BioShock: Су тереңдігіндегі утопия және құлдырау

2007 video game

BioShock is a 2007 first person shooter game developed by 2K Boston (later Irrational Games) and 2K Australia, and published by 2K. The first game in the BioShock series, it was released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms in August 2007; a PlayStation 3 port by Irrational, 2K Marin, 2K Australia and Digital Extremes was released in October 2008. The game follows player character Jack, who discovers the underwater city of Rapture, built by business magnate Andrew Ryan to be an isolated utopia. The discovery of ADAM, a genetic material which grants superhuman powers, initiated the city's turbulent decline. Jack attempts to escape Rapture, fighting its mutated and mechanical denizens, while engaging with the few sane survivors left and learning of the city's past. The player can defeat foes in several ways by using weapons, utilizing plasmids that give unique powers, and by turning Rapture's defenses against them. BioShocks concept was developed by Irrational's creative lead, Ken Levine, and incorporates ideas by 20th century dystopian and utopian thinkers such as Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley, as well as historical figures such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Walt Disney. The game includes role playing elements, giving the player different approaches in engaging enemies such as by stealth, as well as moral choices of saving or killing characters. Additionally, the game borrows concepts from the survival horror genre, notably the Resident Evil series. BioShock is considered a spiritual successor to the System Shock series, on which many of Irrational's team, including Levine, had worked previously. BioShock received universal acclaim and was particularly praised by critics for its narrative, themes, visual design, setting, and gameplay. It is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made and a demonstration of video games as an art form. BioShock was followed by two sequels, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite, released in 2010 and 2013, respectively. Ports of BioShock were released for macOS and mobile following its console releases. A remastered version of the game was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch as part of BioShock: The Collection.

BioShock takes place in Rapture, a large underwater city planned and constructed in the 1940s by individualist business magnate Andrew Ryan, who wanted to create a utopia for society's elite to flourish outside of government control and "petty morality". This philosophy resulted in remarkable advances in the arts and sciences, which included the discovery of "ADAM": a potent gene altering substance which is created by a species of sea slug on the ocean floor. ADAM led to the creation of "Plasmids", mutagenic serums that grant users super human powers such as telekinesis and pyrokinesis. To protect and isolate Rapture, Ryan outlawed any contact with the surface world. As Rapture flourished, wealth disparities grew, and criminal Frank Fontaine used his influence over the disenfranchised working class to establish illegal enterprises and obtain power—enough to rival Ryan. With doctors Brigid Tenenbaum and Yi Suchong, Fontaine created his own company dedicated to researching plasmids and gene tonics. As ADAM became addictive and demand skyrocketed, Fontaine secretly mass produced ADAM through slugs implanted in the stomachs of orphaned girls, nicknamed "Little Sisters". Fontaine was killed in a shootout with police, and Ryan took the opportunity to seize his assets, including control of the Little Sisters. In the months that followed, a man amongst the poor named Atlas rose up and began a violent revolution against Ryan, with both sides using plasmid enhanced humans (known as "Splicers") to wage war on one another. To protect the Little Sisters, Ryan created the "Big Daddies": genetically enhanced humans surgically grafted into gigantic lumbering diving suits designed to escort the sisters as they scavenged ADAM from dead bodies.

