Rapture (BioShock)

Rapture
BioShock location
Screenshot from the 2007 video game BioShock
First appearance	BioShock
Created by	Irrational Games
Genre	First-person shooter
In-universe information
Type	Underwater city
Location	Mid-Atlantic Ocean

Rapture is a fictional city-state in the BioShock series published by 2K Games. It is an underwater city that is the main setting for the games BioShock and BioShock 2. The city also briefly appears in BioShock Infinite, and is featured in its downloadable content, Burial at Sea. The game's back-story describes the city as envisioned by business tycoon Andrew Ryan in the mid-late 1940s as a means to create a utopia for mankind's greatest artists and thinkers to prosper in a laissez-faire environment outside of increasing oppression by the world's governments and religion. However, the lack of government led to severe wealth disparity, a powerful black market, and unrestricted genetic modification, which turned the city into a dystopia^[1] exacerbated by Ryan's tyrannical methods to maintain control.^[2] The masses turned towards political activists like Atlas who advocated an uprising of the poor against Ryan and the elite of Rapture;^[3] and on the eve of 1959, a civil war broke out, leaving much of Rapture's population dead. The remaining citizens either became psychotic "Splicers" due to the effects of ADAM, a substance that can alter genetic material, or have barricaded themselves from the Splicers to protect themselves, leaving the city to fail and fall apart around them.

The player first experiences Rapture in BioShock, in 1960, a year after the fateful riots, as a man named Jack that has come to Rapture after a plane accident over the mid-Atlantic Ocean where the city was located; during this, the player comes to learn more about Ryan's motives and those that he struggled against to keep the city's ideals until the very end. In BioShock 2, the player takes the role of a "Big Daddy", a heavily modified humanoid in an armored diving suit, designed to maintain the city, and would soon come to serve the purpose of protecting the Little Sisters as they collect ADAM from "Angels", which are dead bodies that harbor significant amounts of ADAM; this takes place eight years after the events of the first game, and while Ryan has been killed, there remain those that vie for the vacuum left in his position of power.

Rapture makes a brief appearance near the climax of BioShock Infinite, which is otherwise set in a different dystopian city, Columbia. Downloadable content for Infinite is set in Rapture on New Year's Eve 1959, a year before the events of the first BioShock and on the day of the civil war.^[4]