Characters / BioShock

This is the page for characters introduced in the first BioShock game. For characters seen throughout the series, such as the Big Daddies, Little Sisters and Splicers, please see here.

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Protagonist

Jack

Voiced by: Nate Wells (English)^note Other Languages:Dmitry Polonsky (Russian)

^{Click here for his in-game model}

"They told me, 'Son, you're special, you were born to do great things.' You know what? They were right."

The protagonist of the first game, an American of rural origin who ended up in a plane crash over the Atlantic ocean and landed right next to Rapture's entrance in early 1960.

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• Abusive Parents: Before Jack was sent to the surface, Yi Suchong was one of these.
  Suchong: "Is that your puppy? She's very pretty..."
  Jack: "Thank you, Papa Suchong."
  Suchong: "Break her neck for me."
  Jack: "What?"
  Suchong: "Break that sweet puppy's neck."
  Jack: "No... please..."
  Suchong: "Break that puppy's neck — Would You Kindly..."
• A Good Way to Die: In the Good Ending, Jack raises five of The Little Sisters he rescued as his own children. They lovingly hold his hand when he finally dies of old age.
• And Then John Was a Zombie:
  • To pursue Fontaine and prevent him from leaving, Jack must voluntarily become a Big Daddy. Though the process is reversible (as he isn't surgically fused to the suit like the others), Fontaine claims the damage to his vocal cords isn't. His vocal cords recover in time to fight Fontaine, though, so it's possible Fontaine was just screwing with him.
  • The bad ending suggests Jack has succumbed to ADAM's pull, as the splicers are now loyal to him.
• All There in the Script: According to a Dummied Out passport texture◊ in the files for the first level, his surname, or at least that of his manufactured identity on the surface, is Wynand.
• Anti Anti Christ: Was raised to be an assassin for Frank Fontaine to kill Andrew Ryan so Frank can take over Rapture for himself. Should Jack save the Little Sisters then he becomes this after killing Frank as shown in the Good Ending.
• Bee-Bee Gun: His Insect Swarm plasmid.
• Booze-Based Buff: Drinking alcohol restores Jack's health at the cost of his EVE. With the Booze Hound Tonic, Jack actually gains both EVE and Health from drinking the bottles of alcohol he finds lying around Rapture.
• Brainwashed: Hypnotize Big Daddy, which makes the Big Daddies protect Jack. Not to mention the 'mind control plasmid', used on Jack during his childhood to mold him into an obedient Sleeper Agent.
• Camera Fiend: Jack can use a Research Camera to take pictures of the various different splicers he'll face in Rapture. Doing this helps him research them, giving him bonuses for fighting against them.
• Crash Course Landing: The story starts with Jack's airplane crashing into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, near the lighthouse that will take him to Rapture. He survived, the other 94 passengers on the plane did not. It is later revealed that the plane crashed because Jack hijacked and brought it down. Though in his defense, Jack didn't act under free will when he did this.
• Decoy Backstory: Jack has flashes of his past involving his parents and being raised on a farm. When he finally confronts Andrew Ryan, he discovers his entire past is a hypnotic fabrication; Jack is Ryan's 4-year-old son, genetically enhanced and artificially aged, and manipulated into coming back to Rapture as a living weapon.
• Distinguishing Mark: Jack has noticeable tattoos of chain links across both wrists. After discovering that Andrew Ryan's philosophy was the "Great Chain of Commerce", this provides a subtle hint to the audience that Jack's been in Rapture before. It's also obviously a clue for him being genetically engineered to be a slave.
• Elemental Powers: Gains some of these through the power of the game's plasmids:
  • Blow You Away: Cyclone Trap and the free Sonic Boom DLC plasmid.
  • An Ice Person: Winter Blast, which freezes his enemies, after which Jack can smash those ice sculptures into pieces.
  • Playing with Fire: Incinerate!
  • Shock and Awe: Electro Bolt.
• Featureless Protagonist: Averted, since he has a face. But it'd be justified if he didn't — he's actually the son of the antagonist, and he has had all his memories wiped before having them replaced with fake memories that are only alluded to fleetingly.
• Finger-Snap Lighter: With the Incinerate! plasmid, one snap and he lights something (or someone) on fire.
• First-Person Ghost: Jack has both of his hands visible at different times (left hand is Plasmids, right hand is guns), but his feet are missing, nor can the player ever see his reflection. Basically, in-game Jack is just a pair of sweater-sleeved arms, as revealed by this third-person mod. This also applies to his later conversion into a Big Daddy, in which Jack is STILL portrayed as a pair of sweater-sleeved arms, despite wearing a full-body diving suit.
• Foreshadowing: Early on, a Little Sister has this to say of Jack after finding him nearly dead.
  Little Sister: Look Mr. Bubbles, it's an angel! I can see light coming from his belly. Wait a minute, he's still breathing ... it's alright, I know he'll be an angel soon.
  • If Jack chooses to rescue the Little Sisters — which Burial at Sea establishes as being his canon choice — then he does become a sort of Guardian Angel to them.
• Friend to All Children: The Little Sisters see Jack as this if he chooses to rescue them.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Has blonde hair and canonically rescued the Little Sisters.
• Happily Adopted: If Jack rescues all the Little Sisters, then he adopts five of them and gives them a life they could never have had in Rapture. They hold his hand lovingly when he finally passes away.
• Hate Plague: The Enrage Plasmid, which can cause the targeted splicer to attack all other nearby enemies.
• Heroic Bastard: He's the protagonist, and he's Andrew Ryan's illegitimate son. He was sold as a zygote by his birth mother, an exotic dancer named Jasmine Jolene, to Fontaine so that he could be used to bypass Rapture's genetic scanners, which answer only to Ryan, his direct family members, and his inner circle.
• Heroic Build: It's strongly hinted that Jack has one of these. From the few pictures we see of him in-game, he looks very large and broad. Suchong's log notes hint that part of his genetic engineering was being made significantly more muscular than normal, to help him in combat. The fact that one good whack of a monkey wrench is not only enough to kill, but to kill straight without the Splicer agonizing on the ground is a pretty good clue. Having a Statuesque Stunner Jasmine Jolene as his biological mother might also play a factor.
• Heroic Mime: Downplayed. Aside from grunts of pain and panting after the plane crash, he speaks a grand total of one line in the entire game, during the opening cutscene. So, surgically altering himself to sound like a Big Daddy may not have been that bad for him after all. He is also heard as a child, in one of the audio diaries.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: There's food and drink absolutely everywhere in Rapture, and Jack can eat or drink it to recover Hit Points and/or EVE. He experiences no real adverse effects to eating every single food item he finds, making him seem like a bit of a Big Eater.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Just how he manages to lug around a pipe wrench, a revolver, a Tommy Gun, a pump-action shotgun, a crossbow, a Grenade Launcher, a flamethrower, multiple types of spare ammunition for all of the above, plus a bunch of Eve hypos and first-aid kits all at the same time without any inconvenience is never explained.
• I'm a Humanitarian: After reaching level two research of Spider Splicers, Jack has the ability to ingest their organs to restore some of his health.
• Implacable Man: It doesn't seem anything can stop Jack. Hordes of Splicers, Big Daddies, Rapture basically falling apart around him, and barely any of them come close to slowing him down.
• In the Blood: In the bad ending. Jack makes a play to take over the surface world — continuing Fontaine's legacy — and his sway over the splicers resembles that of Andrew Ryan. Subverted in the good ending, where unlike Andrew Ryan or Fontaine, he has no desire to control Rapture and absolutely refuses it when the Little Sisters offer the city to him.
• Incapable of Disobeying: One of the big reveals is that Jack will obey any instructions included with his Trigger Phrase "would you kindly". One of the audio journals features Jack being forced to break the neck of his own pet puppy while begging not to be given the order. This is also how Andrew Ryan dies on his own terms, ordering you to beat him to death rather than let you do it on your own.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks: With the "Natural Camoflauge" gene tonic, Jack can become completely invisible to enemies (while still being partially visible to the player) so long as he holds still, otherwise the invisibility will be broken.
• Kick the Dog: If one chooses to harvest the Little Sisters. A literal example via audio log, where it's revealed that as a child, Suchong's method of testing the mental conditioning was to force Jack to snap the neck of a puppy against his will.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Though it isn't like the people that he's stealing from are still around.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: He was trained by Fontaine in a complex effort to take control of the city.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Jack is the illegitimate, growth-accelerated son of Andrew Ryan and his mistress, Jasmine Jolene. Furthermore, he was raised/conditioned by Fontaine and Tenenbaum to be a slave, making them surrogate parents of sorts.
• Manchurian Agent: For Fontaine/Atlas, though anyone with know-how can subvert your orders. Andrew Ryan smugly demonstrates this by saying the trigger phrase, then ordering you about his office like a toy poodle. Just as he's got you at his mercy, Ryan instead orders you to kill him.
• Mind over Matter: Telekinesis. Just about anything can be picked up and thrown with his mind.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Even if Jack harvests the first Little Sister he encounters, he can still get the Happy Ending if he rescues all subsequent Little Sisters. The implication of this is that he was so horrified by the harvesting process that he resolved never to do it again.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He can bare a passing resemblance to a young Robert Wagner in his prime during the later period of The Golden Age of Hollywood, which is appropriate considering the game's setting in 1960.
• One-Man Army: The moment Jack picked up that wrench, the fates of many, many Splicers were sealed.
• Only I Can Kill Him: Only a blood relative can bypass Ryan's high-tech defenses and penetrate his command room.
• Opening Narration: Jack, the player character, looking at a picture of his parents. It's his only line in the game aside from an audio log near the end.
• Papa Wolf: In the good ending, he defeats Fontaine to save the Little Sisters and gives them the childhood that was stolen from them.
• Pet the Dog: Every time he rescues a Little Sister right next to the defeated Big Daddy and behind his back leaves a long, bloody trail of dead Splicers.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: In the good ending, Jack is the Spanner in the Works for Fontaine. In the bad ending, he pulls a Faustian Rebellion.
• Power Incontinence: Near the end of the game, his ability to use Plasmids is tampered with, and your selected Plasmid is randomized every so often. However, this randomization allows you to use Plasmids you don't currently have, and every time it gets swapped, your EVE bar is restored to full.
• Psychic Powers: Again, some of the plasmids such as Telekinesis, Target Dummy, and Sonic Boom.
• Raised in a Lab: Jack, is revealed not to be an ordinary human who ended up in Rapture by accident, but the biological son of the city's founder Andrew Ryan, who was taken from his mother upon birth by Doctors Suchong and Tenenbaum. They performed a number of experiments on him, such as installing Fake Memories and Trigger Phrases, subjecting him to Rapid Aging, and more.
• Reversible Roboticizing: Even though Frank Fontaine, alias Atlas is egging him about his transformation into a Bouncer, Jack is still able to return to being a normal human in time for the final fight.
• Self-Made Orphan: Against your will, you are made to climb to Andrew Ryan's office and bludgeon him to death with a golf club.
• Spanner in the Works: The Burial at Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite reveals that Elizabeth tricked Atlas into bringing him to Rapture because she knew that, despite Atlas intending to use Jack as a tool to take over the city, Jack would overthrow him in the end.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Jack has a chain-link tattoo on his wrists.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Triple-whammy: not only are you a test-tube baby conditioned to be the perfect obedient assassin, but you're also Ryan's bastard child — and you've been under mind control for the entire game.
• Trigger Phrase: "Would you kindly" (which makes him obey the speaker) and "Code Yellow" (which tells his brain to tell his heart to stop beating). It's implied there are more, but they aren't used.
• Tyke-Bomb: Born and bred to be Fontaine's secret weapon against Ryan.
• Ungrateful Bastard: If Jack harvests the Little Sisters, than he gets the Evil Ending. This ending begins with him killing the Little Sisters who stabbed Fontaine to death (thereby saving his life).
• Unscrupulous Hero: He will probably kill many splicers in a most painful way (but then again, they tried to kill him first) If he chooses to harvest any of the Little Sisters, he becomes a Nominal Hero. Of course, when he harvests all of them, he won’t even be an Anti-Hero, but worse than that. Conversely, Rescuing the Little Sisters makes him a Knight in Sour Armor.
• Unwitting Pawn: He was actually helping the bad guy seize control of Rapture, though he never actually had a choice in the matter.
  "Nice work, boyo!"
  • The Burial at Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite reveals that he was also this unknowingly for Elizabeth, who performed a Thanatos Gambit to trick Atlas into bringing Jack to Rapture, knowing that this would lead to Atlas' eventual downfall and that Jack would free the Little Sisters.
• Villain Protagonist: Potentially, if the player chooses to harvest the Little Sisters.
• Walking Spoiler: Impressively enough, pulled off with the protagonist. It's impossible to go into the details about his past without spoiling over half the game.
• Would Hurt a Child: If Jack chooses to Harvest the Little Sisters.
• Wrench Whack: His first weapon is a wrench, and it's likely his most used weapon, considering the number of tonics tailored specifically to it and the lack of ready ammunition for the other weapons.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Once Rapture's computer control has been passed to Fontaine, Fontaine drops the mask, locks the doors, and dispatches a squad of Security Bots. Thankfully, a Little Sister arrives to herd you into an air duct, leading to Tenenbaum's office.
• Younger Than They Look: Despite supposedly being a young man, Jack was actually born circa 1956, making him only four years old at the time of the game. This was due to his embryo having been genetically altered, Rapid Aging him to around the age of nineteen within his first year of life. It's heavily implied that his aging slowed down to a normal rate sometime afterwards, since his fake passport lists his year of birth as 1936, suggesting that he physically appears to be 24 years old in 1960.