BioShock is a first person shooter with role playing customization and stealth elements, and is similar to System Shock 2. The player takes the role of Jack as he is guided through Rapture towards various objectives. The player collects multiple weapons and plasmids as they work their way through enemy forces. The player can switch between one active weapon and one active plasmid at any time, allowing them to find combination attacks that can be effective against certain enemies, such as first shocking a Splicer then striking them down with a wrench. Weapons are limited by ammunition that the player collects; many weapons have secondary ammo types that can be used instead for additional benefits, such as bullets that inflict fire damage. Plasmid use consumes a serum called EVE which can be restored using EVE syringes collected by the player or by consuming cigarettes and alcohol. The player has a health meter that decreases when they take damage. The player can restore their health with food or medical packs found throughout Rapture. If the player's health is reduced to zero, they will be regenerated at the last Vita Chamber that they passed with limited amounts of health and EVE. A patch for the game allows the Vita Chambers to be turned off, requiring players to restart a saved game if the character dies. The game provides several options to face challenges. In addition to direct combat, the player can use plasmids to lure enemies into traps or to turn enemies against each other, or employ stealth tactics to avoid detection by hostiles including the security systems and turrets. The player can hack into any of Rapture's automated systems; the hacking process is done via a mini game similar to Pipe Mania where the player must connect two points on opposite sides of a grid with a limited set of piping within a fixed amount of time, with failure to complete in time costing health and potentially sounding alarms. Early in the game, the player is given a research camera; by taking photographs of enemies, the player will cumulatively gain knowledge about the individual foes which translates into attack boosts and other benefits when facing that enemy type in the future. The player collects money by exploring Rapture and from the bodies of defeated foes; this money can be used at vending machines to restock on ammunition, health and EVE, and other items; like security cameras, vending machines can be hacked to reduce the costs of items from it. In addition to plasmids, the player can collect and buy tonics that provide passive bonuses, such as increasing Jack's strength, using EVE more efficiently, or making Jack more resistant to damage. The player can only have a limited number of plasmids and tonics active at any time, and can swap between the various plasmids and tonics at certain stations located throughout Rapture.

Lead developer Ken Levine had created Irrational Games in 1997 out of former members from Looking Glass Studios. Their first game was System Shock 2, a sequel to Looking Glass's System Shock, and was met with critical success, though it did not prove a financial one. Levine had attempted to pitch a sequel to System Shock 2 to Electronic Arts, but the publisher rejected the idea based on the poor performance of the earlier game. In 2002, the team had come up with a core gameplay mechanic idea based on three groups of forces; drones that would carry a desirable resource, protectors that would guard the drones, and harvesters that would attempt to take the resource from the drones; these would eventually bear out as the Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and Splicers in the final game, but at the time of the concept, there was no set theme. Ken Levine cites an example of what a cult deprogrammer does: "[There are] people who hired people to [for example] deprogram their daughter who had been in a lesbian relationship. They kidnap her and reprogram her, and it was a really dark person, and that was the [kind of] character that you were." This story would have been more political in nature, with the character hired by a Senator. By this point, the story and setting had changed significantly, taking place in an abandoned World War II era Nazi laboratory that had been recently unearthed by 21st century scientists. Over the decades, the genetic experiments within the labs had gradually formed themselves into an ecosystem centered on the three groups. This version included many of the gameplay elements that would remain in the final BioShock, themselves influenced by concepts from System Shock 2. These elements included the use of plasmids and EVE, the need to use stealth or other options to deal with automated security systems, direction through the environment from a non player character relayed over a radio, and story elements delivered through audio recordings and "ghosts" of deceased characters. While the gameplay with the 2004 reveal was similar to what resulted in the released version of BioShock, both design and story changed, consistent with what Levine says was then Irrational Games' guiding principle of putting game design first. He cited Capcom's survival horror series Resident Evil as a significant influence on BioShock, stating there are "all these nods and all these little elements that I think you can see where Resident Evil inspired us". The team were particularly influenced by Resident Evil 4, including its approach to the environments, combat, and tools, its game design and tactical elements, its "gameplay fuelled storytelling" and inventory system, and its opening village level in terms of how it "handled the sandbox nature of the combat" and in terms of "the environment".

