Bioshock > Characters > Pivotal Characters
You interact with these characters directly through most of the game.
You, the player, find yourself crash-landing into the ocean in front of a mysterious lighthouse. From there you make your way through the ugly yet beautiful city, guided by Atlas, attacked by aggressors and Big Daddies, and persecuted by Ryan. And it only gets worse.
Andrew Ryan was an electrical engineer and industrialist, who founded Rapture on principles that we call Objectivism, as a community that stressed individual freedom and enterprise over social and community values. Ryan built Rapture to escape the dominion of both the United States and the Soviet Union, whom he regarded as nations ruled by thieving parasites
. To protect Rapture from these parasites, Ryan mandated one rule: No contact with the outside.
Ryan's beliefs blinded him to any idea that one could want power more than wealth and freedom. And his only law made the smuggling of goods from the surface lucrative. Thus did Ryan become his own worst enemy, for by the time he realized there was a threat to his power, that threat became his equal. As the war progressed, he enforced his anti-contact law with such utmost ruthlessness that he ended up forsaking all his other values.
A former New York Mafioso and con artist, Fontaine became rich first by fishing, then through smuggling, then through high technology with his Fontaine Futuristics front, then through his monopoly on Adam and plasmids, then finally through his charity fronts. The orphanage front supplied him with Little Sisters to cook up Adam; the poorhouse front gave him a loyal army of splicers to help him take over Rapture. In time he challenged Ryan for control of the city, sparking a struggle that in the end got him apparently killed. Ryan afterwards seized control of Fontaine Futuristics and the orphanage.
An Irish prole who appeared about the same time Fontaine was killed. He rallied the proles of Rapture and the remnants of Fontaine's army against Ryan and his cronies. He led a year-long war against Ryan, which ground to a stalemate after destroying or maddening the city's population. After you arrive in Rapture, Atlas enlists your help in getting his wife and child out of the city.
A genetic researcher who as a teenager survived the Nazi prison camps by helping the Germans in their eugenics experiments. She was hired by Fontaine to develop the potential of stem cells from a parasitic sea slug into Adam, plasmids and Eve. She also created the Little Sisters as Adam factories and (during the civil war) extractors. When Tenenbaum realized what she had done to the Little Sisters, she went into hiding while Fontaine sacked her apartment. Tenenbaum enlists your help in saving them.
The master of the Fort Frolic entertainment quarter. He and his ex-disciples get a page of their own.