That's just how she goes out. It's fucking crazy. Well, I just swallowed a bug, so we all have it rough, okay? Flora Boys here. The internet's number one. What? No, there's no old episode about Bioshock. Podcast is back with more of what you need. My name is Peter O'Donoghue, and my tattoos are fading. Also, my cat scratched straight through one of the chain links on this ant. So, that neat. Help! Open the door! Joining me at the Lighthouse are my twin time-traveling daughters, Ethan and Jamie. Say hello, girls. Hello. Hello, girls. International Women's Day.
Oh, that's true. We are recording. Yeah, exactly. So no despair to Jane Rand, okay? On this episode. She's the girl boss. Okay, fine. Well, I'm about to lose about four of these five pages in that game. Just ask me questions about the game. I know enough. So today's spoiler-heavy episode about Bioshock was requested by patron Chud, since he is very excited for the next game from writer-director Ken Levine. It is called Judas. Our sweet summer child, Chud, seems to think that Judas is coming out in 2026. All fair, I was telling Jamie that this game has been in development for something like 12 years, and that studio has never released a single thing, so.
Everything I've heard about Judas sounds awesome. Everything I've seen is also fucking fantastic, but I'm going to keep it 100 with you. And everybody listening, as a huge fan of Half-Life, Prey, Dishonored, Deus Ex, and Bioshock, I can tell you, do not clear time on your calendar for this fucking game, okay, dude? Just enjoy it if it comes out right before every single one of those people loses their jobs, because that's it. So, in the time off since we started the podcast, guys, have you ever played a Bioshock game?
Yes. I beat one and three. There you go. Yeah. I think I did that too. Like I played all the way through one, all the way through three, like kind of recently, like in like 2020, like just before getting my new computer in like 2024, I think I beat Bioshock very recently. Oh, cool. Yeah. But then two, I've always started and then given up on because it's like harder to play compared to the other ones. And big daddies are cool and everything. We're all, we're all for big daddies on national women's day. Yeah. National women's day. We can't say that big daddy is the main character of Bioshock at least. Right.
No, yeah. He's just in the second one, but don't worry that the little sisters are in, well, the first two. Yeah, I played two, but I, so like my roommate had Bioshock 1 when I was fresh out of high school. And then I think we rented two from a Bioshock, from a Blockbuster. I don't know how old it is. This was like after Blockbuster had filed for bankruptcy, but there was still Blockbuster, like, and I guess they just go to the bottom of the scene. On a bump, on a nose of the frog in the log at the bottom of the scene.
So, yeah, a long time ago. And then I own, I think I own Infinite, which is Bioshock 3. Yes. The Bioshock initiative's out there. Yeah. Don't think that there was an infinite number of Bioshocks, like, going 3, 4, 5, all the way up to infinity. No. You can get through the trilogy probably in a weekend. You might need three days. They're kind of long, so, yeah. The second one, from what I've heard, although it's not as great for, like, people like 1, people like 3 a lot more than 2, I heard the second one's multiplayer actually ruled. And there was someone...
in our company that we work at, Ethan, that was, like, very competitive. And I cannot for the life remember me, but I think they worked in one of the places where you would go when your mouse got broken and they would, like, give you a new one. That's why, in the back of my brain, I feel like I talk to someone when getting a new piece of equipment about Bioshock 2 multiplayer. Yeah. It was competitive. Like, I'm top 100. Yeah, there's 100 people that play it, by the way. Yeah. 98. Yeah. The multiplayer in Bioshock 2 was cool. My hottest take as a Bioshock fan, 2 has the best combat.
because you get to dual wield both powers and guns at all times, and you get to do that in Bioshock Infinite, but Bioshock Infinite has a two-weapon cap, so you cannot be nearly as creative. Bioshock 2 gives you access to whatever your... powers called plasmid slots and every single fucking weapon in the game and their alternate ammunitions throughout the entire game so you can be way more creative with the combat in the second game whereas I mean one of the reasons I don't think Judas is coming out at all is because it is the exact same team who developed Bioshock Infinite and Bioshock Infinite was overly ambitious and was published by 2K and the stripped down minimum viable Bioshock that they released while good is lacking and I don't want to alarm you Judas is being published by 2K so it is the same publisher and the same team and the same fucking story and it has been 12 years since they fucking started working on this. Yeah. None of those other things like really ring alarm bells to me. I like it for what it was. I understand like a lot of people had. Oh, me too. Like what we got was still really good. But the publisher forced them to strip out tons of shit to the point where everything prior to release is like lawsuit worthy false advertising.
yeah okay i mean i also don't care so much about like i work in uh game production and i can tell you that uh sometimes game designers uh dream too big yes do need a producer to step in and say like this game will take 12 years to develop if you keep all this stuff in so yeah and then it ends up taking more time too because like then you start building all these features and they don't work well together and like qa is blowing up and the game's crashing your memory leaks and like all this other stuff so um you know cautiously optimistic was there a bioshock 4 am i crazy uh it it had it has a disastrous production uh it is currently allegedly being developed by Cloud Chamber Games, who has an office here in Montreal. They have never shown anything, not even concept art. At least, Bioware had the good graces to show us shitty JPEGs of Dragon Age 4 before they squirted that fucking thing out. Nothing about the Bioshock 4 has been released, other than the fact the studio head was shit-canned. They just fucking put a bullet in her and replaced her, and things were going so bad, they laid people off as well. And normally, somebody important like a studio head gets to resign, right? But no, straight up, fired, replaced. So...
