AWESOME FAN ART BY BEN MAURO

In my internet wanderings yesterday, I happened upon a blog post at www.ripten.com about a guy who made some fantastic fan concept art for his vision of a BioShock 2. Now, I think it was the image with the gigantic whale that really made my jaw drop, but I wrote in to Ripten to find this wonderful artist, because I had to thank him. Dedication to a game like this just doesn't come every day.

I finally tracked down Ben Mauro, who was all but too happy to provide me with the artwork he did for a class, and a bit of a background on the project. I have quoted him below, in italics.

The work was for my architecture 2 class at Art Center College of Design, the assignment was to design a sequel to a game or film.

Bioshock 2: 'Industrial Utopia'

The concept was that it would take place after the events of the first game in an old mining colony. Andrew Ryan would have built this the same time as the underwater city as a backup plan if the first one failed. Following the events of the original, this site would become active, the giant machine within the missile silo would begin creating an army of machines to (?) take over the world? enforce Ryans ideals? Expand the second site? I was thinking that after the first game your powers would fade and you would start to question the things that you had done. The player would explore this second site to find out more about their past, and to stop or aid the plans laid out by Andrew Ryan.

The images show the general path the player would take, the initial images of the train system and arriving at the factory would just be the intro credits, there wouldn't be much exploration other than the traincar interior. After their arrival, the player would explore the train yard and its interiors before making their way down into the mines and the main chambers. The majority of the game would take place underground in the mines and subways, keeping with the claustrophobic nature of first game....just not underwater. There would still be the Art Deco themed locales but the majority of the environment will be based around architecture and machinery seen in Paris and New York during the Industrial Revolution. There would be exploration and puzzle solving throughout the mines, the player would eventually get to a broken down subway station (not shown) which they would take to the mechanical museum where they would encounter the growing armies spewing out of the activated machine in the missile silo. The final scenes would take place during your attempts to deactivate/destroy/help the machine in the silo.

- Ben Mauro

Click to see the fullsized artwork.

Thanks for all your hardwork, Ben. The stuff you made me beautiful. I hope that the BioShock artbook, Big Daddy figurine, and tee shirt will help bring about more Bioshock-inspired artwork.