2K Games

Rapture is a city of misfits: its greatest minds are iconoclasts who rejected the surface world, or feel they’ve been rejected by it. And so, when conceiving of the characters behind the revolutionary technology of Minerva’s Den, we had to figure out just who came up with all this tech, and why they chose to come down to Rapture to do so. The man was Charles Milton Porter; his motivations… are complicated.

In Porter, we find a man who is at a crossroads on the world stage: brilliant in his field, but still a second-class citizen in the eyes of society; someone whose greatest work had to be kept a secret, even from those he loved most; a man who’d lost what was most important to him for the sake of a country he didn’t call home. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Porter was born and grew up in Chicago; having shown an early gift for maths, he moved as a young man to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first degree-granting historically black university in the country. His work as a graduate student gained him notice in the mathematical world, and during the height of WW2 he was secretly invited by Alan Turing to join his team of mathematicians in England, to help them break the Enigma Machine’s code. Porter was newly married to his college sweetheart, Pearl, and the two embarked on this international journey together. They kept an apartment in London, but Porter spent day and night at Bletchley Park, often for days or weeks at a time, working with Turing on a project that would have worldwide impact.

Porter’s devotion to the war effort came at a personal cost: as Turing and Porter’s work wore on, Pearl saw her husband less and less, leaving her adrift in a foreign and unfamiliar city. Then, in 1940, with Porter safely outside the city, the German bombing of London known as “the Blitz” began. It was this first wave of bombs that suddenly claimed Pearl’s life, leaving Porter without even the chance to say goodbye.

It was Porter’s sense of loss and regret, along with the disillusionment over his role in the Allied war effort, that drove this brilliant computer scientist to depart the surface for the undersea city of Rapture—a place where a man’s work was his worth, where his labor was only in his own self-interest, and where no regulations would hold him back from realizing his mentor’s dream of true artificial intelligence…

I hope this gives you some idea of the turbulent times that gave rise to the personalities and technology of Minerva’s Den, and that your exploration of the city of Rapture will be that much richer for it!

Thanks for playing,

steve