I wouldn't hold my breath for that fucking one either. I have a fun little story. Speaking of working in video games, I work in video game support. So when you have a problem in a game, you write an email, it might end up on one of my team's desks. And Bioshock had...
a very, like, within the video game support community, it was a meme because people would say, I have tryptophobia, which is the fear of small holes, and when you use the B-plasmid, your hand has a bunch of small holes on it, right? And people say, I have tryptophobia, I puked on my brand new iPhone 13, send me a new one. Or, I have tryptophobia, I puked on my Xbox, send me a new Xbox. And it would just be people saying they have that fear to the Bioshock team and then asking for stuff. And it became a meme online. I think it, like, originated on 4chan or Reddit or something. That's so funny. Yeah, one last thing, actually, right before Bioshock Infinite came out. And, like, I have my reservations with the game.
It's absolutely fucking worth playing. It's a really, really competent shooter, really, really good, especially compared to a lot of the single player stuff that comes out these days. Like what we got, minimum viable Bioshock, like I said earlier, it's still a fantastic fucking game because it's such a high bar, right? It runs on anything. If you're like me and had only a bad laptop that would overheat, you could play this and still have an amazing time. It came out 12 years ago. It could run on anything at 4K, right? But I actually won a contest. I won a fan contest before Bioshock Infinite came out. I was their fan of the month because I had, and they sent me like a swag bundle. I have a bunch of Bioshock merch because I got the tattoos in 2010 and sent them a photo.
I tried to find the forum post, but since Irrational Games was shut down, their website's gone. So the post, I wanted to find the link for the patrons. Let's see what I looked like 13 years ago. I won that contest. I got posters. They gave me some merch. If Jamie walks back in a frame with a framed picture of your forum post, I'm going to lose one. I like to go check on my bookshelf. It's somewhere in a closet, but I do have a Bioshock Infinite art book. So do I. It was part of my swag bundle. I have it on my bookshelf over there. I'll get it on the break. As well as posters that I just don't put up on the bricks, basically, at this point. But anyway.
So the most important location in the series by far is the city of Rapture. Even though Bioshock Infinite is set primarily in a second location, the flying city of Columbia, at the end of that game and in both its DLC expansions, you go back to Rapture. It is very much like the linchpin that the whole series revolves around. I'll send you guys some pictures here. And I've just got a couple of references for these two.
The description of the first one here is the aerial shot of the city. Of course, it's at the bottom of the ocean. And then the second one is just a screenshot I grabbed from the opening cutscene. Aerial, who famously sang Under the Sea. I do think you're describing a photo underwater as aerial. Kind of funny. That was the description of it. I found it very funny as well. Aerial photo. Aerial in quotes. A rapture is like, oh yeah. What else would you call it? Like an above? There's no sky. So for listeners who don't know, it's an underwater city.
Yes, exactly. The city of Rapture is a giant city at the bottom of the ocean. So Rapture is located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It is actually, it has real coordinates. It is right here, between Greenland and Iceland. Okay. You can see the coordinates. The coordinates can be seen on a postcard that's actually given to the game's protagonist. His full name is actually Jack Winand. And the coordinates are given to him so that his mind-controlled, sweater-wearing ass knows exactly where to crash the plane that he's just hijacked. So here are, rather, the coordinates, as well as his passport. This is very photo-loaded at the front here. I'm sorry, Jono.
Yeah. Yes. And one thing I also noticed here is if you look at his picture here, you never really see his face. There is a 3D model of Jack, but you never see his face in-game. It's always kind of like out of focus or blurry. And at the end of Bioshock Infinite, it's like completely obscured by shadow as well because he's a silent FPS protagonist. Like the only voice line he has is when he gets hit by bees when somebody throws up on their Xbox, right? Like that's the audio cue that you get there. But one thing I realized is he looks a lot like young, hot Tim Robbins from like Shawshank. Yeah, I can see that. Right? Like kind of just looks like that guy.
So anyway, there's your photo album for the beginning of year. So Rapture was a longtime dream of its founder, the radical libertarian Andrei Ryanovsky. Andrei was born sometime before 1917 in a small village near Minsk, which is in the, at the time, Russian Empire. While living in Russia right now, in 2026, cannot be great. The early 20th century had to have been worse. Andrei and his family lived through both the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
I was going to say the Bolsheviks was like 1919 or something. It was like right after the First World War. Yeah, we'll get into it here. So after the communists executed the royal family, which was based, the Bolsheviks then suicided the Russian economy, starving some and causing others to flee as refugees. The Ryanovskys first fled to Constantinople.
I have PTSD from our internet going out lately because he stopped and I was like, oh, sorry. PTSD, right? Yeah. I've been the only one at time of recording that's had reliable internet for the past two months. Don't say that. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. So in 1919, the Rydowskis then fled to the United States.
Upon arrival in the U.S., the family anglicized their names like many immigrants have done throughout history, and Andrei Ryanofsky became Andrew Ryan. Wait, that's the guy from the game. What the hell? Yeah, exactly. And re-anglicized his name to Fievel Moskovitz. He's actually a little cartoon mouse. Yeah, somewhere out there. Yeah, exactly. And again, apologies to anybody who may be listening who is a 110-year-old Jewish person. Yes, Fievel Moskovitz is the only other Russian Jew refugee that I am aware of, okay? It's the only second one I can fucking name. So he became Andrew Ryan. We should all be familiar with this name as he's the primary antagonist for most of the first game.
And here he is. Would you kindly show us a picture of that, Pete? I can't resist. I have to. I have to. I'm not sure. He looks kind of familiar. He's got that classic old-timey mustache. One of the things I've always wanted to do, I love the Walt Disney mustache, the thin little pencil lines. Pencil mustache. I am too lazy to buy a razor that can do it properly. You got a girlfriend now? Talk to her. I bet you she's got some type of knick-knack that can shave your face. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Her bathroom is just like an alchemist's fucking chamber of mysterious, like, goos and tinctures. I'm just like... I love it. One of my favorite things about... She listens to the show sometimes, and I roast her bathroom every once in a while.