Major Characters

Andrew Ryan

Has his own page.

Atlas

Voiced by: Karl Hanover (English)^note Other Languages:Vladimir Antonik (Russian)

^{Click here for his in-game model}

"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. These people will liberate themselves."

An Irish fisherman who guides Jack over his shortwave radio. He brought his wife and son to Rapture in search of a better life, but is now desperately trying to get them out. He is gradually revealed to be the leader of the Anti-Ryan rebellion.

He serves as a major character in the second half of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, demanding for Elizabeth's assistance in escaping from Fontaine's Department Store.

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• Accent Relapse: Fontaine goes from an Irish accent to a Bronx one when he reveals himself. Amusingly, the guy who voiced Atlas is actually Irish, doing an exaggerated version of an Irish accent. So, you end up with an Irish guy voicing a New Yorker pretending to be an Irish guy.
• Accent Slip-Up:
  • When he gets upset. It's especially noticeable at the end of the Burial at Sea DLC. As he's standing over Elizabeth, screaming at her to tell her what Suchong's code reads, he doesn't even bother putting on the fake Irish accent because of how mad he is, showcasing his underlying Brooklyn Rage.
  • Even when he's speaking calmly he sometimes uses distinctly American idioms, such as "like 4th of July" or "five-dollar words".
  • There's an interesting example when Andrew Ryan sets Rapture to self destruct, wherein he yells at Jack to "get in there and whack the chump before the whole joint blows". He still has his typical accent, but that's certainly not the kind of vocabulary you'd expect an Irishman to be throwing around.
• Action Survivor: He's one of the few remaining citizens who isn't spliced, though that changes once Jack recovers and begins hunting him. In a panic, Atlas/Fontaine douses himself with massive quantities of ADAM until he becomes unrecognizable.
• Bad Samaritan: He arranged for Jack to return to Rapture in the first place. Under the guise of a rebel who is fighting Ryan's regime, he coldly manipulates Jack into killing Ryan and handing the keys of the city over to Atlas.
• Big "NO!": Lets one out when the sub containing his family is destroyed.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: He's really itching to grease Elizabeth; he would sooner cave her head in than tolerate that smart mouth. When she laughs off his empty threat of a lobotomy, he gets hopping mad.
• Cast as a Mask: Despite being a pseudonym that Frank Fontaine uses, he has a different voice actor (in the first game, at least; in subsequent appearances, they're played by the same actor.) This is lampshaded in BioShock 2, where he comments that he has to work at making his accent sound convincingly like another person's.
• Characterization Marches On: In the first game, Atlas was able to present himself as a well-meaning and affable man who wanted to help out the main character by any means, as a testament to how well Fontaine was able to disappear into his other personas. Come Burial at Sea, and Atlas is far more ruthless, conniving and blatantly antagonistic towards the player character, indicating that Fontaine's Master Actor tendencies aren't quite as good as they seemed.
• Dark Messiah: Presents himself as a heroic revolutionary to the underclass of Rapture, despite being pretty brutal to his enemies and actually being Frank Fontaine, who doesn't give a crap about anyone except himself.
• Didn't Think This Through: His plan was to rally the poor and downtrodden as his forces for the revolution, starting with Fontaine Futuristics workers as his main recruiting base. The problem was that Ryan was already engaged with Fontaine and was thus ready to make a move against his workforce should they prove problematic. Atlas and the majority of his supporters were fairly easily rounded up into Fontaine's department store and sunk to the ocean floor.
• Even Evil Has Standards: At the beginning of Burial at Sea: Episode 2, one of his henchmen is playing Russian roulette with an unwilling Elizabeth, lying still and defenseless on the floor. When Atlas notices, he reprimands him and tells him to just put her out of her misery instead of tormenting her. Considering how he unhesitatingly becomes unfathomably cruel to her later to further his own goals, it seems that he can only be kind in passing.
  Atlas: This ain't a sportin' event, put a bullet in her. No need to torture the poor girl. We're not animals, you know.
• False Reassurance: Atlas scolds his lackey for playing Russian Roulette with Elizabeth instead of rubbing her out as ordered, grumbling that they're not animals and to just quit torturing her and put her down. This becomes darkly funny later when he later abuses her to no end and eventually kills her.
• Faux Affably Evil: He seems like a pretty decent, charming guy, especially with his working-class demeanor and Irish brogue. As we see in Burial at Sea, this goes away fast when Elizabeth starts defying him, and he later enthusiastically bludgeons her to death.
• Fauxreigner: Since Rapture is full of people of multiple nationalities with various accents, it's easy to get fooled into thinking that Atlas was raised in Ireland. You get little hints every now and then when the Irish accent slips on certain words (in particular, the description of the research camera), or when he uses distinctly American phrases like how Nitro Splicers are "sounding off like it's the fourth of July," Cohen being a "Section 8" (U.S. Army terminology for being judged mentally unfit for service), and an American football allusion. After the reveal, Fontaine himself even taunts Jack's gullibility by putting on the voice again with even more exaggeration than before.
• Flanderization: In the original BioShock, Atlas, while clearly hiding something about himself, is an affable, friendly and helpful resistance leader trying to help himself and others survive in a decaying city — a far cry from the vicious, Faux Affably Evil psychopath barely hiding that he's not who he says he is and not even making an attempt to win Elizabeth over to his side in Burial at Sea: Episode 2, resorting almost immediately to blackmail and murder. Presumably, as shown by how his subordinates don't bat an eye, he is far less charming in person for people he isn't outright using Mind Control on, especially after the New Year's Eve attack brought the civil war out into the open.
• Hero Killer: Beats Elizabeth to death with a monkey wrench at the end of Burial at Sea: Episode 2.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: He's even more thin-skinned than Ryan.
• Historical Beauty Update: In-Universe, the posters of him portray him as barrel-chested with a prominent square jaw and short hair. In Burial at Sea, his hair is grown out and messy, at the early stages of a receding hairline, has a light stubble, his cleft chin isn't as predominant, he's lost weight, and his face shape is different. This is somewhat justified because Burial at Sea takes place when he and his men are imprisoned, so he can't exactly maintain his personal grooming.
• I Gave My Word: In Burial at Sea, Atlas actually holds up his end of the bargain he made with Elizabeth and lets the Sally go free. This comes as a surprise, given what he acts like the rest of the game...
• I Lied: He sure doesn't believe in the letting the grass grow under his feet; Atlas has his boys chloroform Elizabeth the instant she delivers on her end of their deal!
  "Didn't your mum ever teach you not to put your trust in strange, foreign men?"
• Ideal Hero: He's a working-class hero who rallied an army against Andrew Ryan as part of a revolution. There are multiple posters of him rallying the people to his cause. This was deliberately invoked by Fontaine, who faked his death and donned Atlas as an alias so he could keep causing trouble for Andrew Ryan.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: He's a revolutionary resistance leader with a rather prominent cleft chin. It's the result of plastic surgery, to disguise Fontaine's features. This was purposely done since Fontaine, a notorious gangster, could only climb so high up the social ladder; as "Atlas", he sought to convince the city that he was the working-class hero it needed.
• Line-of-Sight Name: He names his fake son and his fake wife "Patrick and Moira". It is the title of a musical by Sander Cohen, for which the player finds some posters in two places: Fort Frolic and the Atlas Headquarters.
• Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: Following the first failed attack on Ryan's operations, Atlas and his boys were imprisoned in Fontaine's old haunt, which was then unmoored and allowed to drift away. Even in absentia, though, Atlas still had sympathizers in Rapture, and they kept in touch via telegraph. When he made his triumphant return, they were ready.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: After Atlas reveals he is actually Fontaine, he uses his radio connection to taunt you. He goes from malicious to incoherent by the time you reach the final level, by which time he's spliced out of his goddamn mind.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Too many examples to list here, the foremost being his cold-blooded, needless killings of Diane McClintock (hammered to a desk, causing it to cave in on itself) and Elizabeth in Burial at Sea (killed with a wrench). Atlas is not particularly fussy when it comes to dishing out death, clobbering Elizabeth before he's even checked to see if the letter she handed him is legible or not.
• Oireland: Irish actor Karl Hanover gives Atlas the most stereotypically thick Dublin brogue he can muster. He also uses a fair share of Irish sayings and phrases, and he overall carries himself with a folksy, unpretentious demeanor as is common with stereotypical Irish people. Of course, this is all actually invoked by Fontaine as a means of tricking you into letting your guard down, since it's easy for anyone to trust a friendly, working-class idealist with a charming accent.
• Perma-Stubble: After a week or two stranded on the sea floor, he looks like something caught in a fish net.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: As shown in BioShock Infinite in Burial at Sea -- Episode 2, he calls Dr. Yi Suchong a "slant", an offensive term for people of East Asian descent that refers to the slant of their eyes. Of course, he's not vilified for speaking that way. And it is Suchong.
• Rebel Leader: What he is revealed to be, though he stops considering himself one by the time he becomes a symbol of rebellion.
• La Résistance: How Atlas' followers view themselves.
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: Before interrogating Elizabeth about the whereabouts of the "Ace", Atlas fires up an old phonograph of The Platters singing "The Great Pretender." This song has great significance to Atlas himself.
• This Is No Time to Panic: His lukewarm assurances to Jack after he shoots up plasmids for the first time.
  (as lightning shoots from Jack's palms and he wails in terror)
  Atlas: Steady now. Your genetic code is being rewritten. Just hold on and everything'll be fine.
  (Jack falls off a balcony)
• Took a Level in Kindness: He's considerably less brash in the original game than he is in Burial at Sea, considering that the latter takes place during his time as a revolutionary.
• Torture Technician: Something of a hobbyist. He's chummy with Dr. Steinman and keeps up on all the latest medical procedures, or at least the painful ones. (Paradoxically, he has nothing but contempt for actual doctors.)
• Verbal Tic: He tends to use "Would you kindly" in a lot of questions. Justified because it's Jack's command phrase.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: He spends most of BioShock talking to Jack instead of meeting him face-to-face. The same goes for Elizabeth in Burial at Sea, though he does meet up with her.
• Walking Spoiler: It's impossible to talk about him at length without giving away his true identity.
• Wham Line: "Nice work, boyo!" It's not so much the line itself, as the context of how and when he says it. Right after he says it, Atlas gives off an Evil Laugh now that Jack was made to use Ryan's genetic key to give control of Rapture to Frank Fontaine. Atlas also reveals that he and Fontaine are the same person, along with dropping the thick Irish accent he'd been using before.
• Would Hurt a Child: By driving a scalpel into her brain no less. He also heavily pressures Jack to harvest the Little Sisters, with the excuse that they're not really children any more, even saying not doing so is putting his family's life on the line.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: He's presented as a heroic leader of the underclass in BioShock, and is humble and self-effacing in his interviews. In Burial at Sea, however, he behaves more like a Spear Counterpart to Daisy Fitzroy.

Brigid Tenenbaum

Voiced by: Anne Bobby (English)^note Other Languages:Elena Ivasishina (Russian)

^{Click here for her in-game model}

"What makes something like me? I look at genes all day long, and never do I see the blueprint of sin. I could blame the Germans, but in truth, I did not find tormentors in the Prison Camp, but kindred spirits. These children I brutalized have awoken something inside that for most is beautiful and natural, but in me, is an abomination... my maternal instinct."

A high ranking scientist of German-Jewish origin within Rapture, who mothered the Little Sister project and later came to view them as her surrogate children, in atonement for removing them from their parents and experimenting on them.

