The BioShock series is a collection of story-driven first-person shooters in which the player explores dystopian settings created by Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games. The first two games, BioShock and its direct sequel, BioShock 2, take place in the underwater city of Rapture in 1960 and 1968, which was influenced heavily by Ayn Rand's Objectivism. The third installment, BioShock Infinite, is set aboard the floating air-city of Columbia in 1912, designed around the concept of American Exceptionalism. Though Infinite is not a direct sequel to the previous games, the game is thematically linked; a short scene within the core Infinite game returns to Rapture, while the downloadable content BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea tie in many of the plot elements between BioShock and BioShock Infinite.
As a heavily plot-driven series of games, BioShock contains a long list of non-playable characters (NPC) with which the player interacts and which drive the games' respective stories.
BioShock Jack Jack is the silent protagonist of BioShock, whom the player controls throughout the game. He is first seen aboard an airplane, which crashes near a lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean containing a bathysphere terminal providing entry to Rapture. During his journey through Rapture, Jack encounters various gene-altering substances known as Plasmids and Tonics, which he uses to gain powerful abilities to defend himself. Jack experiences strange visions of his family while traveling, but eventually discovers that he is the illegitimate son of Andrew Ryan and singer Jasmine Jolene, "Andrew Ryan's Favorite Girl." After becoming pregnant, Jasmine sold her fertilized egg to Brigid Tenenbaum, an employee of businessman Frank Fontaine. Fontaine arranged for Jack to undergo genetic conditioning so that he would age rapidly and to follow any order given alongside the phrase "would you kindly." Atlas uses that phrase throughout the game to control the main character and his actions.
There are two endings for Jack depending on how many Little Sisters he saved and/or harvested throughout the game. In one ending, he lives out the rest of his life with the Little Sisters he saved; over time, they enjoy rites of passage like graduation, marriage, and having children of their own. At the end of the cutscene, Jack lies on his death bed, holding the hands of several ex-Sisters. (It is implied that Jack dies prematurely because he was genetically engineered to age rapidly.) The other ending shows him seizing control of Rapture and becoming just as power-hungry and destructive as Fontaine, hinting that all the ADAM he gathered has corrupted him into a Splicer. In the second part of the BioShock: Infinite DLC, Burial at Sea, it is revealed that the former ending is canon.
Andrew Ryan
Andrew Ryan (born Andrei Rianofski) is a business magnate who seeks to avoid scrutiny from governments and other forms of oversight, ordered the secret construction of an underwater city, Rapture, where men and women like himself could be free to achieve greatness on their own terms. When Ryan's vision for a utopia in Rapture collapsed into dystopia, he hides himself away and uses armies of mutated humans known as Splicers to defend himself and fight against those resisting him, including the player-character Jack. Upon meeting Jack face-to-face Ryan orders the mind-controlled assassin to beat him to death with his golf club, dying on his own terms. He is voiced by Armin Shimerman.
Atlas/Frank Fontaine
Frank Fontaine is the main antagonist in BioShock. He is a criminal mastermind who becomes the arch-enemy of Andrew Ryan as he attempts to seize power over Rapture. He is responsible for igniting the civil war that plunged Rapture into social collapse, as well as Jack's kidnapping as a baby. To escape from Ryan's forces, Fontaine faked his death and later took up the identity of Atlas, posing as the champion of Rapture's lower classes. Ryan feared Atlas' power and initially imprisoned him and his followers in a makeshift prison 2000 fathoms beneath Rapture, but they were able to escape and in 1959 launched an all-out war against Ryan. Atlas serves as Jack's guide for most of the game, luring him towards Ryan under the guise of trying to save his fictitious wife and son that he claimed Ryan had taken hostage. He betrays Jack after the death of Ryan and becomes the game's final boss, using ADAM to attain physical perfection and becoming a blue-skinned humanoid with enhanced abilities. He is killed when a number of freed Little Sisters swarm him and stab him to death with their ADAM needles.
Fontaine, in his Atlas guise, also serves as the main antagonist in Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode Two. In this prequel to BioShock, Atlas captures a Little Sister known as Sally. He forces Elizabeth, who in this reality is a nightclub performer, to find Ryan's chief physician, Dr. Yi Suchong. Elizabeth not only finds him, but also retrieves a canister of "Quantum Particles" that allow Atlas's main base of operations, "Fontaine Department Stores" to rise from its 2000-fathoms depth, promptly igniting the civil war that would destroy Rapture. Atlas then forces Elizabeth to retrieve his "Ace in the Hole", which turned out to be the phrase "Would you kindly...". After retrieving it, he orders his men to send Jack "home" before fatally striking Elizabeth on the head with a wrench, leaving her for dead.
Sander Cohen
One of the most prominent public figures in Rapture, Sander Cohen presents himself as a musician, filmmaker, artist, poet, and playwright based in Fort Frolic. As a result of Rapture's civil war and the chaotic months that followed, Cohen grew extremely paranoid and violently insane, becoming obsessed with inflicting pain upon others as a way of making sense of the violent world he now inhabited. The Splicers under his domination are often the subjects of Cohen's art "projects", such as being forcibly covered in plaster and paste and turned into statues. He is voiced by T. Ryder Smith.