The thematic core of BioShock was born when Levine was walking at Rockefeller Center near the GE Building in New York City. He saw the uniqueness of the art deco styling of the building along with imagery around the building such as the statue of Atlas near it, and recognized that these were spaces that had not been experienced in the first person shooter genre. He brought in the ideas of Objectivism that Rand primarily outlined in the book Atlas Shrugged, that man should be driven by selfishness and not altruism, and used this to inform the philosophy behind the city of Rapture and Andrew Ryan's work, viewing them as quite ludicrous, and primed to be applied to an antagonist, tied in with his previous observations on Rockefeller and his writings. Other elements came into the story design. Levine had an interest in "stem cell research and the moral issues that go around [it]". The idea of the mind control used on Jack was offered by LeBreton, inspired by films like The Manchurian Candidate, as a means to provide a better reason to limit the player's actions as opposed to the traditional use of locked doors to prevent them exploring areas they should not. The team had agreed that Jack's actions would be controlled by a key phrase but struggled with coming up with one that would not reveal Atlas' true nature. Levine happened upon "Would you kindly" after working on marketing materials for the game that asked the reader hypothetical questions such as "Would you kill people, even innocent people, to survive? ", later working that phrase into the first script for the game. Hellquist took the revelation in good humor and tweeted that other Easter eggs should have been added to the game to display: "If you are enjoying this, Paul Hellquist did his job." A critical playtest of the game occurred in January 2007, where initial feedback from the players was mostly negative, including issues of the setting being too dark, having no idea where to go, and distrusting Atlas, who at the time was voiced in a southern drawl, described as a "lecherous Colonel Sanders". Levine likened this approach to the initial aircraft crash at the onset of the television show Lost to quickly establish character and setting. In the 2018 interview, Levine recognized several of the characters, including Andrew Ryan (who was inspired by Ayn Rand who was also Jewish), Sander Cohen, and Brigid Tenenbaum, were written all as Jewish, and all seeking to escape a world they felt they did not fit into by going to Rapture; Levine said: There's literal displacement and then there's a feeling of not fitting in, of 'I don't really belong here'. I think Jews are always going to feel a little bit like they don't belong wherever they are. There's always that 'what if we have to flee' mentality." This graphical enhancement has been lauded by critics, with GameSpot saying: "Whether it's standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it will blow you away every time you see it." BioShock also uses the Havok Physics engine that allows for an enhancement of in game physics, the integration of ragdoll physics, and allows for more lifelike movement by elements of the environment. The Windows version was built to work in both Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) and DirectX 9, with the DirectX 10 version supporting additional water and particle effects.

BioShock contains both licensed music and an original score. The licensed music from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s can be heard playing on phonograph throughout Rapture. In total, 30 licensed songs can be heard throughout the game. The original score was composed by Garry Schyman. He composed his pieces to blend with the chosen licensed music as to keep the same feel, while also trying to bring out something that was "eerie, frightening and at times beautiful" to mesh well with Rapture's environments. 2K Games released an orchestral score soundtrack on their official homepage on August 24, 2007. Available in MP3 format, the score—composed by Garry Schyman—contains 12 of the 22 tracks from the game. The Limited Edition version of the game came with The Rapture EP remixes by Moby and Oscar The Punk. The three remixed tracks on the CD include "Beyond the Sea", "God Bless the Child" and "Wild Little Sisters"; the original recordings of these songs are in the game. BioShock score was released on a vinyl LP with the BioShock 2 Special Edition.

An initial demo of the game was made available in August 2007 for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. This demo included cutscenes to introduce the player to Rapture, the game's tutorial section, and its first levels; the demo also included weapons, plasmids, and tonics that would otherwise be introduced later in the full title, as to give the player more of the features that would be found in the published game. The full game was released for these platforms on August 21, 2007. The first patch for the Xbox 360 version was released about two weeks after release to fix some of the game stability issues players had reported. The patch was found to introduce more problems to the game for some users, including occasional freezes, bad framerates, and audio related issues, though methods to resolve these issues through the console's cache system were outlined by Irrational Games. In December 2007, a common patch was released for both the Xbox 360 and Windows version. The patch included additional content such as new Plasmids, new achievements for the Xbox 360 version, and additional graphics settings to address some of the field of view issues identified by players. (See below). The patch also added in an option to disable the use of Vita Chambers, a feature requested by players to make the game more challenging, as well as an achievement to complete the game at its hardest setting without using a Vita Chamber.