I don't know how a single person taller than me takes a shit there. Because my knees are a half inch away from her bathtub. Hold on. Do you stand up? No, I'm sitting. I keep hitting my head on the bathtub. He's there standing up taking a shit like this. Hip to knee ratio. Because my knees are like a half inch away from the bathtub when I sit down on the toilet. It's good for you. You want your knees up when you poop. So tall people have an easier time pooping there. Or yeah, put your feet on the bathtub and get a real power stance on.
I'll see if she can get me some stare-up on Amazon. I do hope I get to meet your girlfriend someday, Pete, now that she apparently listens to the show and I've just told people to shit in her tub. I hope someday I get to meet her, I guess. Look, I need a new herb sewing hat, and I want her to meet you guys. Any excuse to come out to the farm, Ethan? Ball's in your court. You gotta play magic cards to get out there these days. Fuck! I'll break Transformers, it's okay. Yeah, so there he is. He's also voiced by a Deep Space Nine actor who plays the Ferengi. He's voiced by that guy.
Okay. I don't know. I know who you're talking about. But yeah, exactly. There's Trekkies out there, and I've always known that link. Deep Space Nine is the only series of Star Trek I've ever seen any episodes of, weirdly enough, because my uncle loved it and gave me a bunch of VHSs. They're so good. We're still talking about Andrew Ryan, right? Yes. Okay. The Howard Hughes sort of looking back. Not the tall man who's shitting in Pete's girlfriend's tub. No. We've moved on from him. Yeah. And we won't be talking about him again. Under radical libertarianism, which was obviously, or objectivism, which was obviously made up by Ayn Rand, a woman who we respect today, the fact that you would not really need laws of man or God.
Andrew Ryan is the most likely man to shit in her bathroom. Okay, fair. I can just picture, like, Pete coming by, and, like, the curtains by the bathtub are, like, pushed in a little bit. Do you have another man here? Is he going in here? Did he shit here? There's e-marts on the side of your tub. You know mine don't reach. Another man's knees, like, just, like, imprinted onto it. It's, like, hair. Whose legs hair? Whose leg hairs are these? Yours? Pulling a leg hair off the suit jacket, just like, are you cheating on me?
At first, Mr. Ryan loved the United States. He was lucky enough to strike oil on his property and via a series of good investments, he soon became one of the richest men in the country. He owned Ryan Oil, part of the coal industry, and the country's second largest railroad, which at the time in the 20s, I don't know what that was, didn't look into it, but great for transporting hobos who want to work in the Dust Bowl. Excuse me. Now, to give him a little bit of credit, the Russian Revolution might radicalize you against any kind of social programs. Back in the good old days, you had to starve people and kill their families to radicalize them. Now, you can show an AI-generated photo of a transgender athlete to Joe Rogan, and people will beg you to starve and kill their families. So, you know, back in the good old days, things were much, much better, I think.
So Ryan began referring to the U.S. as a worker's paradise, which is so funny, calling Roosevelt's New Deal and social programs Bolshevik poison. I mean, this is classic rich guy stuff, though, right? Like the rich guy who doesn't work being like, no, no, no, no. Workers have it good, actually, though. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's like the Ur-capitalist, right? Like the reason he is going to build a city at the bottom of the ocean is because it is like the furthest place the way you can get from like regulation, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Also, I'm not interested. Anything below sea level, you can't regulate. No. He could have just done this at the bottom of a lake, honestly.
Just at the bottom of Lake Superior. Yeah. Chilling in a tide pool. Selling my soda pops. Yeah. Hormacraps is great. I've done it a bunch of times in PEI. Love it. Where was I here? Right. So one group of activists once asked him if they could turn a private forest he owned, Private Forest, Crazy Flex, into a park, since in their view, it should be shared with the people as nature belongs to God. In response to his push to share this forest. Guys, one guess each. What do you think he did? Raise the forest. Yeah, I think he would cut it down for the wood money, but he still wouldn't share it.
Okay, so Ethan, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. He burned the forest to the ground. Didn't even bother selling it to me. He was like, I don't need the money. I just need to make sure you don't get a park, okay?
As the years went on, Ryan became... Sorry? Chill guy. Oh yeah, very cool. Probably a great hang, honestly. Yeah, totally. I think. So as the years went on, Ryan became more and more disillusioned with the United States, the final straw being the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The atomic gong... Atomic gong, Jesus. Atomic bomb. Oh boy. No, we gotta do it again. We gotta do another Bioshock episode. We gotta delete this one too. Round three, baby.
Atomic gong is kind of a crazy thing to call. The bomb. Kind of crazy, man. Word gets flipped much. I wrote bomb. I don't know why I said that. I do know why, Pete. You gotta look inside for it, okay? It's a little gong behind him, I think. I do, yeah. It's right there.
See, atomic bomb, in his eyes, was the pinnacle of science and human determination. However, it was corrupted by social parasites and used for destruction. Remember, he just hates the government. And the atomic bomb was a government project paid for taxpayer money. He's just like, no, no, no, no, no. These people, Oppenheimer et al., should have been, you know, still doing this. Selfishly. Selfishly. Exactly. Yeah. I think this guy might be the bad guy, if I'm honest. We'll see what happens with the rest of the episode. So the lazy, good-for-nothing government now had a way to destroy anything it couldn't steal, which...
Still true. And Andrew Ryan quickly began initiating his plan to build Rapture, a place that would be safe from the nuclear war that he foresaw between the US and the USSR. The first bricks were laid or sunk or whatever in 1945. He started right away. Ryan... What? Just a stone mason in a boat dropping bricks one by one to the bottom of the ocean. Just hoping that they're going to stack up down there. That's a very funny thought. Just like dumping a bag of cement and then like taking a stick and desperately trying to mix it before it all just sinks.