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• Alter Kocker: She's not that old and senile, but occasionally, bits and pieces of her Yiddish upbringing slip in her use of English.
• The Atoner: As mentioned above.
• Big Good: Of the first game, after Fontaine takes over. She briefly serves this role in the sequel.
• Les Collaborateurs: Despite her Jewish heritage, her love of science led her to become an aide to the Nazi scientists of Auschwitz.
• Do Wrong, Right: During her time imprisoned by Nazis, she helped the scientists by pointing out their errors. One angrily asked her why she, a Jewish child, would help her tormentors. Her response was that if they were going to commit such atrocities, they should at least get the science right.
• For Science!: Her initial outlook on her work, even to the point of collaborating with her Nazi captors.
• Germanic Depressives: A rather justified case.
• The Gift: When it comes to sciences, Tenenbaum has a natural gift which she utilized to help Nazi Scientists even while a child prisoner in their camps. This is highlighted by Suchong of all people in an audio log, who is both amazed and repulsed by her natural ability to conduct experiments with no prior training or notes.
  Suchong: That's quite a little monster Fontaine's dug up. When she does speak, which is almost never, her accent is thick and grating. Her hair is filthy and she seems to wear the same mustard-stained jumper day after day. But I've got to hand it to Frank: Tenenbaum is the all-time diamond in the rough. No formal training, no experience... but put her in front of a gene sequence, and she's Mozart at the harpsichord.
• Heel Realization:
  "One of the children came and sat in my lap. I push her off, I shout, 'Get away from me!' I can see the ADAM oozing out of the corner of her mouth, thick and green. Her filthy hair hanging in her face, dirty clothes, and that dead glow in her eye... I feel... hatred, like I never felt before, in my chest. Bitter, burning, fury. I can barely breathe. And suddenly, I know: it is not this child I hate."
• Hollywood Autism: Averted. An interview with Ken Levine confirms that she has autism, but she’s never portrayed as childlike, unable to take care of herself, or Literal-Minded. However, she's been a scientific prodigy ever since she was a little girl, but has very little in the way of social skills; the other characters, while appreciating her scientific innovations, find her creepy and off-putting.
• Horrible Judge of Character: In Burial at Sea - Episode 2, there's a letter from her to Suchong trying convince him to pull a Heel–Face Turn by appealing to his guilt from creating Little Sisters. It proved ineffective.
• Jerkass with a Heart of Gold: Her past not withstanding, she is often crude and a bit insensitive to you even if you've rescued the Little Sisters. That said, her heart is clearly in the right place, and she is fiercely protective of the Little Sisters.
• Mama Bear: She wasn't warm to the idea at first, but eventually grew into it.
• Mission Control: After The Reveal in the first game, and during the beginning parts of BioShock 2, as well as its DLC Minerva's Den.
• Motherly Scientist: Eventually became this.
• My God, What Have I Done?: As the above quote demonstrated, she came to realize the hell she put the Little Sisters through.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Her audio diary portrait◊ (in the first game, anyways) bears a striking resemblance to the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald.
• Pretty in Mink: One of her outfits includes a fur-trimmed cape.
• Redemption Earns Life: The only one of Rapture's leadership who tried to save those who were experimented on for the sake of the ADAM trade (the Little Sisters, Jack, and — to a certain extent — the Big Daddies, at least in the form of Subject Delta and especially Subject Sigma). She's also the only one of the leadership who survives the series.
• Restored My Faith in Humanity: Jack brings this about in her if he rescues the Little Sisters rather than harvesting them.
• Sole Survivor: She's just about the only adult to go to Rapture willingly and end up leaving alive, and is arguably also the last surviving member of the founders/city council (depending on how involved you think C.M. Porter really was beyond his work on the mainframe).
• Sudden Name Change: Her name was Bridgette Tenenbaum in the first game as seen when entering her apartment, but was retconned to Brigid in the Alternate Reality Game for BioShock 2 and used from then on.
• Teen Genius: She was correcting the methodology of trained scientists when she was only sixteen.
• Twofer Token Minority: She's Jewish and autistic, though neither one gets much focus as the developers consciously chose not to define her character by her identity.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The first two chapters of BioShock 2 imply she'll have as large a role as she did in the first game, then after meeting up with her, she flees from Lamb, sending Delta off to Sinclair. She came back in the Minerva's Den DLC and actually does appear on-screen at the end, when she and Sigma a.k.a. Porter leave Rapture for good.
  • Despite it practically revolving around the Little Sister plot and taking place well before she left Rapture, in Burial at Sea, she is only passingly mentioned and not by name.

Frank Fontaine

Voiced by: Greg Baldwin (BioShock), Karl Hanover (BioShock 2, Burial at Sea) (English)^note Other Languages:Oleg Shcherbinin (Russian)

"Spent the morning jawing with that Kraut scientist. She's damaged goods, all right. Just like all those chumps they scraped out of them prison camps. But she's no crackpot... she's gonna make me the kinda scratch that'll have Ryan look like he's runnin' a paper route. She just needs some supplies to get the ball rolling... and a friend to watch her back."

An infamous New York con man and former business rival of Andrew Ryan's who rose to prominence and power through the sale of prohibited goods. His later discovery and marketing of plasmid technology was instrumental in bringing about Rapture's civil war and downfall.