In an August 2007 interview, when asked about the possibility of a PlayStation 3 version of BioShock, Ken Levine had stated only that there was "no PS3 development going on" at the time; however, on May 28, 2008, 2K Games confirmed that a PlayStation 3 version of the game was in development by 2K Marin, and it was released on October 17, 2008. Jordan Thomas was the director for the PlayStation 3 version. While there were no graphical improvements to the game over the original Xbox 360 version, the PlayStation 3 version offered the widescreen option called "horizontal plus", introduced via a patch on the 360 version, while cutscene videos were of a much higher resolution than in the DVD version. Additional add on content was also released exclusively for the PlayStation 3 version. One addition was "Survivor Mode", in which the enemies were made tougher, and Vita Chambers provided less of a health boost when used, forcing the player to be more creative in approaching foes and to rely more on the less used plasmids in the game. BioShock also supports Trophies and PlayStation Home. A demo version was released on the PlayStation Store on October 2, 2008. An update for the PlayStation 3 version was released on November 13, 2008, to fix some graphical problems and occasions where users experienced a hang and were forced to reset the console. This update also incorporated the "Challenge Room" and "New Game Plus" features. BioShock was bundled with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as a double pack on PC and Xbox 360 on July 7, 2009. A port to OS X systems was made by Feral Interactive and released in October 2009. In early 2008, IG Fun secured the rights to develop and publish a mobile phone version of BioShock. This version was developed as a top down, two dimensional platformer that attempted to recreate most of the plot and game elements of the original title; IG Fun worked with Irrational to determine the critical story elements they wanted to keep in the game. IG Fun recognized they would not be able to include the full storyline within a single mobile title, and so planned to split the title into three "episodes". Only the first episode was released. Another mobile port was developed by Tridev, known as BioShock 3D, released in 2010. Several parts of the game were reduced to single image graphics and the main gameplay engine had to use low resolution and low polygon models due to the limitations of mobile phones at the time of its release. A port to iOS devices done by the 2K China studio was released on August 27, 2014. The iOS version is content complete and functionally equivalent to the original Xbox 360 and Windows version, featuring either the use of touch screen virtual gamepad controls or the use of a Bluetooth enabled controller, and with a graphics engine optimized for iOS devices. The game was later delisted from the App Store in September 2015; the game had become unplayable for many that upgraded to iOS 8.4 on their devices, and while a patch had been discussed, a 2K representative stated that the decision to remove the game came from the developer. 2K later clarified that they will be working on resolving the issues with the game's compatibility with the new firmware and will re release the title once that has been completed. However, by January 2017, 2K officially stated that it will no longer working to support the game's compatibility with newer iOS system.

BioShock has received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator Metacritic, with the game receiving an average review score of 96/100 for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, and 94/100 for PlayStation 3. and compared the game to Whittaker Chambers' 1957 riposte to Atlas Shrugged, "Big Sister Is Watching You". Wired also mentioned the Ayn Rand connection (a partial anagram of Andrew Ryan) in a report on the game which featured a brief interview with Levine. The Chicago Sun Times review said "I never once thought anyone would be able to create an engaging and entertaining video game around the fiction and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but that is essentially what 2K Games has done  the rare, mature video game that succeeds in making you think while you play". The Los Angeles Times review concluded: "Sure, it's fun to play, looks spectacular and is easy to control. But it also does something no other game has done to date: It really makes you feel." The New York Times reviewer described it as: "intelligent, gorgeous, occasionally frightening" and added: "Anchored by its provocative, morality based story line, sumptuous art direction and superb voice acting, BioShock can also hold its head high among the best games ever made." GameSpy praised BioShock "inescapable atmosphere", and Official Xbox Magazine lauded its "inconceivably great plot" and "stunning soundtrack and audio effects". The gameplay and combat system have been praised for being smooth and open ended, and elements of the graphics, such as the water, were commended for their quality. Reviewers did highlight a few negative issues in BioShock, however. The recovery system involving "Vita Chambers", which revive a defeated player at half health, but do not alter the enemies' health, makes it possible to wear down enemies through sheer perseverance, and was criticized as one of the most significant flaws in the gameplay. IGN noted that both the controls and graphics of the Xbox 360 version are inferior to those of the PC version, in that switching between weapons or plasmids is easier using the PC's mouse than the 360's radial menu, as well as the graphics being slightly better with higher resolutions. Some reviewers also found the combat behavior of the splicers lacking in diversity (and their A. I. behavior not very well done), and the moral choice too much "black and white" to be interesting. Some reviewers and essayists such as Jonathan Blow also opined that the "moral choice" the game offered to the player (saving or harvesting the little sisters) was flawed because, to them, it had no real impact on the game, which ultimately led them to think that the sisters were just mechanics of no real importance. Daniel Friedman for Polygon concurred with Blow, noting that the player only loses 10% of the possible ADAM rewards for saving the Little Sisters rather than killing them, and felt that this would have been better instituted as part of the game difficulty mechanic. Former LucasArts developer Clint Hocking wrote a noted essay that claimed that BioShock exhibited "ludonarrative dissonance" between its story and mechanics, as while he saw the story as advocating selflessness in helping others, its gameplay encourages what he views as selfishness by preying on Little Sisters.