Hey, if you want a longer paddle to stir as it sinks there, you've got to get it yourself, buddy, okay? No fucking handouts here. He's trying to stir the cement, and the boat's just spinning. They're just spinning. So Ryan and his associates actually purchased the materials in secret, presumably via shell companies and other means to trick the government, because I guess the IRS's vision is just fucking based on movement, like a T-Rex. So they didn't want the FBI investigating anything he did. He was very, very paranoid that the government would try and stop him from building his paradise at the bottom of the ocean. One thing that I found out recently that is unfortunately very relevant in the modern news, Greenland?
has been a target of like radical libertarians for a long time, not just the South African devils of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk currently, but like they've had their eyes set on it for a long time because it's the middle of nowhere. So like, I'm sure somebody, Ken Levine was very likely familiar with this and why he put placed rapture between Greenland and Iceland. It's like, that's. That's libertarian Agartha, right? There's no age of consent in Greenland sort of shit. There probably is. Well, libertarians are very anti-age of consent, unfortunately. I know. Yeah, I'm saying for any weird listener who just went, yippee, and is looking at the tickets, I'll say there probably is an age of consent. I'm going to make my game based off the coast of Greenland. There's going to be full of big daddies, little sisters. No rules. No rules. Anything goes. No rules is all, baby. I mean, that is the point, though, right? Is that it was kind of an anything goes kind of place? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as long as it was capitalist. It's the hyper-capitalism, anything goes. No regulations? Fucking go for it. We'll get more into that.
after the break there. So these materials were transported to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on large privately owned ships like Ryan's Olympian, which I couldn't find a good picture of, unfortunately, but it reminded me very much, if anybody's seen Peter Jackson's King Kong, like that style, like ironclad steamboat, like big. Like the equivalent of a yacht, I guess, in 1940. Like that sort of thing. Like a private steamer. A boat big enough that you won't spin in circles when you stir the cement. You could make cement off the side of the hull. Yeah, safely. A boat big enough for a man to ride on. Absolutely. Where was I here?
Right, so we'd transport the materials out there, and they'd already constructed, I couldn't really find much on this thing here, and they were sent to the seabed via a massive submersible platform called the sinker. There's the nickname of it. Deep-sea welders and mechanics began construction, working from the sinker at first until enough had been done where the platform was just directly anchored to the bottom of the ocean, becoming a massive foundation for the city. And then Rapture's buildings were actually, much like our cement mixer guy here, Rapture's buildings were prefabricated closer to the surface where there's less pressure so you could get multiple workers working on it. You know, sitting on the I-beam with your lunchbox with all your boys on the island, just being able to break the surface sort of thing.
and then those were sunk into the bottom like it is funny how like so much of this is just like kind of grounded in reality but the idea that they had a platform in the 40s big enough to build a city at the bottom of the ocean and then also finish construction and have people move to rapture by November 1946 is fucking insane like the private sector gets more done in a lot of cases unfortunately than a government government is so fucking slow If you had more money than God in 1946, you're not building a livable city at the bottom of the ocean in the 40s. If you had more money than God today, you're not building an ocean under the ocean, man. The ocean is a very hostile place for human beings. Yeah, exactly. Turns out if every single drop of water on Earth is directly above you, you get squished. Also, you can't breathe under it. Also, it's constantly walking. There's no light. You can't grab plants. One of the coldest places on Earth. Hard to ship, dude. Well, no, Jamie, you just huck bricks off your canoe. They go straight there. It's free. Yeah, the Vikings did it. Yeah.
So people began moving in November 1946. I'm not stupid or rich enough to think that I am immortal, and I don't want to be immortal, frankly. I would not have been in the queue of people moving to an undersea paradise that is still under active construction. Large-scale construction continued into the late 40s and then moved on to smaller projects. Rapture was only really wrapped up in 1951, and that's when they considered it a done deal.
No, people would do it though. Cause it's like, look at like Elon Musk today. Like how many people will just like worship the ground he walks on and like fully invest all their savings into Tesla, get a Tesla car, listen to AI podcast, drive around and stuff. They're moving to the bottom of the sea. I think, but yeah, absolutely. Like making his floating city and there's countless people who would love to go. And obviously they won't be allowed to, cause it's only going to be mega. I guess they're going to need people to work and be slaves there. So San Jose.
Like when I was at San Jose like a month and a bit ago, I got an Uber driver who was driving a Tesla listening to a podcast about how billionaires are cool. Oh man, that's a lost soul, dude. You should call them put the show on just a click. We drove by a Cybertruck. He's like, whoa, dude, you see that Cybertruck? Got a sick rap on it. I don't really like the stock Cybertruck, but that's a nice one. We're not talking at all, but anyways, yeah. People are allowed their interests and their fun little hobbies.
you're working uber dude you're a little misguided at this point no hating on uber drivers but like if you're worth like this guy does not care about you at all you know and actively try to make your life that's it like i think tesla's tesla was a great company for a good while uh and i think they did do great things for the ev market like i drive an ev uh and if you like the cyber track the more power to you dude i think it looks ugly and from everything i hear it's a cheaply made car uh that loves running children but worshiping billionaires is that's that's the hobby that i i think is a bridge too far all right like they're bad people they're one and all they're bad people Yeah, and we find more horrible things about them every single day. But now that Raptor has been completed, we're going to find out more about this made-up billionaire. Maybe he's a good guy after the break. I hope so. Oh, I didn't pick up. Oh, it's such good timing. Welcome back from the break. It's unfortunate. So while I did get my smaller gong that I leave in the foyer, I also did go grab for the people who watch the videos over on YouTube the developer edition art book that I got when I was Bioshock fan of the month. Very cool.
