He became one of the very parasites he had built Rapture as a sanctuary from, and he was destroying it — just like he believed all "parasites" did to great things.

BioShock
Ryan is an ever-present voice while Jack travels through Rapture. Frank Fontaine set Jack on his journey to kill Ryan using the "would you kindly" trigger phrase, but at first Ryan did not know that was the case. When Jack first arrives in Rapture Ryan assumes the trespasser is someone from the Russian KGB or CIA, come to make an already disintegrating situation worse. After Jack made it safely out of Arcadia, Ryan began to piece together the puzzle, realizing that it is Atlas who is directing Jack's movements.

However, it is only when Jack is halfway to breaking down his defenses in Rapture Central Control that Ryan truly realizes who his enemy is. He hints at this knowledge in his final radio messages before his face-to-face meeting with Jack. The "Would You Kindly" board outside his office shows how he put together the clues connecting himself with Jasmine Jolene, and Jack as their illegitimate son, whom Jasmine had sold to Frank Fontaine before he was born. His own flesh and blood, reduced to a puppet, was the ultimate insult this world could have given to Andrew Ryan. Looking at his life and his works, now all in ruin — by his own hand as much as his enemies' — he decided to die as he had lived: on his own terms, by setting Rapture's self-destruct mechanism.

Minutes later, Ryan is confronted by Jack. With the trigger phrase, he could have controlled Jack as Atlas did, and directed him against his enemy. Instead, he educates Jack about his true self while calmly putting golf balls into a shot glass, telling him of his birth, his conditioning, his experiences in Rapture - and the phrase would you kindly, which controlled his every action. He tells his son that it is not money or power that make people great, but that "A man chooses, a slave obeys". He then hands his son the club...

and orders Jack to kill him. Jack obeys. As he batters his father to death, Andrew Ryan seems to plead to his son that, "a man chooses, a slave obeys." But Jack has no choice but to shatter his father's skull with the broken club and claim Atlas' prize - the genetic key to Rapture's systems.

On the way to the controls, Jack notices a Vita-Chamber - a deactivated chamber. Rather than fleeing or doing battle with Jack, Ryan had shut it down, to prevent the device from resurrecting him, before confronting his son for the first and last time - Andrew Ryan, industrialist, inventor, and father, was irreversibly dead at age 68.

There are a number of theories as to the motivations for Ryan's assisted suicide.

Some say that with his city and his dreams in ruins, Andrew Ryan lacked the courage to live in a world not under his own control, and instead chooses permanent death; this is ironic in that Ryan, who has not hesitated to murder others for his own ends, cannot find the fortitude to commit the final act himself, instead relying upon Jack to do it for him.

Others say that Andrew Ryan saw this as his only chance to be a father to his son; to teach him to be a man, not a slave. He ordered Jack to kill him to demonstrate that a man chooses his own destiny; that he, a man, would not be controlled. If the conditioning could be broken, this challenge was the only way he could imagine to make the attempt. And if the attempt led to his death, perhaps that might accomplish what the challenge could not. By deactivating the Vita-Chamber he could demonstrate to Jack that he would rather die than live as a slave to Atlas's whims. If this is the case, he succeeded; Jack immediately sets out to free himself from Atlas' control, and ultimately avenges his father by slaying Fontaine.

BioShock 2
2K Marin has stated that, although Andrew Ryan will feature again in Bioshock 2, it is unclear to what extent he will return. One of the most obvious ways would be through Audio Diaries, and perhaps messages left over the intercom system. It has also been seen through videos showcasing Ryan Amusements, that his ideals will be carried on through the large animatronic devices showing his versions of the "Parasite"'s world. The player will be able listen to his voice booming over the scenery, as shown in the videos. The relationship between him and his political opponent, Sophia Lamb, will be detailed throughout the game.

Audio Diaries

 * Medical Pavilion
 * Parasite Expectations
 * Vandalism
 * Neptune's Bounty
 * Fontaine Must Go
 * Watch Fontaine
 * Death Penalty in Rapture
 * Working Late Again
 * Arcadia
 * The Market is Patient
 * Offer a Better Product
 * The Great Chain
 * Farmer's Market
 * Pulling Together
 * Desperate Times
 * First Encounter
 * Hephaestus
 * A Man or a Parasite
 * Impossible Anywhere Else
 * Great Chain Moves Slowly
 * Point Prometheus
 * Marketing Gold
 * Mistakes
 * Removed Audio Diaries
 * Congregations

Trivia

 * Andrew Ryan is heavily based on the character, John Galt, from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Their political philosophies are identical, and their personal history is very similar. For example, they are both born in Russia and have emigrated to America after their home country adopted a Communist regime. . Andrew Ryan's name is an anagram of Ayn Rand, with the letters REW added in. References to John Galt can also be seen through the course of BioShock, such as the phrase "Who is Atlas?", which is a mock-up of "Who is John Galt?", Atlas Shrugged catch-phrase. Also, Ryan's actions (burning an entire forest down when the government nationalized it and then isolating himself from the rest of the world) closely mirrors that of another character in the novel under the same circumstances (the character in question was Ellis Wyatt. Instead of a forest he burnt down his oil fields and retreated to Galt's Gulch.)
 * In his office, as aforementioned, Ryan has turned off the Vita Chamber which could have otherwise resurrected him. However, there is a glitch which turns it on without so much as touching it; after you have killed him and put the genetic key into the slot, wait until the locked door opens and the alarm begins to sound. When the Little Sisters appear, don't follow them, but instead allow the Security Bots to kill you. You will then respawn in the previously deactivated Vita Chamber.
 * Despite Frank Fontaine and Atlas being his arch-nemesises, he never figured out that they were the same person.
 * He is also prone to favoritism, doting on those who side with him, so much so that he has subdivided Rapture and given two of his subordinates Sander Cohen and J.S. Steinman complete control over their respective sectors.