At E3 2006, BioShock was given several "Games of the Show" awards from various online gaming sites, including GameSpot, IGN, GameSpy and GameTrailers's Trailer of the Year. BioShock received an award for Best Xbox 360 Game at the 2007 Leipzig Games Convention. After the game's release, the 2007 Spike TV Video Game Awards selected BioShock as Game of the Year, Best Xbox 360 Game, and Best Original Score, and nominated it for four awards: Best Shooter, Best Graphics, Best PC Game, and Best Soundtrack. The game also won the 2007 BAFTA "Best Game" award. X Play also selected it as "Game of the Year", "Best Original Soundtrack", "Best Writing/Story", and "Best Art Direction". Game Informer named BioShock its Game of the Year for 2007. At IGN's "Best of 2007" BioShock was nominated for Game of The Year 2007, and won the award for PC Game of the Year, Best Artistic Design, and Best Use of Sound. GameSpy chose it as the third best game of the year and gave BioShock the awards for Best Sound, Story, and Art Direction. GameSpot awarded the game for Best Story, while GamePro gave BioShock the Best Story, Xbox 360 and Best Single Player Shooter awards. BioShock won the "Best Visual Art", "Best Writing", and "Best Audio" awards at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards. During the AIAS' 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, BioShock received the most nominations of the ceremony with twelve, including notable categories such as "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming", "Action Game of the Year", and "Overall Game of the Year"; it was ultimately awarded with outstanding achievement in "Art Direction", "Original Music Composition", "Sound Design", and "Story Development". Guinness World Records awarded the game a record for "Most Popular Xbox Live Demo" in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008. BioShock is ranked first on Game Informer list of The Top 10 Video Game Openings. GamesRadar placed Bioshock as the 12th best game of all time. In 2011 BioShock was awarded the number 1 spot in GameTrailers' "Top 100 Video Game Trailers of All Time", for submerging the viewer into the BioShock universe and its enduring impact. In August 2012, IGN gave it the top spot on their list of the Top 25 Modern PC Games, a ranking of the best PC games released since 2006. In November 2012, Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games of all time. In July 2015, the game placed 9th on USgamer The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list.

The Xbox 360 version was the third best selling game of August 2007, with 490,900 copies. The Wall Street Journal reported that shares in Take Two Interactive "soared nearly 20%" in the week following overwhelmingly favorable early reviews of the game. Take Two Interactive announced that by June 5, 2008, over 2.2 million copies of BioShock had been shipped. In a June 10, 2008 interview, Roy Taylor, Nvidia's VP of Content Business Development, stated that the PC version has sold over one million copies. According to Take Two Interactive's chairman Strauss Zelnick, the game had sold around 3 million copies by June 2009. By March 2010, BioShock had sold 4 million copies.