It's super, super, super, super long and has concept art for both Bioshocks 1 and 2. I remember going through it. It's just like one of the coolest fucking things. Just like the propaganda pages of all the fake art and posters and stuff at the back here. Really, really cool. Won this back in 2014. Nice. I have a Mafia 3 record player that I never took out of the box. It's still in my closet. I feel like we should give that away at some point. We're going to New York. More voice. I'm giving away garbage. Hey, it's a fully functional record player. You can do records on it. And there's Mafia fans out there. I saw people in the Discord.
Yeah, there you go. Also garbage. If you like garbage, you have garbage. I've never looked at, touched, or want. I'll give it to you. Subscribe on Patreon to win it. I always figured it would be worth more if I just never touched it and I left it alone. So that was my strategy. The emotional value of the fan who's going to get it and then have to carry it around all night at BoyzCon, forget at the bar we're at, and then have to go back for it in the morning is going to love it even more. Are you going to get it created at PSA 10?
No shot, right? No. No shot, dude. I know you and I know your apartment. That box is in rough shape. Yeah, it's not too bad. The decade of humidity has had its way with it. Love it. The last time, when I went away a year ago, my girlfriend was very nice to tidy up my apartment and move stuff around, but I opened the closet recently and shit is just stacked to the top. So it might be a load-bearing record player at this point. Oh, there. Yeah. It's a kingstone. Yeah.
Oh, fuck. So yeah, welcome back. So for a while there, while the political and economic conditions of Rapture were quite stable for a bit, just as it started, you know, it's fresh. You know, the class divisions haven't really been established yet. Everybody's moving in. Everybody's getting their feet under them in Rapture now they've moved in. But the hyper-capitalist, laissez-faire, unregulated libertarian paradise did allow some industrious people to get creative, right? Without the notoriously thorough, pro-safety, caring, and benevolent American government breathing down your neck, you really do get to break a lot of eggs while trying to reinvent the omelet.
Bridget Tenenbaum, a Holocaust survivor and brilliant scientist, discovered a material later known as ADAM, which, this is ADAM, within sea slugs native to the area around Rapture. Okay, that's why they chose that spot. No, this was an accident. Okay. Yeah, here's one of the slugs. And here is the photo of Bridget Tenenbaum, her portrait from the first game.
How do you milk a slug? Sorry? How do you milk a slug? Do you squeeze it from butt side and toothpaste out the mouth? Depends what you're trying to milk it for. Do you tickle its little cheeks? They are very pudgy. It's got a frog gullet.
Getting gas out of a car. You got to like siphon it. You put a tube in it. You suck. Sucking slugs. I'm a slug sucker at the hyper-capitalist underwater city. I don't have rights. They don't really pay me very much. And I have to see Uber on the side. But honestly, I think that Andrew Ryan guy is really cool. Actually, I like to rap on that slug so much. But, you know.
So a dock worker with an injured hand was bitten by a slug that he'd caught by accident. It was just like part of the net. And rather than poison and kill him, Bridget Tenenbaum realized that the venom within the slug, or something in its saliva at the very least, started to heal his hand. And the Generation of Atom is apparently an evolutionary adaptation of these slugs who have been living in and around the luminescent biomass. This is a large area of glowing biological material that Raptor is built kind of on top of. And it's what gives, other than the city lights, gives this aurora effect around the city. So reading about this when I was doing research, this came out of left field for me. Because I have completed all three Bioshock games, I think a minimum of like three or four times. Like even Bioshock 2, which I'm not super hot on, I have finished.
minimum three times total. And like, I'm not really a big completionist. I'm like, is this in one audio log that I have missed every single playthrough since 2007? Is this fucking possible? Like, where does this biomass thing come from? So I did a little additional digging today. I found that this lore likely came from a forum post, which was done by ex-Bioshock dev Steve Gaynor on the 2K forums. Unfortunately, the link in the references section goes to a 404 page because after Irrational Games was shut down, everything was deleted. So I have no idea.
where this came from, but it was just like, yeah, we had the luminescent biomass, this is the source of the, is the evolutionary pressure on these slugs that caused them to evolve to generate atoms. I wonder if we can get it through the Wayback Machine or whatever, like you can get some old websites here and there, but not all of them. Yeah, I wanted to read the post directly because I was like, oh man, because obviously like after the, because I mentioned it earlier, after the old, what would have been the third Deus Ex game. uh from idos montreal got cancelled i had friends working on that and after it got cancelled i was just like talking about a party and i was just like what can you tell me because i'll do another deus x episode he's like i can tell you whatever you want the product's gone forever it doesn't exist and like we found a bunch of like behind the scenes shit about uh what would have been the third deus x finding out adam jensen's a clone and all this other like all this other shit that would have been in the third game uh there was more spots there was more levels in montreal i think i can't remember like all very cool shit that we missed out on so i wanted to find this post to see if there was anything else but yeah the luminescent biomass is apparently Whatever. Apocryphal, maybe, but we'll put it in Loreboy's canon. This is why they generate Atom. It's just feeding off of magic sludge at the bottom of the ocean. You could say it kind of gave these slugs a bio-shock. It's really too bad that we missed out on the Deus Ex level Laval, or whenever they were coming.
My next objective is in Terrebonne. I'm going to get taken stuck in traffic for five hours on the 13th. It's so realistic. It's such a good simulator. Squad Victoria OACE.
