You spend hours making choices in a dangerous underwater city, only to learn you never had a choice at all. This episode explores the 2007 game BioShock, from Irrational Games and director Ken Levine, and how a project born from Electronic Arts rejecting System Shock 3 morphed from a space-station cult story to a Nazi laboratory to the Art Deco city of Rapture built by Andrew Ryan.

We cover the turbulent development after 2K Games bought the studio and the budget swelled to $25 million, the disastrous focus tests that led to redesigned opening levels and a new Irish accent for Atlas, the Ayn Rand-inspired objectivism behind Ryan, Levine's own reflections on displacement, and the ADAM economy of Splicers, Big Daddies, and Little Sisters. Then we get into the would-you-kindly reveal, Clint Hocking's critique of the conflict between gameplay v ...