---

• Abstract Apotheosis: Not quite literally, but by the time of the game he's come to be a representation of both the ultimate expression of the city's values and the 'parasites' Andrew Ryan always hated; a man completely self-interested, smarter than those around him, and completely unencumbered by principles or moral scruples, and who used that to rise From Nobody to Nightmare- but also someone who relied on exploiting the system and tricking others into working to his own benefit more than their own, simply because that's the best way to increase his own power. And while Fontaine himself died when Ryan betrayed his own principles, his work was carried on by others, like Atlas and his rebellion, who were acting for the fair market that Fontaine used to rise to power. For the very good reason that Fontaine and Atlas were one and the same. To the end, Fontaine's actions were all for Fontaine.
• Alliterative Name: Frank Fontaine; he seems to have a knack for naming his businesses like this too.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Fontaine builds himself up into the city's leading drug baron. According to Burial at Sea, Suchong took a cue from Jeremiah Fink and experimented with peddling plasmids in beverage form. However, the cost of bottling ADAM far outweighed that of the syringes, causing a steep drop in profits; Fontaine ordered him to cut it out, adding that "the boys in marketing" could come up with a flimsy excuse to roll back their product line.
• The Alcatraz: Fontaine's shopping center. Following his last stand with the police, the remnants of Fontaine's army were hounded into the department stores and cut loose — literally, the entire hub was uncoupled from the city and sunk. When Elizabeth restored the district to its rightful position (via the Lutece particle), the prisoners swarmed Rapture and the war began in earnest. In Burial at Sea, the mall serves as a preview of Rapture's fate: it's swarming with masked maniacs, and beginning to flood.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • For Andrew Ryan. Although they initially had a civil relationship when Fontaine first arrived in Rapture, the two of them very quickly became bitter rivals when Fontaine Futuristics starts becoming more successful than Ryan's own businesses. Even when Ryan seemingly eliminated his competition, Fontaine still remained a thorn in his side in the guise of Atlas, sparking a revolt within Rapture that ultimately destroys Ryan's city and allows Fontaine to win.
  • To Brigid Tenenbaum. Though the two were initially close partners when first developing and selling ADAM together, Tenenbaum's gradual realization of the horrors of what she was doing to the Little Sisters caused friction between the two of them, resulting in Fontaine firing her. After Andrew Ryan's death and discovering Atlas's true identity, Tenenbaum works with Jack to take down Fontaine once and for all.
  • And finally, to Jack himself. After being coldly discarded by Fontaine after he was used to kill Andrew Ryan and give Fontaine the keys to Rapture, it's no wonder that Jack wants to do everything in his power to take down the man at any cost, even going to the extent of turning himself into a Big Daddy. In turn, Fontaine rages at Jack for his supposed "betrayal", and splices himself up with all the ADAM in Rapture to make himself powerful enough to kill him.
• At Least I Admit It: How he views his conflict with Ryan (and Sofia Lamb, when she was active); they're both cons, but Ryan is a con who's deluded himself into thinking he's honest, while Fontaine remains fully aware that he's a conman. Because of this, Fontaine is willing to fake altruism because he knows that the objectivist cause Ryan champions is just as fake, while Ryan refuses to make nice because he thinks charity contradicts his ideals.
• Badass Boast:
  • "COME AND GET IT, MOOK!"
  • "You think you got power? You're 20 watts, and I'm the lights of Broadway!"
  • "You've got nothing but deuces and threes, kid!"
• Bald of Evil: Quite a shiny dome he's got there. One wonders how he was able to pass so well as the fully-haired Atlas. BioShock: Rapture reveals that he shaves his head because "the ladies like him bald". It likely makes it easier for him to disguise himself, as well: His Lex Luthor-ish dressing room is hidden within his nightclub in Burial at Sea: Among the items is a giant dressing room mirror, some costumes and numerous wig stands.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: His end boss form is naked but with no visible genitalia. Apparently, hulking yourself up with ADAM causes your privates to wither away.
• The Barnum: He's as phony as a rubber check. Frank expresses amusement in his diary that no one in Rapture gave thought to who would scrub the toilets. They can't all be captains of industry. This led him to believe that Rapture's citizenry was really gullible; experience bears out this belief.
  "Rapture: paradise of the confidence man."
• Big Bad: He becomes the main antagonist of the first game after Ryan’s death. Though, he was technically pulling Jack's strings the entire time.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With Andrew Ryan. He is just as responsible for the fall of Rapture as Ryan and is the one who engineered Jack’s creation and set up the plane crash that brought Jack to Rapture.
• Breaking Speech: After Jack frees himself from his mind control conditioning, Fontaine tries delivering a few of these to stop him, trying to convince him that there's nothing left of Rapture worth taking. Of course, Fontaine says this while he himself wants Rapture, so he's coming off as quite a hypocrite.
  "You think you're some kind of hero? I ordered you up from Suchong like a Chinese dinner: a little from column A, a little from column B. What do you plan on going back to? Your fake family? Your phony dreams? Putting you out of your misery will be the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you."
  "Look around you, kid. You think two-bit heroics count for a fig in this pit? You're staring down the puke stain of Ryan's busted dream. You think there's something worth saving down here? Then you deserve to gargle with the rest of these scrubs."
  "Look around you! There's nothing to save! Rapture's a mausoleum, a god damn cemetery funhouse. And you and the Kraut is just ghosts. Just a matter of time till you realize it."
• Brooklyn Rage: It even slips through his Atlas disguise when he gets angry enough in Burial At Sea!
• Boisterous Weakling: Zig-zagged. For how frightening Fontaine looks on paper, the man himself is merely a very smart conman who is good at manipulating people into doing his bidding, especially when he has people who do his dirty work without questioning him. When it comes to actually fighting someone though, Fontaine never attacks unless the person is weaker than him or is unable to fight back; it's telling that when Jack starts going after him, his first instinct is to run off and over-splice himself to get the upper hand by any means necessary.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He's a blood-soaked gangster who kicks the dog as a matter of routine. The problem is, so does Suchong, Ryan, Cohen, et al.
• Carrying the Antidote: Fontaine had Lot 192 created as an antidote to a Mind Control plasmid as an insurance policy, fearing the plasmid might be used against him one day. Jack gulps the serum in order to rid himself of Fontaine's remaining Trigger Phrases, which Tenenbaum couldn't dismantle on her own.
• Cement Shoes: The freezer in Fontaine's Fisheries doubles as a dumping ground for mooks who decided to cross him. "Frank Fontaine" is the name of a fishing mogul who was unceremoniously dumped off the side of his own boat, courtesy of Frank Gorland.
• Character Name Alias: While his real name is Frank, his real last name is unknown (and it's stated that only a handful of people in the world know it).
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Fontaine has a rather eerie habit of betraying everyone who works for him, usually in a fit of pique. One minute, he's recruiting lower-class workers with the promise of making some real money. The next, he's pocketing their smuggling profits and threatening to turn them in to the cops if they complain. His most ardent fan, Diane McClintock, was murdered on the tiny suspicion that she might connect Atlas with his old identity. Elizabeth ended up becoming the linchpin to Atlas' escape from prison and his return to Rapture; Frank executed her once her usefulness was at end — and then panicked once he realized it wasn't. This ends up killing him in the end, as he had two protagonists willingly working for him at one point, and he could easily have kept their service, if not outright loyalty, simply by not trying to kill them at the first opportunity (though at least in Elizabeth's case she was almost goading him into killing her).
• Con Artist: His occupation. While he goes about it with Pragmatic Villainy, Fontaine's still in Rapture only for the money and the power, running a racket that feeds the poor and makes people like and respect him so they willingly give Fontaine what he wants from them. That way, Fontaine doesn't have to dirty his hands taking what he wants by force. This scheme of his worked so well that Fontaine even started beating Andrew Ryan at his own game, in his own city, prompting the civil war that erupted across Rapture.
• Create Your Own Villain: Ryan was moved by Fontaine's flattering letters to invite him to Rapture. Ryan at first observed Fontaine's rise to power with pride, pointing to him as example of what Rapture was built to foster. Even when Fontaine's empire began to compete with his own, he merely admonished Fontaine's opponents to "offer a better product." And the cancer spread from there. Fontaine may be a smuggler and a brute, but his attempts at legitimate businesses were big successes. Being hounded by Ryan's private police — who employed violent measures to crack down on the smuggling ring — pushed Fontaine into more overt criminality. Fontaine Futuristics did one better, giving Frank enough clout to challenge Andrew Ryan directly. Again Ryan responded with extra-legal measures to smother his business, and again Fontaine dug in and turned to crime — this time building up a splicer army. Even if Fontaine was like Gandhi, it's unlikely that Ryan would tolerate any competitors on his turf for long.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: A downplayed version. He could have made his fortune legitimately and been a great businessman, but he only found joy in pulling off a con. As a result, he couldn't help himself and broke the few rules Rapture had. But as an experienced crook Frank was able to keep this going for a very, very long time, always managing to be "where the evidence wasn't." He arguably would've been able to keep operating in Rapture for as long as he wanted if Ryan hadn't gotten greedy and decided to play Frank at his own game by taking his company from him by force. Even then, Frank was playing that game longer than Ryan and managed to fake his death and set the stage for a comeback.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: Frank was just a hoodlum when he left the Bronx. Few months in Rapture, dude's got his own office towers.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Unlike Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb, Fontaine never had any desire to create a better society. He even started a civil war on Rapture as Atlas, simply to claim the city as his own and turn it into the capital of his criminal empire.
• Diabolical Mastermind: He eventually gains a lot of power within Rapture, even rivaling Andrew Ryan's, because "he's got the ADAM, and that makes him the guv'nor". His smuggling operations continue, but with Fontaine tucked safety away in his office across town. He can even throw some of his own men to the wolves if he has to, knowing the evidence will never point to him.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: By his own admission, Fontaine is such a Con Artist that he can't help himself but to go against what anyone else wants him to do, because that's the only way Fontaine enjoys himself. By game's end, all Jack really wants is to just leave Rapture. Yet Fontaine won't just let him do it. And had Fontaine not been so needlessly antagonistic towards Jack, he might have survived that game's events.
• Didn't See That Coming: Fontaine's plan to use Jack to take over Rapture while being a Voice with an Internet Connection was a brilliant one, and it all works completely in his favor without a hitch. Unfortunately, he didn't expect for Tenenbaum to rescue Jack and give him the means to fight back, forcing himself to sell his sanity for the sake of raw power to fight against his former asset.
• Dirty Coward: When Jack starts going after Fontaine after freeing himself of his hypno triggers, Fontaine immediately starts running away from him, with his retaliatory efforts limited only to slowing Jack down and threatening to stay out of his way. It's clear that when actual danger is facing him, Fontaine would prefer to avoid direct confrontation unless he has the upper hand.
• The Dog Bites Back: Fontaine is stabbed to death by a throng of Little Sisters, whose suffering he is the direct cause of.
• The Dreaded: It's often mentioned how the inhabitants of Rapture are terrified of Fontaine, even years after his apparent death. Dr. Suchong, one of the few people in Rapture not to be impressed by him, points out that it's all an image Fontaine himself took great measures to cultivate, and that beneath it all he's just a very skilled flim-flam man.
  Ghost 1: "Hey, Fuck Fontaine."
  Ghost 2: "You don't fuck Fontaine, Fontaine fucks you!"
• Drunk on the Dark Side: After overdoing a self-defensive splicing, Fontaine goes completely nuts. He constantly begins rambling about how good ADAM feels, and how he needs more to stop Jack.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In Rapture, Fontaine is deeply offended when Ryan insinuates that the reason why the orphanages he's been setting up only house girls is because he's molesting them. While it's probably because he is the one being accused, Fontaine's genuine disgust at the mere thought of doing such a thing shows that there exist moral lines that even he wouldn't dare cross.
  • In the same book, Fontaine is also very disturbed by the methods Suchong and Tenenbaum come up with for producing more ADAM. However, he quickly changes his tune when he finds out how much money this could make him.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Downplayed. Frank would sooner step on your face than help you, but he's also a lifelong confidence man who at least understands compassion well enough to fake it. When coming up in Rapture, this let him play the crowd and look more benevolent and loving than Andrew Ryan, who couldn't even understand the need for charity well enough to so much as fake it. That said, the only flaw in his masterplan which led to his downfall, was not anticipating Tenenbaum growing a conscience and empathy for the Little Sisters, leading to her turn on him and her support of Jack.
• Evil Gloating: It's practically endemic to the man. After The Reveal he divides his time between stopping your heart with code phrases and pontificating about how awesome his (admittedly, rather impressive) accomplishments are. He even brags to himself in his audio diaries, which at one point almost gets his cover as Atlas blown.
• Evil Is Petty: Fontaine had always a grudge towards Ryan. He didn't just want to take everything from him, he even went the extra mile to annoy Ryan at any opportunity he got, even when it didn't benefit him at all. What makes this even more petty is that Ryan never did anything to him. Fontaine started envying and hating Ryan the moment he saw the latter on a newspaper!
• Evil Laugh: After Jack beats in Ryan's skull with a golf club, Atlas begins to drop the Irish brogue while laughing maniacally.
• Eviler than Thou: Fontaine might not be "the greatest electrical engineer of our time", but when it comes to cutthroat business practices, he's Ryan's equal.
• Expy: Ken Levine stated that Fontaine was inspired by Keyser Söze, being a charismatic yet brutal and unrelenting crime boss who is feared by all who know him. The fact that Fontaine spends much of the game pretending to be somebody else is also an interesting parallel to Söze.
• Faking the Dead: The more Ryan fought to suppress him, the stronger Fontaine got. Finally, he decided the best course of action was to become a martyr, thus completely discrediting Ryan.
  "As if this was the first time I had to dodge a bullet! They're comin' to my house expecting a show, but they're gonna get a disappearing act. Say goodbye to Fontaine... *cocks shotgun* And hello to Atlas!"
• Fatal Flaw:
  • His ego. He's very cunning and all, but the guy sure likes to show off how smart he is. It comes to bite him when he decides to not only try to kill Jack but even gloat that the latter was only his pawn.
  • His impulsive behavior, a flaw that he admits having in the Rapture novel. While he's a very good planner, he is unable to wait years for his plans to come to fruition and decides to speed things up in order to get to his goals faster. He thus keeps getting into plans whose risks keep rising, until his final plan ends up leading to his death.
• Faux Affably Evil: Befitting a con artist such as himself, Fontaine can turn on the charm at the drop of a hat, and has a lovely public face. Beneath that, he's a cold-blooded killer who values no one and nothing but himself. This extends to his treatment of Jack. Fontaine claims that Jack is the closest thing he's ever had to a son. He says this after having manipulated Jack into killing his own father, then trying to kill him in a slow and painful fashion.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The powers he has during the final battle. In that order.
• Final Boss: A very spliced up Fontaine is fought at the end of the game.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He was just a lowly bookie in the old days. Though a twist of fate, one of Ryan's shell companies did business near a dockside bar owned by Frank (seized from one of his debtors). Fontaine did some sniffing around, eventually determining that Ryan was building something big at the bottom of the Atlantic. Adopting the reputable identity of Frank Fontaine, he took over a fishery and offered his services to Ryan. Of course, Fontaine brought a few 'associates' with him...
• Full-Frontal Assault: His appearance as the Final Boss has him completely naked as he fights you, presumably because his rampant Splicing has made him grow so large no clothing available would fit him. Developer Ken Levine later apologized for this on Twitter.
• Functional Addict: Fontaine admitted to trying drugs on the surface and likely drinks given the alcohol collection in his penthouse. However, he claims to Jack he knows how to be professional with his products and never once spliced in all his time in Rapture. Once Jack corners him, however, he goes ballistic and splices himself with all the ADAM he's hoarded.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Fontaine (believably) states he never spliced until his boss fight, when he's in a panic because he knows Jack intends to kill him, but given his in-game model reuses a Wader Splicer model, he shows ADAM-induced physical deformities. This is because the developers ran out of time and money to create new models, and the player never gets close enough to see him very well, so they assumed no one would notice.
• Gambit Roulette: Though Fontaine's plan was ultimately successful (at least up to the point his creations teamed up and killed him), it does seem a bit needlessly complicated and dangerously susceptible to bad luck.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: Was well aware of the trope, hence why he avoided splicing himself since he knew "mixing business and pleasure" would end poorly. He plays it straight in desperation in his boss fight, splicing himself with everything he's got when he realizes Jack is coming for him.