Well, you do get to go to the big O with the first one, which is always something I love, that it still exists in 2027, which fucking nine months from now actually is a documentary. So whatever, who gives a shit? It's still there. That whole part was for us. All our American listeners have no idea, but that's all Montreal stuff. Our Toronto listeners don't know what we're talking about. Yeah, exactly. It's so hard at work being the only guy in Montreal, like I'm alone. So when people ask me like any questions about like, oh, how is it getting to work? I'm just like.
fuck how do i explain roads these people have never been on in a city they've never seen and like describe like no i can get there and very quickly because i'm close to the highway but still kind of in the suburbs not quite on the highway so it's kind of nice it's still quiet sort of thing it's just like i like one of these people understand like quick side total tangent here i was talking when i was in toronto talking to my friends who i work with they're asking about my apartment and whatever blah blah blah and i was just like oh yeah i've been there a long time so my rent's cheap and it's quite large as well in comparison and then uh one of my one of my buddies he was like dude you live like a king i'm like just showing him pictures i have of my cat where you can see like two doors in the background. He's just like, there's two closed doors in this photo. He said, you live like a fucking king. It's crazy. There are apparently, maybe this is in Montreal as well now that the rental, like the cost of living is so fucked. In Toronto, you need to bid on an apartment in a building that is owned by a corporation and then some second level fucking sucker owns your apartment and you rent from him. So you pay him who then pays the building owner. I'm just like, the company that I rent my apartment from just owns the entire building and I send them $900 a month.
This is the socialism episode, and, like, hey, uh, you know, uh, land ownership means you're a parasite, man. Like, if you're making, producing profit off of, uh, owning land or owning a place to live, all you do, you have a trimming society. Duckfoot Jonah, fuck you, dude. Yeah, I just bought back my rent increase, like, I talked him down. He went for, he tried to get me for, like, 10% this year. What? Fuck you, you piece of shit. I just, I pushed back, I sent him a couple photos of stuff around the building, and he's like, okay, yeah, 3%'s fine. I have the infinite privilege of my landlords have never tried to fuck me.
Their limit is 4%, and they always hit me with like 3.9. I'm like, whatever. Here's the spoiler, though. They've been fucking you all along. Exactly. Almost certainly, yeah. The reason I still have parquet floors is because they're fucking me. 4% for the last eight years or whatever. That's outpacing inflation, my friend. You're giving them raises every year. Yeah, well, look at the bricks, though. I can't put anything up, but they're cool looking.
No, I deal with the bank, and they're cool and chill, you know? You're right, yeah, yeah, yeah. The mortgage isn't parasitic at all, Ethan. I do like where I live, too. I don't like my landlord, but I like my spot, I like my neighborhood, I like my neighbors. Absolutely. It's a good place, Montreal, yeah. Very, very good spot. Take a drink for killing landlords. Anyway.
Where was I here? So after, excuse me, so Dr. Tenenbaum, along with Korean Frankenstein, Dr. Yi Suchong, and by which I mean the monster, not the monster, began using atom to experiment on human beings. Dr. Suchong lived in Japanese-occupied Korea during the Second World War, and to survive, as well as fund experiments he wanted to do as hobbies, he would sell opium to the Japanese, and they wouldn't kill him. In real life, my grandfather and my great-grandfather, while living under a bridge, sold cigarettes to the Nazis when they occupied Greece. I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but the reason they weren't killed is because they were selling tobacco products to the Nazis, and I also love this fact.
All those Nazis are fucking dead now, some of whom were definitely killed by lung cancer, and my grandfather died of natural causes in 2023, baby. Like, let's fucking go. I think that's a long game. Yeah, it seemed like a little too slow of a strategy for what was going on. Well, if they'd shot him, who would be doing your fucking Bioshock episode, huh? You, JB? Nope. I mean, maybe.
Atom can be used to modify genes of human beings. Gene tonics could passively enhance your body, both mentally and physically, but the real money was in plasmids. These are the powers I was talking about earlier. So plasmids allow the people of Rapture to start fires with a snap of their fingers, move things with their mind. Telekinesis is objectively the best fucking plasmid in the first game. Don't at me, because the impact of just throwing an empty barrel that you've already exploded an enemy does more damage than any fucking gun in the game. Freeze water or the air with their mind. And even for some reason, like we mentioned earlier, shoot bees at people. Isn't that a murder of crows as well? That's an infinite.
I will talk about that in a second. So in an alternate universe, prior to the events of Bioshock Infinite, the industrialist Jeremiah Fink managed to spy on Dr. Sushong through tears in reality to create his own plasmids, which he called vigors. In the past, vigors were drinkable, but there is like a lore tidbit you can find in, I think, one of the DLCs for Bioshock Infinite where like the drinkable vigors cost 10 times as much atom to create rather than injectable ones, which is why they're injectable now, and they used to be in the past more of like a snake oil tonic sort of thing. So some of his, like, there's still, like, fire, electricity, and telekinesis, I believe, in Bioshock Infinite, but there are some more unique ones that Jeremiah Fink had developed himself, one of which is, like, a magnetic shield, where if you hold down the button, you can catch bullets and throw them back at people, otherwise it just deflects you, and then you can also somehow summon and control a flock or a murder of flesh-eating crows, which is... What if bees was crows, is the question that Bioshock Infinite really asks. You know what I mean? Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's just fucking great. It's great power.
The queen crow, like, living in a giant nest, and there's, like, a bunch of other crows around, making crow honey. How do you milk a crow? Do you squeeze it from the bottom or the top? Do you want to think about the beak or the cloaca? Think of the cloaca. Or maybe just get the eggs. I'm not sure. Are eggs the milk of the bird? Eggnog would say yes. Now we're digging deep. Now we're ready to go on Rogan. My grandfather used to sell milk of the poppy to the Japanese, and now I sell milk of the bird. Whoever's selling fucking unpasteurized milk to Republicans right now is doing the Lord's work.