The initial Windows release was criticized by players for several perceived shortcomings. The game was shipped with SecuROM copy protection that required activation from 2K Games' servers over the Internet; the unavailability of these servers was reported as the reason for the cancellation of the game's midnight release in Australia. Players found that the SecuROM limited the number of times the game could be activated to two; user feedback led to 2K Games to increase the activation count to five, and later offer a tool that allowed users to revoke previous activations on their own. Ultimately 2K Games removed the activation limit, though retail versions of the game still required the activation process. Levine admitted that their initial approach to the activation process was malformed, harming their reputation during the launch period. The SecuROM software also caused some virus scanners and malware detector to believe the software was malicious. 2K Games assured players that the software installation process did not install any malicious code or rootkit. However, players observed that some of the SecuROM software was not entirely removed on uninstallation of the game. Some of the graphic capabilities of BioShock were criticized by players. The initial release of the game was found to have cut off the top and bottom of the field of view in order to fit widescreen monitors, resulting in less vertical view instead of more horizontal view compared to 4:3 monitors, conflicting with original reports from a developer on how widescreen would have been handled. 2K Games later stated that the choice of the field of view was a design decision made during development. Irrational included an option for "Horizontal FOV Lock" in the December 2007 patch that allows widescreen users a wider field of view, without cutting anything off the image vertically. BioShock was also criticized for not supporting pixel shader 2.0b video cards (such as the Radeon X800/X850), which were considered high end graphics cards in 2004–2005, and accounted for about 24% of surveyed hardware collected through Valve's Steam platform at the time of BioShock release. On July 8, 2014, 2K Games released a DRM free version of BioShock on the Humble 2K Bundle, and then re released on the Humble Store. On December 17, 2018, BioShock and BioShock 2 remastered were released DRM free on GOG.

BioShock has received praise for its artistic style and compelling storytelling. In their book, Digital Culture: Understanding New Media, Glen Creeber and Royston Martin perform a case study of BioShock as a critical analysis of video games as an artistic medium. They praised the game for its visuals, sound, and ability to engage the player into the story. They viewed BioShock as a sign of the "coming of age" of video games as an artistic medium. John Lanchester of the London Review of Books recognized BioShock as one of the first video games to break into coverage of mainstream media to be covered as a work of art arising from its narrative aspects, whereas before video games had failed to enter into the "cultural discourse", or otherwise covered due to moral controversies they created. Several games were chosen by the Smithsonian's curators; when the public voted for additional games they felt deserved to be included in the exhibition, BioShock was among the winners. The game's plot twist, where the player discovers that the player character Jack has been coerced into events by the trigger phrase, "Would you kindly ", is considered one of the strongest narrative elements of recent games, in part that it subverted the expectation that the player has control and influence on the game. In homage to BioShock, Black Mirror video game centric episode "Playtest" includes the phrase.

In response to the game's high sales and critical acclaim, Take Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick revealed in a post earnings report call that the company now considered the game part of a franchise. He also speculated that any follow ups would mimic the release cadence of Grand Theft Auto, with a new release expected every two years. 2K's president Christoph Hartmann stated that BioShock could have five sequels, comparing the franchise to the Star Wars movies. BioShock 2 was announced in 2008, with its development led by 2K Marin. Levine stated that Irrational (then 2K Boston) was not involved in the game's sequel because they wanted to "swing for the fences" and try to come up with something "very, very different", which was later revealed as BioShock Infinite. BioShock 3 was also announced, with its release assumed to likely coincide with the BioShock film. BioShock 2 takes place about ten years following the events of the first game. The player assumes the role of Subject Delta, a precursor of the Big Daddies who must search the fallen city of Rapture for his former Little Sister, Eleanor. BioShock 2 was released for Windows PC, Mac, Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3 worldwide on February 9, 2010. While BioShock Infinite, developed by Irrational Games and released in 2013, shares the name and many similar gameplay concepts with BioShock, the title is not a sequel or prequel of the original story, but instead takes place aboard the collapsing air city of Columbia in the year 1912. It follows former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt as he attempts to rescue a young woman, Elizabeth, from the angelic tower in which her father has imprisoned her. Infinite involves the possibilities of multiple universes. In one scene, the game take place at the lighthouse and bathysphere terminus of Rapture as part of this exploration. However, no direct canonical connection is given in the main game. The episodic expansion, Burial at Sea, takes place in Rapture in 1959, before the war between Atlas and Ryan, while continuing the story of Booker and Elizabeth. This content links the two stories while providing expansion on the causes and behind the scenes events alluded to by the in game background from BioShock. After completing BioShock Infinite and its expansion, Levine announced that he was restructuring Irrational Games to focus on smaller, narrative driven titles. 2K Games continues to hold on to the BioShock intellectual property and plans to continue to develop games in this series, considering the framework set by Levine and his team as a "rich creative canvas" for more stories.