• Gone Horribly Right: When he realizes that Jack has become a Big Daddy and is not going to stop hunting him, Fontaine decides to finally start splicing in an attempt to make himself tough enough to take him on. He manages to do exactly that, but at the cost of his sanity (though he doesn't seem to mind all that much).
• He Knows Too Much: Diane walking in on "Atlas" at an inopportune moment. Taking a powder, perhaps? A tabloid reporter met his untimely end while snapping photos outside of Fontaine's penthouse. His corpse is found rotting next to the tripod camera.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He had Jack created to kill Andrew Ryan... only for Jack to turn on him when Fontaine showed his hand and tried to kill him, while Jack also got a warning from Ryan himself that was used against Frank. He was also partly responsible for creating the Little Sisters, a group of whom swarm him to deliver the killing blows. They even kill him with the very ADAM extractors he had them use.
• Hypocrite:
  • He rants about Jack "betraying" him at the end when in fact it was Fontaine who attempted to throw Jack under the bus when he got control of Rapture. He also expects you to believe him when he repeatedly accuses Tenenbaum of being untrustworthy, despite the fact that he spent the entire game lying about his identity and intentions while manipulating you via Mind Control.
  • Fontaine also begins plays the family card the closer Jack gets to him, claiming that he's the closest thing Jack ever had to a father. This is the same man who previously left Jack for dead because he refused to indulge in "mixing business with friendship", making it clear he's only saying these things to vainly appeal to Jack's humanity.
• Humanoid Abomination: At the end of the game, Fontaine splices himself up with as much ADAM as possible, turning him into a gigantic, naked muscle-bound creature that glows orange all over.
• Humiliation Conga: Downplayed, but the ending of the first game is not kind to him. He loses all power over Jack, so he has to oversplice to stand a fighting chance. During the fight, he gets a beating from the man he used for all of his life as a tool, and needs help while he refuels to keep fighting. Then, when he is fully defeated, the Little Sisters gang up on him and beat him to death.
• I Have Many Names: Gorland, Barris, Wiston, Moskowitz, Fontaine, Atlas and... Wang? And turns out not even Fontaine is his real name.
  Frank: Hell, once I was even a Chinaman for six months.
• Just You and Me and My GUARDS!: "You think I'm alone in this world?" Fontaine's final boss form summons various splicers and drones to distract you while he refuels.
• Karmic Death: He is done in by a group of Little Sisters, like those he victimized in his "orphanage" and encourages Jack to harvest throughout the game. Doubly so come the Burial at Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite when it's revealed that Fontaine's downfall was planned by Elizabeth, the same person he beat to death with a wrench. To add insult to his injury, you can literally beat Fontaine to death with a wrench. For even more karma, Fontaine was in the midst of a Villainous Breakdown, ranting about how he was responsible for Jack's life and how he's the best family he could ask for. In the good ending, Jack returns to the surface and raises a group of Little Sisters as a real family.
• Kill and Replace: BioShock: Rapture reveals that he murdered and stole the identity of the real Frank Fontaine in order to take over Fontaine Fisheries and gain access to Rapture.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Fontaine couldn't take Ryan on directly — even as the mogul's power base was rapidly eroding — and needed to assemble a mob to do the heavy lifting: first as a crime boss, then as a leader of the downtrodden, and now as Jack's hypnotic controller.
• Like a Son to Me: He claims Jack is the closest thing he's ever had to a son, although mostly when he is cornered.
• Malevolent Mugshot: His bald mug adorns the logo for Fontaine Futuristics.
• Manipulative Bastard: To the core. Fontaine's charities and homes for the poor were ultimately little more than recruiting grounds where he got the people he was supposedly helping hooked on plasmids and turned into his splicer army.
• Mask of Sanity: The greatest advantage that Fontaine had over Ryan was that while both were ruthless mob bosses, Fontaine knew how to pretend otherwise, while Ryan never hid his contempt for everyone around him. This made Fontaine seem much more reasonable and charitable by comparison. Fontaine even knew how to pragmatically lean into this perception, helping people out and pretending it was a charity while secretly building an army and conspiring against Ryan.
• Master Actor:
  • His background in the theatre has given him the uncanny ability to slip into and out of alter egos effortlessly, as well as making him an excellent liar.
  • Downplayed in Burial at Sea. While Fontaine keeps up his Atlas persona for much of the game, he acts much more impulsive, threatening and Obviously Evil than he does (or will do) in the first game, making it feel less like he's disappeared into Atlas this time around. He also slips into his Brooklyn Rage whenever he gets really stressed and angry, indicating Fontaine's ability to stay in character isn't quite as easy for him when things aren't going his way.
• Master of Disguise: He can render himself totally unrecognizable with the right clothing, makeup, accents, and vocal inflections. He even mentions having spent six months as a "Chinaman" once. This might not sound so impressive when you consider that ADAM makes Magic Plastic Surgery possible and easy, but if BioShock: Rapture is taken into account, he did that before coming down to Rapture.
• The Mob Boss Is Scarier: Electrodes? Pfft. Whatever.
  Jimmy: Whatever Ryan thinks he can do to me, FONTAINE CAN DO DOUBLE!
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: After getting the keys to Rapture through manipulating Jack for much of the game, Fontaine could've just told him to kill himself and wash his hands of his greatest asset without fear of it ever turning on him. Instead, he chooses to brag and mock Jack for being his wind-up toy and getting him what he wanted, which angers Jack enough to throw his lot in with Tenenbaum to get revenge. By the time Fontaine stops toying with Jack, he's disabled his hypno triggers, and is fully intent on taking him down without anything getting in his way.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: With his Bald of Evil, Brooklyn Rage and being a villain, he can pass off as a movie villain role played by Telly Savalas with a mustache during the 1960s.
• Not So Harmless: McDonagh discovered this when he led a raid on the smuggler's hideout. Somebody tipped Fontaine off.
  (bewildered) Them Splicers come screaming out the woodwork, burping fire, spitting ice... Like demons out of the Bible they were! Never seen nothing like it. It wasn't a business he was building, it was an army!
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Being an experienced con artist, Fontaine rarely breaks character. The one time he did is when he is in a tremendous amount of stress while interrogating Elizabeth to the point he doesn't even bother hiding his Bronx accent. He does so again when Ryan threatens to blow up Rapture out of spite, completely forgoing his Atlas persona and angrily demanding Jack kill Ryan before it's too late.
• One-Winged Angel: He confronts you after splicing himself into a hulkish superman with multiple plasmids and more than a passing resemblance to the mythical Atlas. It's twice as ironic when you realize that in the end he's defeated by a bunch of little girls.
• Only Sane Man: A villainous version. Fontaine noticed that Rapture's concept was inherently flawed (because nobody considered the necessity of menial labor) as soon as he heard about it, and comments as such in his diaries. However, he decides that because the only people who'd live in such a place would be convinced of their own cleverness but also lack an understanding of consequences, it was a perfect place for him to exploit as a con man.
• Parental Abandonment: Rapture tells us that he was dropped off at an orphanage when he was young because his father couldn't be bothered to take care of him, and that as an adult he drinks and sleeps around because it distracts him enough that he doesn't have to think about it.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Refers to Tenenbaum as "The Kraut" almost every time he mentions her. He also mentions having spent six months pretending to be a "Chinaman"
• Posthuman Nudism: In the finale, Fontaine splices himself up with all the ADAM he has on hand, transforming himself into a gigantic, hugely-muscled superbeing empowered with numerous Plasmid abilities. Also, he's naked - albeit with Barbie Doll Anatomy - partly because his clothes no longer fit him but mostly because Splicing has left him too deranged to care.
• Posthumous Character: As one of the main instigators of the uprisings against Ryan, Fontaine was gunned down by Ryan's men prior to the game. Except not. He used that opportunity to fake his death and return as the Rebel Leader Atlas.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He opened up a poorhouse, feeding the hungry and taking care of people who were down on their luck, because it was a way for Fontaine to be a better Con Artist. In Fontaine's mind, there was no need to try and steal from people if he could just make them hand everything over. Fontaine doesn't really care a wick about anyone but himself, but he's at least capable of acting like he cares. This put Fontaine in stark contrast to Andrew Ryan, who seemed incapable of showing empathy to people who were down on their luck. This, in turn, made Fontaine a Villain with Good Publicity who was capable of rousing an army of blue-collar workers to go after Ryan and his goons, all while Fontaine just sat back and watched. This also allowed Fontaine to, in Andrew Ryan's words, "be where the evidence isn't" whenever the cops or Ryan's goons came knocking, enabling Fontaine to continue his schemes in Rapture pretty much unopposed because he had so many people willing to help him out.
• Psychological Projection: Fontaine thinks that everyone is a self-serving, exploitative opportunist like him, which leads to him not trusting anyone and will attempt to backstab his own ally at the first opportunity, it also never crossed his mind why Tenenbaum would rather save the little sisters than harvest them for ADAM.
• Sanity Has Advantages: When Fontaine was all by himself in Rapture, he was a devious conman who was successful in manipulating everyone around him, to the point where he was successfully able to fake his own death and pretend to be somebody else without anyone the wiser. He also avoids anything to do with splicing, due to a fear that "mixing business with pleasure" would be detrimental to him. Fontaine ends up proving himself right later in the game, as once he realizes that Jack is going to put him down no matter what, he splices himself up out of panic, and becomes so Drunk on the Dark Side that he becomes a deranged Humanoid Abomination who wants nothing more to destroy Jack and anyone in his way.
• Sanity Slippage: When Fontaine realizes that Jack intends to enact revenge on him, he immediately dives headfirst into splicing himself so he'll be strong enough to kill him. Unfortunately, the ADAM inside Fontaine affects him so much that he begins becoming even more deranged and sociopathic, rambling about Jack's "betrayal" and desire to get more ADAM.
• Satanic Archetype: If Andrew Ryan is (ironically) the God of Rapture then Frank Fontaine would be the Devil of Rapture. He's a Con Man who sets up charity services for the indigent and less-than-well-off as a front for smuggling and human experimentation (including getting them addicted to ADAM and turning them into splicers), akin to the Deal with the Devil Satan makes on the most vulnerable. His Master Actor abilities allowing him to convincingly fake his death and reappear as somebody else with people none the wiser harkens to Satan always appearing as someone innocuous before luring somebody into their trap. The fact that the player can become something akin to the Messianic Archetype towards the Little Sisters by saving them (doing so would grant the good ending, which has been canonized and also makes him the Anti Anti Christ) futher highlights Frank as BioShock's equivalent of the Devil.
• Secret Identity: He isn't the real Frank Fontaine at all, merely a skilled and ruthless con artist named Frank Gorland (which probably isn't his real name either) who murdered the real Fontaine so he could take over his fishing business and gain access to Rapture. He is also the real identity of Atlas.
• The Sociopath: Fontaine was a vicious animal to begin with, and even more so once Ryan had him on the run.
• Sore Loser: In an Audio Diary where he threatens and belittles Suchong for changing to Ryan's side, he claims he has never lost with dignity in his life.
• Super Mob Boss: Effectively fits all the check points for one and pretty much embodies the trope. After monopolizing ADAM, he had it used to create an army of super powered Splicer mooks to help his illegal enterprise in Rapture and eventually overdosed on ADAM to give himself powers as well.
• Super-Strength: One of the few gene-tonics he's been willing to use before the final boss battle; during the climax, he uses it to create obstacles that can slow Jack's pursuit.
• Take Over the City: This was his original goal. Now that Rapture stands in ruins...
• Take Over the World: Fontaine's new dream is to unleash ADAM on the surface world.
• Thanatos Gambit: As McDonagh puts it in an audio log, Fontaine "wasn't overly inconvenienced by his own demise" when it came to forwarding his plans for Rapture. This is the first of many hints that Fontaine isn't really dead, but rather faked his death and is still intending to grift Rapture as much as possbile.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Fontaine is an interesting case: He's the ultimate "parasite", according to Ryan's belief system. But without ample help from Ryan, Suchong, and Tenenbaum — all pursuing their own "enlightened self-interest" — he could never have risen as far as he did.
• Too Dumb to Fool: He believes in the spirit of the trope, that smart marks are far easier to con than dumb ones. Rapture, with its population filled to the brim with people who think they know everything, was like a playground to him.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Frank Fontaine and Atlas.
• Undignified Death: He is stabbed to death by a bunch of little girls- while being ultra hulked up on ADAM. Doubles as a Karmic Death since he is responsible for said little girl’s suffering and they kill him with the same ADAM extractors he created them to use.
• Villain Has a Point: Fontaine'll be the first person to admit that his success in Rapture came by exploiting serious problems that the city already had. He wisely identifies that most of Rapture's population came into the city already expecting to become rich and successful captains of industry, while they all seem to forget the importance of blue-collar workers and that not everyone has the same luck. Unlike Ryan, who never had a single drop of sympathy for people down on their luck, Fontaine at least pretended to care about Rapture's downtrodden, opening up "Fontaine's Home for the Poor" as a way of demonstrating how unjust Ryan's system ultimately was. Ryan's hearty abandonment of his own principles in the pursuit of stopping him just made Frank seem all the more honest.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Both as Atlas and as the benefactor of "Fontaine's Home for the Poor". This is reflective of real-life gangsters, who are often venerated as neighborhood protectors.
  Peach Wilkins: Fontaine's promising something better. He's like one of us, y'know? Like he's worked a day in his life.
• Villainous Breakdown: You can tell from the moment Andrew Ryan sets Rapture Central Control to self-destruct that "Atlas" seems to be losing his Irish accent as he tells you to "whack the chump before this whole joint blows". Then, once Jack breaks free of the mind control setting, Fontaine rages over how he did it, telling him to go to Point Prometheus to settle the issue once and for all. And there he begins losing it even more as Jack dons a Big Daddy disguise, still continuing to fight against his orders and playing the family card on him again, threatening him and Tenembaum, as well as the Little Sisters under her care, all in a futile effort to discourage him from continuing. It finally culminates in Fontaine giving himself into a massive amount of ADAM to fight Jack in person, rambling about how he was responsible for his very life to begin with.
• Visionary Villain: Ryan slowly began to realize this about him. No matter how many rackets they bust or smugglers they hang, Fontaine is simply too devious and smart to be caught red-handed. Fontaine wasn't interested in just making money; he was challenging Andrew Ryan for control of Rapture.
  "This Fontaine fellow is somebody to watch. Once, he was just a menace, to be convicted and hung. But he always manages to be where the evidence isn't. He's the most dangerous type of hoodlum... the kind with vision."
• Vocal Evolution: Fontaine's regular voice provided by Greg Baldwin in the first Bioshock is significantly deeper and huskier than Karl Hanover's take heard in the sequel, where he's clearly straining to match Baldwin's original performance. Thankfully, Hanover refines his version of Fontaine's voice in Burial at Sea, sounding much closer to the character's voice in the first game.
• Voice of the Legion: When spliced up on ADAM at the end of the first game, Fontaine speaks with a reverberating tone complete with a deeper overlay.
• Walking Spoiler: This section is awfully long for a Posthumous Character. Figuring out more about Fontaine, his plans, and what he's planned for is a big twist for Bioshock.
• War for Fun and Profit: The gun-dispensing "Power to the People" vending machines were built by Fontaine. They were a cynical ploy to spur paranoia and armed conflict between the citizens of Rapture, who were growing fearful of the splicers as well as their own government. It was a successful side venture for Fontaine Futuristics.
  A gun in every home, peace on every street
• Would Hurt a Child: If Jack saved the Little Sisters, Fontaine threatens to go after them, saying it's something Jack can consider his legacy.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: After getting Jack to kill Ryan and revealing himself, he locks the office doors and sends turrets to kill Jack, even though it would be MUCH easier and faster to use WYK to make Jack kill himself. It’s as if he just wanted to watch Jack squirm before finishing him off, and it directly leads to his downfall.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Fontaine plays a mean game of Speed Chess. When his initial plan — get the entire city hooked on ADAM to the point where he is effectively in charge — breaks down with Ryan seizing his legitimate assets, he fakes his death, reinvents himself as "Atlas", and triggers a citywide civil war by exposing Ryan as everything he (and by extension, the hardcore Objectivists who followed him into the ocean) hated. During the fighting, everyone got spliced to the gills, resulting in crippling ADAM addiction, and the conditions for peace included handing Fontaine's seized assets over to Atlas.
  McDonagh: Strikes me that Fontaine wasn't overly inconvenienced by his own demise.