Yeah, so Dr. Tenenbaum sought funding from Frank Fontaine, a wealthy businessman in Rapture who may or may not have had ties to organized crime, multiple identities, and also beef with Andrew Ryan. Fontaine introduced Tenenbaum to Souchong, who he'd been funding after Andrew Ryan had stopped. So the three ended up founding Fontaine Futuristics. Fontaine's first business in Rapture was Fontaine's Fisheries, which is where the slugs were first discovered. So that kind of links back to them. That's why Tenenbaum went to him for funding is because it's like, your guy found the slug. I want to milk the slug. Can you give me slug milk? And he was like, can I overthrow the ruling class with slug milk? And she was like, maybe.
Oh, here we go. Listen, Mr. Fontaine, sir, you just got the best slug suckers in town. Everybody knows it. Those guys would never get canker sores, like, ever. Slug suckers? Yeah, there's been slug stuff all day long, man. Well, didn't you say that slug sucks? Oh, yeah, it's true. It would never. Yeah, that's true. You know what my dad did once? So, a friend of the show, Kyle, got a bunch of canker sores once, right? That's when we were, like, in elementary school. And my dad was like, oh, you know what fixes that? Cloves.
And I had a core memory when I was like 10 or 11 years old when my dad was like holding Kyle down and like putting cloves in his mouth to try and fix his canker sores. It's not your business, Danny. I mean, he was just there. He was just there. He was like, oh, my mouth hurts so much. Help me. And my dad was just like, it's not that he was just like, I can't believe your mother was abusing you without feeding you cloves or whatever. We all know Kyle. Kyle was just getting a little too crazy. And Danny's like, finally, a chance to put this kid's face in the dirt. That's it, yeah. Kyle was a little too whiskey drunk. A bunch of cloves in his mouth. Cloves cigarettes, yeah.
So the first plasmas were created. Along with the creation of the plasmas, they also created a way to maximize the amount of atom that a slug could generate. If a slug... Now, I don't know the lore implications behind this. If a slug was implanted into a young girl, the two entered a symbiotic relationship. The girl would consume genetic material. The slug would then convert that into atom, and it's more stable and more plentiful when generated inside of a host. The children would then regurgitate this atom, which would then be harvested and used to create whatever was needed. So it is very much like a fucked-up honeybee. There is a reason it doesn't work in boys. I don't remember why, and I've neglected it.
Oh, but there you go. Problem solved. I think Peter Thiel and a couple other billionaires could tell you in pretty exact detail. Peter Thiel trying real fucking hard. Also, one thing in the concept art, it might be in this book where I saw it, or maybe in like a dev interview or whatever. Originally, the little sisters were supposed to be dogs, like little dogs. And like some of them, they had like concept art for like a little crippled dog where he had like the little dog wheelchair. And it was just like, you had to like harvest or rescue the little dogs. And the devs were like, it's too sad.
We want this to still be brutal, but no one's harvesting the little dogs. No one's getting the bad ending, basically. I love me a dog wheelchair. Animals with wheels are cute. There's like a tortoise that has no legs. And like up front, he's got little Lego wheels. I've not seen him on Instagram. That's why you're always pulling the legs off flies. And putting tiny wheels on them. That's your love of Transformers coming through. Exactly. There's a dog that goes to our local haunts that has three normal legs and then one little gimp half leg. Oh, is that the Nils' dog? Nils' dog, yeah. Very sweet. Hobbles around. Yeah.
Perfect time to crack a ear. I lived with him for a little while, for a couple of months. Because when I got back from Toronto, I lived at my sister's. And he was a theater kid with her and ended up being one of her roommates. But I was moving out when he moved in, so we lived together for like two, three weeks. Did you mess up the dog's leg? No, no, no, no. It was like 12 years ago. That dog is like five. Keep bashing this dog's leg, trying to get a fucking wheel to stick into it. Trying to get a wheel to stick into it. Yeah, trying to get a wheel to stick into it. Yeah, it was theater kids. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so Rapture's class system very quickly became top-heavy, as you can imagine. The so-called best and brightest were exceptionally rich, and with plasmids in some cases had fucking superpowers. The divide between the haves and have-nots widened, and the thin social fabric began to tear. Fontaine would take advantage of this, so despite being a wealthy and extremely powerful criminal, his selfish and insincere populist messaging did resonate with the underclasses, which sounds very familiar. In a completely individualistic society, any amount of help was appreciated. So Fontaine went on to establish Fontaine's Home for the Poor, a place where people down on their luck could get a little assistance from their fellow rapturers, or whatever the citizens are called. And then he also founded the Little Sisters Orphanage, just for orphaned girls. So yeah, just like a pedophile doing the podcast circuit, Fontaine whitewashed his image in the eyes of the people, without brain cells at the very least, and elevated himself to a point where he was an actual political rival to Andrew Ryan.
