2. Andrew Ryan – BioShock / Ayn Rand
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? BioShock is a tremendously inspired video game. This is crucial in creating the game’s leering atmosphere and engaging story. One of the game’s main figureheads also has a long list of coattails that he’s riding on.
Created by Irrational’s Ken Levine, Andrew Ryan is a stoic leader, abstaining from society and establishing his own Capitalist Utopia underwater. Most of his Objectivist philosophy is shared with that of Ayn Rand, prolific author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, two literary pillars of Objectivism. Both of them escaped Russia as children and came to America to avoid Communist tension, and in Atlas Shrugged, a character creates his own society called ‘Galts Gulch’ to house the ‘men of the mind’.
Galt’s Gulch later acquires the name ‘Atlantis’ which really pins down where Ken Levine and the team got their inspiration from. They are both societies created so that other people could never find and taint them. A real hedonistic paradise. Atlas himself is also a character in BioShock, showing just how far the inspiration is embedded into the game.