Yi Suchong

Voiced by: James Yaegashi (English)^note Other Languages:Nikita Prozorovsky (Russian)

^{Click here for his in-game model}

"War a terrible thing. Japanese kill every man in my city, except for Suchong. Suchong have opium. Very good opium. This war, terrible thing, too, but not for Suchong."

Dr. Yi Suchong was one of the leading scientists in Rapture, who worked for Fontaine on plasmid tests, as well as designing Little Sisters and the first of the Big Daddies. He and Dr. Tenenbaum were also responsible for creating Jack and the mental conditioning that would be used to control him.

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• Asian Rudeness: Born in a small city in Korea, and a thoroughly unpleasant being.
• Asshole Victim: He's accidentally killed by a Big Daddy after making a fatal error in judgment. Given what a heartless bastard he was, there's no sympathy to be had.
• Blood-Stained Letter: Or rather "Blood-Stained Audio Diary" as there is a noticeable blood stain on his portrait that sets him apart from other characters.
• Child Hater: Suchong hated children, and scarcely bothered to conceal it in any way. One of his big dreams was to find a way to make children age quickly to make them more efficient and "domesticatable." Eventually, he succeeded in this by creating Jack.
• Children Are a Waste: In one loading screen, one of his quotes is him saying that children are a waste because they mature slowly, and consume resources while contributing nothing. He then remarks that "There must be something to be done to speed the process..."
• Continuity Snarl: You find him dead, pinned to his desk by a big daddy drill, which is still smoking. This officially happened in 1959, at least a year before the game takes place. Which not only means that 1) nobody bothered to remove his corpse in over a year, 2) his body failed to even begin rotting in over a year, and 3) that drill has been continuously emitting smoke for over a year! To make matters worse, none of the games can seem to keep track of the exact time he died. The first game suggests it's after the riots, since he worked on the pheromones that were only used after Atlas started being a problem, the second game implies he died working on Delta (which would have happened before the riots), and the third shows him dying right around the time of the riots.
• Dirty Coward: He forces Elizabeth to run various errands for him because he is too terrified of the Splicers running loose in Fontaine's Department Store to go there himself.
• Death by Irony: Minutes before his death, he complained that the Big Daddies didn't seem to be especially protective of the Little Sisters; after he made the mistake of slapping one of said Little Sisters in the face, he ended up getting drilled to a desk by one of the supposedly neglectful Big Daddies. Eureka!
• Dub Personality Change: His Asian Speekee Engrish way of talking has been removed from multiple dubs such as the French one, making him sound a lot smarter and less like a caricature.
• Entertainingly Wrong: In Burial at Sea, he demands a lock of hair from Elizabeth before he lets her return from Columbia. When she reacts with derision, he clarifies he doesn't want her hair, he wants a hair sample Fink had taken. As Elizabeth finds out, said hair sample originally came from her in the first place.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In BioShock: Rapture, to the point he utterly fails to recognize Tenenbaum's Heel–Face Turn. Even Ryan and Fontaine are able to understand Tenenbaum's change of conscience, while Suchong literally doesn't even know the word "conscience" (it being a word he didn't consider important to learn when learning English).
• Evil Counterpart: To Tenenbaum. They have similar backstories, as both were victims of the Axis Powers during World War II who became brilliant scientists, came to Rapture, and researched plasmids. However, unlike Tenenbaum, who had a change of heart and worked to reverse what she had done, Suchong maintained his cold For Science! attitude until it got the better of him (see Karmic Death).
• Failed a Spot Check: Somehow fails to notice Elizabeth walk into his clinic as he's so distracted by his Audio Diary recording.
• I Fight for the Strongest Side!: Suchong has a habit of making himself valuable to the enemy.
• For Science!: Although his principal concern was always how he himself could benefit financially from his research, his secondary motive seems to have been scientific advancement, regardless of collateral damage. Even the deaths of his patients provided valuable insight: after the clinical trials for Telekinesis showed it was possible to stop a bullet in mid-air if not for slow human reaction times, Suchong was inspired to create the Sports Boost plasmid.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: One of the few characters with glasses... and one of the biggest sociopaths.
• Freudian Excuse: His childhood was spent as a lowly servant to Japanese nobles, whose children bullied him and treated him like a dog during his whole youth.
• Gone Horribly Right: In his final audio diary, he discusses how he wishes that the Big Daddies could be bonded or be protective to the 'brats'. Unbeknownst to him, not only did the former happen, but it worked well enough to get him killed!
• Hate Sink: Unlike the Splicers who can come across as Tragic Monsters and Ryan being a Well-Intentioned Extremist, Suchong is just a repulsive bastard with zero redeeming qualities.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In Burial at Sea, audio logs show that, just like how Jeremiah Fink stole his plasmid ideas, he's perfectly willing to steal Fink's ideas of drinkable genetic powers. He lampshades this too.
    "Theft of intellectual property two-way street."
  • Suchong complains about Tenenbaum in his audio logs, grumbling that her accent is so thick it's irritating to listen to. Suchong really shouldn't be throwing stones, as his English is just as spotty.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: When you find his corpse, it's been stabbed through with a Big Daddy drill.
• It's All About Me: The only person he truly cares about is himself, as evidenced by his audio diaries and the fact he's willing to do anything to save his own skin, even sell out his former employers.
• Jerkass: Suchong doesn't even try to come off as a half-decent human being. He's a cruel, self-serving, sociopathic prick to his final breath.
• Karmic Death: After going into so much detail as to how much he despised children and how responsible he was for the creation of the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, Suchong finally dies as a direct result of slapping a Little Sister in the face and angering her Big Daddy.
• Kick the Dog: Suchong has a very literal example in one of his audio diaries. While Jack was still being prepared, Suchong gave him a puppy to play with; after seeing that the boy had gotten quite attached to it, he activated Jack's mind control and ordered him to break the dog's neck.
• Lack of Empathy: He might not be an obsessive control freak like Andrew Ryan or an exploitative megalomaniac like Fontaine, but Suchong manages to make himself just as bad as them via his most obvious character trait: he couldn't care less about anyone but himself. This is why it took so long for the imprinting of the Big Daddies and Little Sisters to form — he couldn't recognise that, while trying to replicate the Songbird's imprinting onto Elizabeth, it wasn't due to pheromones or hypnotherapy, but it was genuine love and loyalty... something completely foreign to him. 'Mistaking an ounce of emotion for a pound of science', as Elizabeth herself puts it.
• Les Collaborateurs: Works with the Japanese in Japanese-occupied Korea after his whole village was destroyed by them by selling them opium so he can fund his experiments prior to going to Rapture.
• Loyal to the Position: His schtick both before and after coming to Rapture. After the Japanese killed everyone in his village, Suchong was left alive because he was willing to extend the same services he offered them to the invading forces. In Rapture, once he finds out Fontaine is dead, he's all too happy to jump ship to Ryan and do the same thing for him instead. In fact, after Fontaine was killed and his company seized by Ryan Industries, Suchong's only major complaint was that Ryan didn't pay as much as Fontaine.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Yi Suchong's "Free" Clinic. Fittingly for Rapture, the clinic was created more as a business venture than as a genuine act of charity.
• Nerves of Steel: Best shown in BioShock: Rapture, where Suchong and Tenenbaum are first captured by Ryan and locked in a disgusting cell awaiting execution as punishment for their Little Sister experiments. While Tenenbaum is fidgeting in a corner having a mental breakdown, Suchong is calmly writing notes in Korean on a wall in crayon despite having bruises and a split lip gained by Sullivan from an earlier escape attempt during his capture. He calmly explained to Ryan the notes were ways to harness ADAM from splicers for Ryan's benefit and was promptly freed along with Tenenbaum in exchange for their services.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The game never explains whether or not it's intentional, but Suchong knows better English than he lets on in his speech and lab notes. He also is smart enough to know that Fontaine's attempts to pass himself off as a dangerous gangster is mostly bullshit, and that he isn't nearly as dangerous as he tries to make himself look.
• Opportunistic Bastard: He gladly exploits any opportunities that would benefit him, or to save his own skin. Even before arriving in Rapture, he was perfectly willing to provide opium to the Japanese, and after arriving in the city, he betrays Ryan to help Fontaine, and when Fontaine supposedly dies, goes right back to Ryan.
• Pet the Dog: Despite his absolute disdain for Tenenbaum as a person, he does wholly recognize her talent and praises her for that alone in one audio diary.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": It's his birth date, natch. It fits his narcissistic outlook.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Even more so than people at the time would be comfortable with. In BioShock: Rapture, he's shown to have a heavy amount of contempt for women (Tenenbaum especially) and a pathological hatred of children due to the abuse he suffered by children in his youth.
• Posthumous Character: Despite a central role in Rapture's politics and having a major presence through audio diaries, Suchong is seemingly the only major character in the first game's story to already be dead before Jack arrives.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Suchong despises Ryan but nevertheless knows he's better off working for him as Rapture goes downhill.
  • He is absolutely against harvesting the Little Sisters, reasoning them being far more useful alive than dead. This is notable as he despises children and would otherwise be happy never seeing any ever again.
• The Reveal: His major background presence indicates you'll meet him down the line, but when you discover his clinic halfway through the game, his drilled corpse is the first thing you see upon opening the door.
• Smug Snake: While Suchong is nevertheless a genius, whereas Fink admires him as such, he only ever derides Fink as an idiot and plagiarist. Eventually, Fink surpasses Suchong in their mutual research and severs their alliance. Suchong ironically dies in the midst of seemingly making no progress in genetic research Fink wrapped up long before meeting Suchong.
• The Sociopath: In BioShock: Rapture, he's shown to be more cold and heartless than even Fontaine or Lamb, to the point that he even scares Fontaine.
• Sophisticated as Hell: This is a guy who will redact all of his lab notes, but still refer to Tenenbaum as "foreign bitch" in code.
• The Stoic: As seen in BioShock: Rapture, he seems to be the least perturbed character in the book, managing to maintain an attitude of amused indifference to the insanity around him. In Burial at Sea, he manages to lie to Booker, despite being interrogated for 15 hours.
• Suddenly Shouting: "On other side of window, man in strange hat experimenting on Suchong's own creation. On Plasmid. Man name of Fink. OUTRAGE! THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY!"
• Third-Person Person: As shown by his quote above, to show how self-centered to sociopathic levels he is. The book implies he simply never bothered to learn more English than was needed for his work. Interestingly, some of his audio diaries, such as "Plasmids Are the Paint", have him drop this vocal trait, implying that it's all an act to make westerners think he's dumber than he really is.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: He really doesn't like Tenenbaum, but they're the only ones who can work on the Little Sister program and Jack so they're forced to collaborate.
• Tested on Humans: Many of the working-class citizens of Apollo Square who could not afford Steinman's astronomical bills came to the clinic seeking aid. Suchong used the Free Clinic as a place to further his experiments by using his patients as test subjects.
• Too Dumb to Live: As seen in Burial At Sea, after slapping Leta and her Big Daddy very, very visibly becoming enraged, Suchong approached it and began questioning what its problem was moments before being killed.
• Vocal Evolution: Suchong's voice in Burial at Sea sounds has much more Asian Speekee Engrish-like qualities, and he speaks much faster. Supposedly this is because James Yaegashi's voice for the character changed between games, which is why some of the audio diaries for the first game were re-recorded.
• War for Fun and Profit: He welcomes the civil war as an opportunity to advance his Plasmid research.
• Wild Card: His allegiances waver between Fontaine and Ryan. He's not fond of either, however.
  Fontaine scary son of a bitch, but Ryan cheap son of a bitch.
• Would Hurt a Child: He was the one who pushed so hard for children to be used as ADAM experiments, and one of the audio logs shows him forcing Jack to kill a puppy. In fact, hurting a Little Sister is how he ends up nailed to a desk by a Big Daddy's drill.
• Yellow Peril: He's a Korean Mad Scientist and a huge sociopath.
• You No Take Candle: Suchong tends to talk like this, although it seems more a force of habit than any inability to speak the language. A look at his notes shows that he even writes like this. Although he drops it sometimes in his more personal audio diaries (such as "Plasmids are the Paint").

Other Citizens of Rapture

Rose

Voiced by: Susanne Blakeslee

"Is it someone new?"

The first Splicer you see in game, and the first Spider Splicer. She almost kills you several times before she is driven off.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: A lot of her quotes relate to how she wants Jack to be with her... even if she has to kill him.
  "I'll wrap you in a sheet!"
  "Can't we be together!? Can't we!?"
  "A flower for your grave."
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Has the character model of a Rosebud Spider Splicer, yet she has much more health than any other Spider Splicer. There is a great chance you won't be able to kill her on harder difficulties.
• I Was Quite a Looker: She laments the loss of her beauty due to splicing. She wants it back.
• Meaningful Name: She drops rose petals wherever she goes, making her all the more visible when clinging to the ceiling.
• Schmuck Bait: She leaves out in the open for you to grab, the Wrench Lurker Gene Tonic. A Tonic meant for helping with ambushing splicers
• Shout-Out: She will sing "If I Didn't Care" by The Ink Spots, but her raspy voice doesn't help.
• Starter Villain: She is the first named splicer you fight, and introduces how dangerous the splicers you fight are. She even introduces herself by gutting poor Johnny like a fish!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In playthroughs where you fail to kill her, she runs off, and you don't see her again, nor hear of her fate.
• Yandere: Even as she is determined to kill you, she won't stop attempting to have you be together with her, she even won't stop her obsession for you, even after you get killed
  "I'll plant him in my garden."
  "A flower for your grave."

J.S. Steinman

Voiced by: Peter Francis James (English)^note Other Languages:Andrey Yaroslavtsev (Russian)

"With genetic modifications, beauty is no longer a goal or even a virtue, it is a moral obligation. Do we force the healthy to live with the contagious? Do we mix the criminal with the law abiding? Then why are the plain allowed to mingle with the fair?!"

Before Rapture's societal collapse, J.S. Steinman was one of the city's most famous medical professionals; already a highly innovative plastic surgeon, he used ADAM to sculpt his patients to the highest possible standard of beauty. Unfortunately, he also tried a few of these new techniques himself. As such, by the time Jack meets him, Steinman has degenerated into a splicer, and now sees his patients as little more than human-shaped canvases on which to practice his skills as an artist-specifically, cubism.