Now, of course, Fontaine's Home for the Poor was a great source of people to experiment on for Dr. Suchong, and the orphanage was a great source of slug-ready little girls. Would you kindly provide me with some pizza? Exactly. what is the would you kindly thing is like they programmed someone's are you gonna get into it uh no so i didn't i'm not gonna talk about uh the uh jack at all but i mean since you brought it up so the protagonist of the first game jack uh is uh testu baby he was grown in a lab by dr sushong and frank fontaine and at the time of the game like despite being visibly unadult he's like four years old basically because he was like created in a tube uh and then like grown and like grown at accelerator rate and basically as an assassin and the would you kindly is programmed into his brain like genetically coded into his brain where he cannot um refuse an order if you ask say would you kindly do this and he just does it so it was a way to uh have like an assassin fully under control because the purpose of jack was to kill andrew ryan and i didn't write this down this is like stuff i know from the game um jack's jack is technically
made from Andrew Ryan's genetic material. So I think he had a affair or something like that. He has a lover. Like your mom was like a high-class escort or prostitute in like the red light district of Rapture, right? Andrew Ryan got her pregnant. I'm pretty sure Frank Fontaine and Dr. Sushong like took the embryo and then accelerated its growth is because there was genetic codes that like lock a lot of Andrew Ryan's doors. So you can't get into his office without his DNA. So they needed his kid. They needed his DNA. And like there's like a ghost vision where when Andrew Ryan finds out that his like bastard child is now like...
a genetic assassin. I know he beats her mom to death. You can find her body in her room. On International Women's Day? On International Women's Day. He's a villain. Yeah, he is. I'm starting to remember how brutal parts of this game is. Like in Infinite, I can't remember if it's a DLC or what, but don't you have to put like a needle in Elizabeth's eye or something? So I will show you a picture from that scene, but there is a first-person lobotomy torture scene in Bioshock Infinite, and it's fucking crazy. I remember it is one of the most brutal scenes I've ever seen, and it's interesting to see the character who's doing it do that because...
He doesn't need to pretend to be a good guy yet. He pretends to be your friend in the first game, but you can see, and you find out he's a villain, obviously, but you can see how brutal he is when he doesn't have to put on a facade, basically. What? It's not all fun and beased, you know? It's not. Sometimes you throw up on your Xbox. So in the late 50s, Fontaine and Ryan would come to blows. In a shootout with Rapture's security forces, Fontaine was, in quotes, killed. However, in reality, he'd already prepared for this, having already visited the cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Steinman, with one of his lackeys named Reggie. Steinman used Adam to alter the men's appearances. Reggie was made to look exactly like Frank Fontaine, and then he was shot to death in his place, while Fontaine was mutated into a monstrous new form, an Irishman.
Ryan. Ryan. Ryan believing Fontaine had been killed, relaxed a little, and things in Rapture were a little bit more BAU. So I will show you the new form. So you never actually get to see what Frank Fontaine looks like outside of his portrait. I'll post here. I believe he is the... Oh, no, he's not in this photo. That's true. I don't have a picture of him. But this is a picture of his Irish alter ego, Atlas, while he is hammering a spike into Elizabeth's forehead in that cutscene. It's... I remember it shocked me when I played through it. I rewatched the cutscene to get the screenshot today.
Tough watch. It sucks. What? That must be a DLC, right? It's in Burial at Sea, yeah. Yeah, because I was like, I don't remember this at all, but I didn't play the DLC. I had to look away from... When I played a couple years ago, I remember having to look away. I couldn't watch because it was just too brutal. The Atlus is brutal in that game because to kind of close the loop on everything and go back to Rapture and be like, Jack is the ultimate protagonist, Atlus also just beats Elizabeth to death with a wrench at the end.
That's just how she goes out. It's fucking crazy. Well, I can swallow the bug, so we all have it rough, okay? On International Women's Day to boot. There's one of those ladybug stink bugs in my water. Ew. And he's a vegetarian, too, so it's also like a... How's that first bit of protein, hippie? He just rips out of his shirt. Now I'm ready to go on Rogan.
Yeah, so however, the Irish fisherman calling himself Atlas quickly rose up as a hero of the poor, quietly continued to work with Dr. Sushong, which is what we talked about with the creation of Jack, as well as working with a captured Elizabeth Comstock, who'd arrived from Columbia through time and space. They all kind of worked together to start the civil war in Rapture and overthrow Andrew Ryan. The final event that sealed the fate of Rapture was a terrorist attack on New Year's Eve in December 1959. Rapture descended into chaos after this, Ryan went into hiding, and Atlas initiated his final phase of his plan, sending his ace in the hole to the surface to hijack an airplane.
And that's our one and only Bioshock episode. I've been your host, Peter O'Donohue. You can find the Outlaw Voice podcast on Instagram. You can find my book, The Black Frontier, which is also underwater, linked below. And there's a secret naughty word in my book if you look hard enough, actually.
Is that true? Yeah. You can find me on LoreboyJames on Twitch. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my most consistent days. Although, we did do a random Friday stream with Ethan and I played Slay the Spire 2. If I'm a good boy this week, I'll rip my Twitch VOD and upload that to the YouTube at some point so you guys can find that there. And if you guys do want more visuals, our YouTube's up there. We have a lot more views on the audio format because that's where we built our whole thing. But it does exist. You can see our faces. You can see our pictures and all that stuff on YouTube. So go look up Loreboy's VODs. Sometimes they're VODs.
It's hidden in there, hidden in the background like a Disney movie. In the box art for the little mermaid in the castle, just Ethan's ass. I wish. Maybe it would have sold a little bit better, huh? That woke bullshit that Disney puts out. Thanks so much for listening, everyone.
If you want to support the show, consider leaving us a rating review on your podcast app of choice. And if you want to kick us a couple bucks, we do have a Patreon, patreon.com slash the Loreboys. Check it out. If you don't trust Patreon, we do, of course, have Loreboys Prime, a service which we've always offered. And we do need you guys to write in and let us know, each and every one of you who has thrown up during this episode, so we can buy you a new Xbox. So do get on that. We will need video proof. Send your video proof to Jamie of you throwing up. Anyone who chose a video of you throwing up to Jamie will get a gong from Peter. Go ahead, hit up the gong, Pete. Is it going to come through?
Nope, nothing. The Discord noise gate. I mean, really don't necessarily hear. We need a better recording. I'll get the bigger one for next time. All right, we got Jono on the video edit. Maybe there'll be a little gong sound. Movie magic. And I think that would constitute a lore below. Out.