Bioshock > Characters > Background Characters
You do not meet with these people, as almost all of them are dead by the time your avatar arrives in Rapture. But their stories provide background into the rise and fall of the city.
A genetic researcher and colleague of Dr. Tenenbaum, Suchong was an opportunist willing to work with either Fontaine (whom he feared) or Ryan (whom he dissed as a cheapskate) to create the plasmids you use throughout the game. He was responsible for both Jack's accelerated growth and for his psychological conditioning for Fontaine's benefit.
Suchong also created the Big Daddies to protect the Little Sisters. This Suchong did too well: While working to imprint a Big Daddy on a Little Sister, Suchong slapped the girl for annoying him; the Big Daddy reacted by impaling Suchong with a giant drill bit.
She was Ryan's mistress, whom he lost interest in by the start of the civil war. McClintock was injured during an attack by Atlas' splicers, and further deformed by Steinman's surgery. Seeking to learn the cause of the civil war, she met Atlas and was persuaded to join his cause. McClintock was killed by Atlas when she discovered by accident that he was in fact Fontaine.
Ryan's chief contractor, McDonagh was a decent fellow frustrated by the neglect of Steinman, the machinations of Fontaine, the leaks that were starting to appear throughout the city, and the refusal of Ryan to see anything amiss. He was even more appalled by Ryan's reaction to the civil war: The murder of innocent people, the seizure of Fontaine Futuristics, the madness of the survivors from oversplicing. Finally fed up with Ryan, he tried to kill him. As the only person who understood the infrastructure of Rapture in its entirety, McDonagh's death and impalement marked the doom of the city.
Mary Catherine "Jasmine" Jolene was a well-built pole dancer at the Eve's Garden strip club in Fort Frolic's Poseidon Plaza. Ryan turned to Jolene's erotic attractiveness after McClintock's loss of beauty; and she was more than willing to make book off of that. But when she became pregnant, Jolene sold the embryo to Dr. Tenenbaum as Fontaine's agent. For that, Ryan brutally beat her to death. There is plenty of incriminating evidence of the murder in her room, but by the time you show up it doesn't matter anymore. Her relationship with Jack is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ryan's chief of security set up shop at Port Neptune and was more than happy to pursue smugglers by any means, including torture. Then his faith in Ryan was shaken first by Ryan's order for him to personally kill Sander Cohen's rival Anna Culpepper, then by Ryan's order of the death penalty for smugglers. Sullivan appears to have resigned after the order. As to his fate, it seems likely that Sullivan killed himself before the war broke out in earnest, for there are no tapes of his mentioning Fontaine's death or Atlas.
Dr. Julie Langford planted the trees and vegetation of Arcadia, and was willing to make money off of them — even going so far as to charge for the extra oxygen. Dr. Langford discovered a way to revive dead trees with the Adam-based Lazarus Vector. When Ryan killed the Arcadia forest with an herbicide (threatening Rapture's oxygen supply), Langford offered to help Jack create the Lazarus Vector. Ryan gassed Langford to death to stop her, but she left enough clues for Jack to work on his own.
She and her husband Sam were Eastern European immigrants who came to Rapture for a better life. They had a daughter Masha, whom Ryan's agents took from them in order to make her a Little Sister. When she and Sam discovered what Masha had become, they committed suicide in despair. You find their bodies (with a picture of Masha and the pills they took) in room #7 on the upper floor of the Fighting McDonagh tavern after unlocking the door (code 7533).
A short-order cook with a taste for good tobacco, who did not mind the upper-class twits of the city as long as they tip well. He was gunned down in the Marquis d'Epoque during the war, but left you with the code (7774) to the inner room of Robertson's Tobaccoria.
A popular British singer, among whose songs were those that made fun of Sander Cohen as Ryan's songbird
and Ryan's stableboy
, shoveling the dung of Ryan's corrupt policies with his songs. For that Ryan ordered her assassination, which Sullivan carried out while she was taking a bath.
Beekeeper and proprietor of the Silverwing Apiary at the Farmers Market. Denu threatened Julie Langford with a shotgun after the latter wore out her welcome by hanging around the hives too often. It's too bad Denu did not carry that gun on her person. You find her corpse with a jar of honey and that taped threat in front of the entrance to the tunnel leading to the Farmers Market; her shotgun lies under the counter at the Apiary.
An œnophile whose frustration with the low standard of living in Rapture gets worse when he discovers that the product of the Farmers Market's Worley Winery is watered down. Hey, at least the water is distilled.
Proprietor of the Footlight Theater, just below the Kashmir Restaurant. He was angry about the hole in the restaurant men's room and the stink coming out of it. You find his taped complaint in the women's room, next to the corpse that is probably his.
A freelance photographer whose specialty is hunting celebrities. He picked the wrong one in Fontaine, on whose elevator he was spying when Fontaine's goons caught and killed him. At least he learned and recorded the code to Fontaine's lift (5744) for you.
The name Pararazzi is an anachronism: There is only one of him, so the name should be Paparazzo; and the movie (Fellini's La dolce vita) from which the name came was not released until during the civil war. But never mind.