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• Achilles' Heel: He himself is quite resilient normally, but he can be taken down in seconds with Incinerate courtesy of all the spilled oil covering the ground of the operating room he's in.
• Ambiguously Jewish: He has a German-Jewish name but is otherwise never stated being a jew.
• Asshole Victim: A smug creature with a low regard for his patients, or should we say test subjects. He rationalizes using up and discarding the Little Sisters for ADAM, likening it to euthanasia. BioShock: Rapture shows that he was a functional opioid addict with a fairly arrogantly high opinion of himself even before the collapse of Rapture and his descent into madness. Long story short, odds are that you won't feel very bad about killing him in whatever gruesome manner you see fit.
• Ax-Crazy: A given for splicers, but Steinman takes it to new heights.
• Berserk Button: By the time Jack meets him, Steinman is a very strong believer in Beauty Equals Goodness, and considers anything ugly to be offensive to the point that he's willing to kill and/or mutilate it on sight.
• The Beautiful Elite: Fancies himself one, and considers the non-handsome of Rapture to be one step above germs.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: He strongly believes that nothing is more important than a person's appearance, considering it an "obligation" to make people beautiful. Unfortunately, because his standard of beauty is incomprehensible and seems to change by the second, this led to him giving his patients unnecessary surgeries because they fell short of his standards and subsequently mutilating them to death when he couldn't get it right.
• Body Horror: He's almost certainly responsible for some, considering his audio diary praising Picasso (fine artist, but by no means realistic), and his complaining that one of his "patients" is "too symmetrical".
  Female Ghost: You promised me pretty, Steinman, you promised me pretty! Now look at me! Look at me!
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Good luck trying to determine his standards of beauty. One of his victims was even considered "too symmetrical."
• Crazy-Prepared: The hall leading to his operating room is infested with Security Cameras and turrets. The player can, of course, hack them and lure out Steinman into their vision.
• Dissonant Serenity: His audio diaries, especially "Not What She Wanted," which records the moment in which Steinman finally loses his mind and begins performing a facelift on a patient — who'd only been scheduled for a nosejob. He whistles to himself while a nurse screams for help in the background.
• Dressed to Heal: He wears a doctor's smock.
• Functional Addict: BioShock: Rapture revealed that Steinman had a drug habit on the surface which caused his first hallucinations of "the Goddess", though he still remained a well-respected and dependable plastic surgeon during this period of time. With the introduction of ADAM, however, he spiraled into being an incredibly dangerous and unhinged Addled Addict.
• Herr Doktor: A Mad Doctor with a German name.
• King Mook: Steinman uses the generic Dr. Grossman model, the only differences being that he wears an orange smock, takes much more punishment, and uses a machine gun much earlier in the game than regular leadhead splicers do.
• Large Ham: The man could probably give Cohen a run for his money in this department, fitting considering his friendship with the Mad Artist.
• Mad Artist: Already, this isn't exactly a quality you want in a surgeon. Knowing that he wanted to emulate Picasso (Not exactly known for his realistic portraits of the human body) makes it even worse.
  When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I've spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?
• Mad Doctor: Even before he went bananas, Steinman had a feeble grasp on the Hippocratic Oath. Inevitably, he started seeing imperfection everywhere and aspiring to become "the Picasso of surgery".
• Manufacturing Victims: By using ADAM in his treatments, Steinman unwittingly ensured that any of his patients that weren't already addicted had a pretty good chance of becoming addicted after leaving the surgery. And given that excessive use of ADAM tends to result in disfiguration, quite a few of his patients would have returned for further treatments.
• Mask of Sanity: Rapture reveals that even before splicing up, Steinman was very interested in facial mutilation-as-new-standard-of-beauty, and (admittedly with the "help" of cocaine and ether) hallucinating Aphrodite encouraging him. ADAM just destroyed his ability to keep it all in check.
  He shrugged. "Just as you like. I simply think..." Thinking to himself: If I could just cut a quarter inch off the nose... and then... perhaps narrow the forehead, entirely remove the orbicularis oculi...
  But aloud he said, "I’m so glad you’re pleased with the results. Go ahead and let her get dressed, Nurse, release her to her fiancé, and I’ll, uh…" He turned vaguely and walked, as if through a dream, back to his office.
• Palette Swap: He's the governor of the Medical Pavilion, and the first boss you face, looking like a orange-smock-wearing generic Dr. Grossman.
• Professor Guinea Pig: His audio diaries reveal that he was more than willing to use his experimental techniques on himself; per Rapture, even before that he was contemplating ways he could operate on his own face. You know what they say, the plastic surgeon who lifts his own face has a fool for a patient.
• Punctuated Pounding: "She (stab) WON'T (splat) STAY (splork) STILL!"
• Room Full of Crazy: Most of the Medical Pavilion has been turned into this under Steinman's watch, with numerous messages from the man himself smeared on the walls in blood.
• Sanity Slippage: Unlike many of the splicers, Steinman's audio diaries clearly show his descent into lunacy, beginning with his feelings of dissatisfaction with the banality of his work, then his thoughts on cubist art as applied to surgery, and finally his hallucinations of the goddess Aphrodite... this time without needing to get high first.
• Villainous Breakdown: When Jack finds him in his operating theater, he's stabbing at his latest patient with a scalpel and ranting over yet another failure, and when spotting Jack, goes into hysterics about how "ugly" the intruder is while randomly opening fire with a tommy gun.
• Villainous Friendship: In BioShock: Rapture, he apparently is good friends with Sander Cohen.
• Warm-Up Boss: Jack faces off against Steinman, a King Mook of the Leadhead Splicer who uses a tommy gun, before he fights his first Big Daddy. The fight against Steinman gives the player some seriously-needed combat practice against a beefy enemy that doesn't utilize charge and stun attacks, with many environmental hazards to take advantage of.

Peach Wilkins

Voiced by: Michael Villani (English)^note Other Languages:Yuri Brezhnev (Russian)

"We all come down here, figured we'd all be part of Ryan's Great Chain. Turns out Ryan's chain is made of gold, and ours are the sort with the big iron ball around your ankle."

Initially just a worker in the Neptune's Bounty fisheries, Peach was drawn into becoming the leader of Fontaine's smuggling ring. As Fontaine started to take advantage of his employees and the Rapture Death Penalty was introduced, he found himself trapped between a rock and a hard place. He ultimately snitched Fontaine out to Ryan and became paranoid and reclusive, refusing to believe Fontaine was really dead.

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• Conspiracy Theorist: He thinks, among other things, that Frank Fontaine is still alive, and that you might be working for him. Never mind that, as Atlas informs you soon after, Fontaine's been dead for a while. Of course, refer to Properly Paranoid...
• Didn't Think This Through: He tries to get the upper hand on Jack by forcing him to relinquish his weapons to a pneumo before coming into his lair. But as Atlas points out, Peach can't confiscate Jack's Plasmids (of which by the time Jack encounters Peach he has at the very least Electro Bolt, Incinerate, and Telekinesis). He also doesn't count Jack's wrench as a weapon (which is honestly pretty stupid), and doesn't take into account that Jack can hack his security equipment to work against him,
• Fisticuffs Boss: He confiscates your firearms before his boss fight, limiting you to just a Wrench, a Camera, and the various Pistols his mooks leave behind. You need to utilize the power of your Plasmids to stand a chance against him.
• Flunky Boss: He doesn't fight you alone when the time comes to throw down, with several Splicers and at least one Turret on standby.
• Funetik Aksent: His is pretty thick, and extends to some of the subtitles if you have them on.
• Improperly Paranoid: Kinda. While he was right that Fontaine was still alive and that Jack was his puppet, he was wrong in his assumption that Jack was knowingly working for Fontaine and was sent specifically to kill him — he just wanted passage through the fisheries. The only reason Ol' Peachy didn't live to see the end of the game is because he attacked Jack first and made him act in self-defense, making his paranoia more of a liability than anything else.
• King Mook: He's a Waders Splicer in distinct orange overalls, acting as a Nitro Splicer with significantly more health.
• Lower-Class Lout: He's not exactly the most cordial fellow you'll ever meet.
• Mad Bomber: When you get attacked by a Spider Slicer, he sends you a grenade launcher to help even the odds. When he comes after you himself, he's got the abilities of a Nitro Splicer.
• Morton's Fork: Work for Fontaine, Ryan strings you up. Try to quit Fontaine, and he kills you. This leads to...
• Properly Paranoid: All that rambling about Fontaine not being dead, and you being his flunky? Turns out that he's right about all of it (though you weren't aware of it at the time).
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Because of Fontaine's level of influence over Rapture, Wilkins has deluded himself into believing he's still alive and might show up at any second to tie up the loose ends he left behind. While he doesn't know he's using the Atlas name, he was right that Fontaine did send someone to kill him in the end.
• Sanity Slippage: His paranoia about Fontaine has not been very good for his mental health. And neither was the splicing...
• Third-Person Person: Often refers to himself by "Ol' Peachy".

Julie Langford

Voiced by: Susanne Blakeslee (English)^note Other Languages:Marina Bakina (Russian)

"Today Arcadia was closed off to all but paying customers. The man hires me to build a forest at the bottom of the ocean, and then turns a walk in the woods into a luxury."

A renowned botanist who was recruited by Andrew Ryan to build an undersea forest that would provide oxygen to Rapture. She eagerly accepted and built the massive garden called Arcadia. She was angered by Ryan's increasing control over the garden as he began charging people to see and for the oxygen it provided, but continued working for him in order to continue her experiments with ADAM and plant life.

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• The Atoner: Her reason for working on the Lazarus Vector in the first place — she feels bad about all the ecological destruction she unleashed during WWII to flush out Japanese camps in the jungles.
• Badass Bookworm: While we never see her in action, she's one of the few non-spliced denizens of Rapture that you encounter. Either she doesn't venture far from the safety of her well-fortified home, or she knows her way around some firearms. Either way, she gets a few points.
• Berserk Button: Those trees are the last thing in Rapture she cares about. Ryan killing them makes her turn against him.
• Deadpan Snarker: In her Audio Diaries, she has this attitude toward the Saturnine cult.
• Dying Clue: When Ryan gasses her lab, she writes the combination to her safe on the fogged-up glass of the observation window.
• For Science!: She doesn't really care what happens to the rest of Rapture so long as she can continue her experiments. Her zeal is so strong, she became trapped in Arcadia during the lockdown, refusing to leave her office when she was close to a breakthrough.
• Helpless Window Death: Jack's attempt to seek help from Julie Langford in Arcadia goes awry when Andrew Ryan remotely gasses her office, leaving Jack to watch through the office window as Langford chokes to death - but not before she helpfully scrawls the combination to her safe on the fogged-up window, Hand Sliding Down the Glass as she finally expires.
• Insufferable Genius: She complains there's no point in being a genius if everyone around is too insane from splicing to appreciate her intellect. She cuts short an explanation of the Lazarus Vector not to save time, but because she's convinced Jack can't possibly understand what she's talking about.
• Only in It for the Money: She balked at Ryan privatizing the Arcadia gardens, and was in the middle of a tirade when she remembered who signs her checks.
  "The only thing worse than a hypocrite is an unemployed one."
• Only Sane Man: Other than Tenenbaum, she's actually one of the only normal, fairly reasonable, unspliced humans left in Rapture. She's also the only other one besides Tenenbaum who doesn't outright try to harm Jack (as Ryan does), instead giving him instructions for what materials to gather so she can undo the poisoning of Arcadia's air before they all suffocate.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Ryan gasses her office after she decides to help Jack restore Arcadia with the Lazarus Vector. The specific reason is that her contract made all her intellectual discoveries Ryan's property, and by trying to give it to Jack she was betraying him.

Sander Cohen

Voiced by: T. Ryder Smith (English)^note Other Languages:Dmitry Polonsky (Russian)

^{Click here for his in-game model}

"I know why you've come, little moth. You've your own canvas. One you'll paint with the blood of a man I once loved. Yes. I'll send you to Ryan, but first, you must be part of my masterpiece. Go to the Atrium. Hurry now! My muse is a fickle bitch, with a very short attention span!"

Artist, writer, actor, director and composer, famous for writing Rapture's national anthem, "Rise, Rapture, Rise", as well as many other strange and eccentric works. Notably hostile towards those who question his art and/or closeness to Andrew Ryan. Jack first encounters him in Fort Frolic, after Cohen jams Atlas' radio transmission and blocks the exits; welcoming Jack as a fellow artist, he gives him the task of killing his former disciples and photographing their corpses.

Cohen makes an appearance in Burial At Sea, hosting a private party at his personal club before the New Year's Eve Riots.