Cohen also appears in the first chapter of Burial at Sea, where he is confronted in his private club about information on Sally. Cohen is shown painting male and female models dressed as mythological deities, electrocuting those who fail to follow his directions properly while complaining that his art is not appreciated enough. After briefly discussing matters with the protagonists, Cohen instructs them to dance for him before shocking them into unconsciousness and placing them in a bathysphere to Sally's last known location.
Brigid Tenenbaum
Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum is a geneticist who helped originally develop ADAM. She was originally born near the city of Minsk, Belarus. into a Jewish family with a German father. At the age of 16, she was sent via train to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was going to be experimented on by German doctors, notably Josef Mengele. Before Tenenbaum was to be prepared for testing, she observed Mengele and started correcting him, impressing the doctors so much that they allowed her to participate in experiments on other prisoners. At this time Tenenbaum discovered her love for science and due to her participation in the tests, she survived the Holocaust. Tenenbaum is a high-functioning autistic. Her absolute adoration of science and lack of social skills caused her to completely ignore what happened around her, including the horrific experiments she did, which continued into her adult years.
After arriving in Rapture, she had a bit of a struggle to get the recognition she deserved among the best and brightest, until she discovered the Sea Slug, which contained a substance that could replace cells, which led to the discovery of the wonder-drug ADAM, which allowed the citizens of Rapture to manipulate their DNA. With the help of Frank Fontaine, who provided financing to develop the drug, Tenenbaum become known as a scientific genius in the city. Tenenbaum also discovered that by putting the slug into a host, it would produce up to thirty times as much ADAM and the only hosts that proved effective were young girls. While Tenenbaum was the "mother" of the Little Sisters, Dr. Yi Suchong was the creator of the Plasmids. Much like her younger self, Tenenbaum was blind to what she was doing, exploiting little girls for her own scientific purposes. When the Little Sisters were first created, she had no regard for them or their lives, seeing the removal of the slugs as no different from removing life support from a terminal patient. Soon before the Rapture Civil War, Tenenbaum's maternal instincts were awoken, causing her to leave her Mercury Suites apartment and life to reside in the sewers of the abandoned residential complex Olympus Heights. Here Tenenbaum began rescuing Little Sisters via a Plasmid she developed, as she felt that they were her responsibility and began to care a great deal about their safety, calling them "little ones"; in return, they call her "Mama Tenenbaum". Tenenbaum was able to survive the fall of Rapture and continued to save Little Sisters in her hiding place.
During the events of BioShock, while in the Medical Pavilion, Jack approaches a lounge in the Surgery wing and sees a Big Daddy being killed by Splicers and thrown through a window. This Big Daddy was protecting a Little Sister, which now is left alone with the remaining Splicer. Just as the Splicer is about to strike the Little Sister, Tenenbaum emerges and shoots him. Tenenbaum warns Jack not to hurt her, while Atlas encourages him to harvest the Sister to get ADAM. When Tenenbaum questions Jack's morality, Atlas accuses her of hypocrisy, as she's the one that turned the girls into Little Sisters. While Atlas tries to convince Jack to kill the girl, Tenenbaum presents an alternative: a Plasmid that would safely remove the Sea Slug from the girls. The following events gives the player a choice of harvesting the Little Sisters or saving them with Tenenbaum's Plasmid. From this point on, Tenenbaum's perception of Jack is up to the player. If Jack saves the Sisters, Tenenbaum will show her gratitude to him by providing an ADAM gift for him after every third Sister he saves and an overall good attitude towards him. If Jack harvests the Sisters, he will not be granted gifts and she will repeatedly express her anger towards him. After the Andrew Ryan confrontation and reveal of Atlas' true identity in Hephaestus, Tenenbaum sends Little Sisters to save Jack from the hands of Fontaine by leading him into a vent, where Jack falls and blacks out. Jack wakes up in Tenenbaum's safehouse and finds that she has undone the "Would you kindly?" mind control conditioning that Atlas had exploited. Tenenbaum can be seen behind glass in an office in the safehouse, smoking and explaining to Jack what has occurred and what he should do next. After this, she serves as Jack's guide throughout the final third of the game and provides the narration during the final scene (which is affected by Jack's choice to save or harvest the Sisters). Sometime after the events of the first game, Tenenbaum leaves Rapture with an undisclosed amount of Little Sisters.
During the events of BioShock 2, eight years later, she returns to Rapture to rescue the last of the Little Sisters and find the cure for Splicing. She contacts Subject Delta during the beginning and guides him through the first two levels before being replaced by Augustus Sinclair, as she needs to help others, such as Charles Milton Porter. She is voiced by Anne Bobby.
Brigid Tenenbaum's personality and back story were largely developed by Ken Levine, who wanted a believable and flawed human which was managed with the combinations of her medical condition, ethnic background, and overall circumstances. Levine felt that her core characteristics - being a woman, autistic and Jewish - were not what defined her, but 'her absolute adoration of science' was what ultimately did.