2K Games

One of the guiding principles behind BioShock is that the story and characters need to fit not just within the world of Rapture, but within the wider historical and political context of the time. As the writer of the Minerva’s Den story-based DLC for BioShock 2, this was great for me: since Minerva’s Den is all about the computer center of Rapture, I got to nerd out not just about the real-world technology of the time, but also the historical figures and events that brought these advances into being.

The following posts are concerned with the backstory and surrounding context of Minerva’s Den, so it should be fairly spoiler-light, but if you want to go into the experience completely fresh, read no further!

When we decided to focus on the computer technology of Rapture, we knew that we wanted to base it on the dawn of the modern computing age, which was largely motivated into being by the events of World War II. Babbage’s Difference Engine aside, some of the earliest, groundbreaking work in electronic computing was done during WW2 by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park in England. Their challenge: to crack the cryptographic code hidden within the German’s “Enigma Machine.” The electromechanical machine they devised, the “bombe,” would help bring an end to the war.

It was this project, and Turing’s further work on stored-program computer technology, that would in part lead to the enormous mainframes that would define computing in the era (and upon which most of the technology seen in Minerva’s Den is based.) These were ENIAC, UNIVAC, and a number of other mainframes housed at government facilities and state universities. The irony of their invention, and the great medical, communications, and other humanitarian advances that computing technology has brought about in the intervening decades, is that these computational powerhouses were originally designed to crunch numbers for the hydrogen bomb, the most destructive weapon that the world had ever encountered.

And so, in Minerva’s Den, the conflicted nature of the era is personified in Charles Milton Porter, the inventor of “The Thinker,” the computer mainframe which used Rapture’s unchecked advances to surpass anything computer scientists on the surface could have imagined. Who is Porter, and what drove him to this city under the sea? More on that in my next post.