Following the creation of a fan petition for a special edition, Take Two Interactive stated that they would publish a special edition of BioShock only if the petition received 5,000 signatures; this number of signatures was reached after just five hours. Subsequently, a poll was posted on the 2K Games operated Cult of Rapture community website in which visitors could vote on what features they would most like to see in a special edition; the company stated that developers would take this poll into serious consideration. To determine what artwork would be used for the Limited Edition cover, 2K Games ran a contest, with the winning entry provided by Crystal Clear Art's owner and graphic designer Adam Meyer. On April 23, 2007, the Cult of Rapture website confirmed that the Limited Collector's Edition would include a Big Daddy figurine (many of which were damaged due to a dropped shipping container; a replacement initiative is in place), a "Making Of" DVD, and a soundtrack CD. Before the special edition was released, the proposed soundtrack CD was replaced with The Rapture EP.

BioShock was remastered to support 1080p and higher framerates as part of the 2016 BioShock: The Collection release for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One systems. The remastering was performed by Blind Squirrel Games and published by 2K Games. A standalone version of BioShock Remastered was released for macOS by Feral Interactive on August 22, 2017. The standalone version of the remastered version of BioShock along with The Collection were released on May 29, 2020, on the Nintendo Switch.

BioShock: Breaking the Mold, a book containing artwork from the game, was released by 2K Games on August 13, 2007. It is available in both low and high resolution, in PDF format from 2K Games' official website. Until October 1, 2007, 2K Games was sending a printed version of the book to the owners of the collector's edition whose Big Daddy figurines had been broken, as compensation for the time it took to replace them. On October 31, 2008, the winners of "Breaking the Mold: Developers Edition Artbook Cover Contest" were announced on cultofrapture. com. A prequel novel, titled BioShock: Rapture written by John Shirley, was published July 19, 2011. The prequel book details the construction of Rapture and the events leading to its demise. The book follows multiple BioShock characters.

Industry rumors after the game's release suggested a film adaptation of the game would be made, utilizing similar green screen filming techniques as in the movie 300 to recreate the environments of Rapture. On May 9, 2008, Take Two Interactive announced a deal with Universal Studios to produce a BioShock movie, to be directed by Gore Verbinski and written by John Logan. The film was expected to be released in 2010, but was put on hold due to budget concerns. On August 24, 2009, it was revealed that Verbinski had dropped out of the project due to the studio's decision to film overseas to keep the budget under control. Verbinski reportedly feels this would have hindered his work on Rango. Then Juan Carlos Fresnadillo was in talks to direct with Verbinski as producer. In January 2010 the project was in the pre production stage, with director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Braden Lynch, a voice artist from BioShock 2 both working on the film. By July, the film was facing budget issues, but producer Gore Verbinski said they were working it out. He also said the film would be a hard R. Ken Levine, during an interview on August 30, 2010, said: "I will say that it is still an active thing and it's something we are actively talking about and actively working on." Verbinski later cited that by trying to maintain the "R" rating, they were unable to find any studios that would back the effort, putting the film's future in jeopardy. Levine confirmed in March 2013 that the film had been officially canceled. Levine stated that after Warner's Watchmen film in 2009 did not do as well as the studio expected, they had concerns with the $200 million budget that Verbinski had for the BioShock film. They asked him to consider doing the film on a smaller $80 million budget, but Verbinski did not want to accept this. Universal then subsequently brought in a new director to work with the smaller budget, but Levine and 2K Games did not feel that the new director was a good fit with the material. Universal then let Levine decide to end the project, which he did, believing that the film would not work with the current set of compromises they would have had to make. In January 2014, artwork from the canceled film surfaced online, showing what an adaptation could have looked like. Verbinski said that there is "all kinds of crazy stuff" from the pre production stage that still exists, such as screen tests for characters. He noted in the 2017 Reddit piece that with the success of the 2016 film Deadpool, he believes that there is now justification for his vision of the BioShock film. Francis Lawrence was slated to direct with Michael Green to write, as of August 2022. Green and Lawrence were collaborating on a new draft as of October 2023.