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• Affably Evil: Weirdly friendly towards Jack throughout their time together, often complimenting him on his fighting style or his talents as a photographer. Also, he apologises profusely after launching a horde of splicers at him. If Jack expects to fight Cohen Jack will have to fire the first shot.
• Ambiguously Jewish: Cohen is a common last name among Jews and a significant name in the Jewish religion. A non-Jew with that last name would be like a non-Muslim having the name Muhammad.
• Animal Motif: Rabbits. As shown by his poetry ‘The Wild Bunny’ and his unique gold and black rabbit mask.
• Arc Villain: Cohen is at the center of a storyline detached from the conflict between Atlas and Ryan. While Atlas does warn Jack he has to likely get past him before arriving in Fort Frolic, Cohen jams the radio comms for the entirety of the level and has Jack perform some insane errands for him, after which he simply lets him go in peace unless provoked. For Ryan's part, he only expresses surprise afterward that Jack survived his encounter with the mad artist.
• Asshole Victim: Should Jack decide to kill him, it's hard to say this twisted bastard didn't have it coming.
• Ax-Crazy: Practically the poster boy for it in the game.
• Back from the Dead: If the player kills Cohen in Olympus Heights then returns to Fort Frolic and attacks his art display, he will inexplicably return to fight you.
• Berserk Button: Just try questioning his art. He could even rise from the dead to attack you if you hit his Quadtych!
• Beware the Silly Ones: You don't get a chair on Rapture's board without some degree of cunning. Cohen might be a hack and a joke, but he's a dangerous amoral madman and can see through most subterfuge (although he claims true "artists" are more attuned to life, etc.), and isn't buying into Elizabeth's Rapture guise even after she served as his apprentice for two months.
• Broken Pedestal: Cohen may have once been an ardent supporter of Ryan; Not necessarily because he believed in any of his policies, but for the simple reason that Cohen recognized Ryan as an awe-worthy figure and stuck around to see what would happen. Their falling-out was the result of similar, simplistic reasoning, with Cohen getting increasingly bored with Ryan’s descent into a bog-standard dictator rather than any moral reservations. That said, leaving Cohen to rot in the dilapidated Fort Frolic probably didn’t help matters.
• Can't Take Criticism: In the middle of the Fort Frolic mission, he decides that Jack's a doubter (keep in mind, Jack literally said nothing to him), and launches a four wave splicer assault on him set to Waltz of the Flowers by Tchaikovsky.
• Celebrity Survivor: One of the most active media personalities in Rapture prior to the civil war, now thriving in the anarchy of the city's collapse.
• Condemned Contestant: Making Kyle Fitzpatrick perform the same 'piano lesson' over and over. On a piano covered with dynamite. True to form, Cohen is displeased with his rendition of Cohen's Scherzo #7 no matter how hard he tries. In Burial at Sea, the pair of dancers who fail to "open themselves to the music", as Cohen puts it, are electrocuted into unconsciousness and dragged up to the ceiling via harnesses.
• Depraved Homosexual: Rumors about young men 'never returning from his dressing-room' circulate pre-Rapture, not to mention his 'living sculptures' of scantily-clad proteges portraying Caligula. His former disciples are implied to have dated him—he directly mentions staring at Finnegan's 'carriage' in his radio messages. Splicing and post-Rapture drugs don't help (with the depraved part, that is). Ken Levine has confirmed that Cohen is a homosexual.
• Evil Is Petty: According to audio logs, a rival artist spoke out against Cohen's nationalistic support of Ryan. He responded by first calling her a "musical gremlin" and then smearing her as a Bolshevik. The possibility of commies in their midst was enough to alarm Ryan, who put the word out to "make sure the little red bird stops singing." Cohen's more recently acquired distaste for Ryan wasn't even provoked out of the latter becoming a despot; rather, he just began to perceive him as boring.
• Hidden Depths: He's a surprisingly good judge of people if his sense of "art" isn't clouding his judgement. In Burial at Sea he sees through Elizabeth's disguise and it's implied he can tell "Booker" isn't who he says he is.
• Karma Houdini: Surprisingly, he can come out on top of the game, to be seen as the true winner, and the Fort Frolic part eventually ends as this. If the player chooses not to kill him, and not to disturb him in his apartment, he accomplishes his goals, completely as planned, gets exactly what he wants, and walks away scot-free in the end. Him of all people.
• King Mook: Cohen is the only Splicer to sport a gold/bronze rabbit mask rather than the common white/gray ones. As a Houdini Splicer, Cohen performs a lot of paranoia-inducing teleports. Stat-wise, he's the toughest enemy in the game other than the Big Daddies and the final boss.
• Large Ham: Very large.
• Laughably Evil: He is a ton of fun to listen to and watch.
• Mad Artist: Even before he jacked up on ADAM, he was pretty out there. And violent. Cohen's Scherzo #7 was analyzed and then played by a semi-professional pianist on YouTube. According to him, it's nearly impossible to play (the central section has no repetition and goes all over the keyboard); small wonder it was used to torture a guy.
  AtinPiano: "This song was specifically composed to torture pianists, which I could have guessed after playing through the game. The main reason is the chaotic middle part, which is sheer test of will to get through. Took me about half a year."
• Man of Wealth and Taste: It befits the main artist of Rapture.
• Mood-Swinger: Is quick to go from polite and erudite to frenzied and rabid at the slightest provocation. He unleashes a horde of Splicer minions upon Jack because he simply “thinks” he’s criticizing his artwork (Jack, as you should know by now, is mute).
• Monster Clown: Cohen's face is smeared with pancake makeup, lipstick, and eyeliner. His appearance in Burial At Sea is still out there: his drawn-on eyebrows, eyeliner, glittery eye shadow, and lipstick. According to Booker, he's "halfway to splice-town" by the time of the riots.
• Never My Fault: He labels anyone who criticizes or doesn't think he's an artistic genius as a "Doubter". The real reason people don't consider him an artistic genius is because his art is either mad or crap.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: His concept art and waxed mustache are based on the painter Salvador Dali. Dali was also as eccentric about his own work, and very opinionated about his critics and other popular artists. Cohen's personalty was also inspired by "the man who owned Broadway" George M. Cohan, a multi-talented American entertainer who is best known for his ultra-patriotic works. He also resembles Vincent Price, one of the Kings of Terror active since The Golden Age of Hollywood.
• Not Quite Dead: It's possible for you to not kill him and that he could come back from the dead; don't be surprised if you hear him laughing maniacally or hear his signature piano piece in Cohen's Collection in the sequel.
• Optional Boss: You don't have to kill him to advance the plot, although sparing him in Fort Frolic and then fighting him in Olympus Heights allows access to his bedroom, which contains a Power to the People machine. He only attacks if you hit him first or damage his masterpiece (in Fort Frolic) or if you disturb the dancing splicers in his house.
• Patriotic Fervor: "Rise, Rapture, Rise" will fill you with entrepreneurial pride. Or stomach ulcers.
• Performance Artist: A lethal one.
• Pet the Dog:
  • He may block out any radio signals from Atlas and Ryan during Jack's time in Fort Frolic, but he's willing to let Tenenbaum deliver gifts if Jack rescues Little Sisters in Fort Frolic.
  • Excluding the fight/"dance" when Jack delivers enough photographs to his masterpiece, Sander Cohen never betrays or goes out of his way to fight him. At the end of the Fort Frolic arc, Sander Cohen keeps to his word, gives Jack a gene tonic, and lets him proceed to Hephaestus. And he doesn't mind Jack paying him a visit at his apartment in Olympus Heights, so long as he doesn't disturb the pair of dancers in his living room. In a reversal of most of Jack's encounters with the residents of Rapture, it's Jack who has to make the first move to fight Cohen.
• Playing with Fire: If he ever gets pissed off enough to attack you in person, a lot of fireball-tossing will be involved.
• Professional Butt-Kisser: "Rise, Rapture, Rise" adds a new wrinkle to his contemporaries' accusations that Cohen only rose so high because he was in Ryan's good graces.
• Serial Killer: Fort Frolic is absolutely strewn about with the corpses of Cohen's various victims displayed as wax statues.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: The man's certainly fond of using... colorful language (particularly the f-word), to say the least. To quote the man himself from his song, The Wild Bunny:
  "It's my curse! It's my fucking curse!!"
  • "I'm SANDER FUCKING COHEN!"
• The Starscream: The last surviving member of Andrew Ryan's council (and his biggest fan) has been left to rot in Fort Frolic. He spares your life in hopes that Jack will kill Ryan for him. Ryan is unaware of Sander's anathema for him, and expresses disappointment that Jack strolled out of Fort Frolic unmolested.
  "I could have been the toast of Broadway, the talk of Hollywood. But, instead, I followed you to this soggy bucket. When you needed my star light, I illuminated you. But now I rot, waiting for an audience that doesn't...ever...come...I'm writing something for you, Andrew Ryan...it's a requiem."
• Stylistic Suck: Although Cohen is a gifted composer (albeit one unconcerned with whether his pieces are physically possible), his poetry and lyrics leave something to be desired. A quick glance at the lyrics to "Rise, Rapture, Rise," Cohen's paean to Ryan, shows that the song is absolutely execrable.
• Taken for Granite: Cohen doesn't actually petrify people, but he does the next best thing by covering their bodies in plaster and posing them. Almost everyone in his domain is either a dead statue, or a person pretending to be a statue. One of his "students" took to using his ice powers, rather than plaster, to freeze people in poses.
• They Called Me Mad!: "Screw you! Screw all you fucking doubters!"
• Unique Enemy: Sander Cohen one of three characters in Bioshock who has a unique model, and the only one of which who fights like a traditional Splicer (Houdini, in Cohen's case).
• Villainous Friendship: Was a close friend and confidant of J.S. Steinnman in BioShock: Rapture. Unsurprising considering their… similar sensibilities.
• White-Dwarf Starlet: His reputation has already waned by the time Ryan recruits him for Rapture, with his comeback production receiving less-than-stellar reviews; Cohen, talks of nothing but his "projects" and his admirers. Being the only headliner in Rapture helps get him to prominence again. Though one of his audio-logs reveals that he regrets not trying harder to revive his career on the surface.
• Wicked Cultured: Yes, it's true that most of his sculptures and poems range from crap to utterly mad, but there's no denying that he's also a very talented composer.
• Would Hurt a Child: Disgustingly so in fact. According to a conversation between Elizabeth and Dewitt/Comstock in Burial at Sea: Episode-1, many of the Little Sisters were at one point pimped out as a part of a trafficking ring run by Sander Cohen to depraved clients to fund his art.

Diane McClintock

Voiced by: Miriam Shor (English)^note Other Languages:Elena Solovyova (Russian)

"I thought Andrew Ryan was a great man. I was a fool."

Andrew Ryan's girlfriend, she was fanatically loyal to him and his views, and was kept secluded from the plight of many of Rapture's citizens. After she was injured in the New Year's Eve Riots and maimed by Dr. Steinman, Ryan replaced her as his mistress. She grew disillusioned with him and joined Atlas' rebels.

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• Allegorical Character: Diane, in many ways, represents Rapture and its citizens. In the beginning, sheltered from the poverty and despair, she leads a charmed life enchanted by Ryan and believing in his vision. However, Ryan neglects her in his pursuit for control which culminates in her mutilation during the New Year's riots. Permanently disfigured by the injuries and her treatment and ignored by Ryan, she slowly grows disenchanted by his increasingly cruel policies. She leaves him to join Atlas who kills her when it's revealed that he cares nothing about the city and is only using her and the rebels. Abandoned by Ryan and used and victimized by Atlas/Fontaine, she dies just as the city completely falls into ruin.
• Break the Cutie: Things went badly for her during that fateful New Year's party, and it only got worse from there...
• He Knows Too Much: Diane unexpectedly enterd Atlas' office while he was making a recording in his original accent. Whether or not she suspects anything, Fontaine couldn't risk it and killed her.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Dating Andrew Ryan, and her later admiration for "Atlas".
• It's All About Me: At first, Diane comes across as a whiny, high-maintenance bimbo. After the New Year's Eve attack, she blames the loss of her looks and social life on the rebels ("They've ruined everything for me!"). Once she confronts them, though, she quickly pulls her head out... and develops a crush on Atlas. Oops.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Before her injuries and Dr. Steinman's "treatment". ("He's taken a personal interest in my case!") She went from Ryan's girl to being unable to get a date.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Diane's Audio Diary portrait is based on the mugshot of Tanya Williams, a woman working at the Melody Lane club in San Francisco, arrested in 1942 for "indecent entertainment."
• Non-Idle Rich: Like many in Ryan's camp, Diane was radicalized when she explored outside the bubble of Olympus Heights and saw what was happening to the lower classes.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: After personally participating in a few raids, she was eventually introduced to Atlas himself. Her corpse can be found atop a desk in Atlas' hideout. Fontaine suspected she might have overheard him speaking in his real voice. The novel confirms she did overhear him, after which Fontaine guts her like a fish.
• Took a Level in Badass: After joining Atlas' rebels. She even managed to take out a few Big Daddies on her own, something she gushes about in her last diary.

Bill McDonagh

Voiced by: Ritchie Coster (English)^note Other Languages:Nikita Prozorovsky (Russian)

"I told Mr. Ryan when we were building this place; either you build her like a bathtub, or she's gonna turn into a sewer. "No, McDonagh," he said, "we're not gonna build no bathtub... we're gonna build Eden.""

A general contractor who was friends with Andrew Ryan and was recruited to help maintain Rapture, becoming a member of the Rapture City Council. He attempted to moderate Ryan's polices, but as Ryan lost control of the city due to Fontaine's actions and Atlas' rebellion, McDonagh resigned his position and attempted to kill Ryan. He failed and tried to flee the city with his wife and daughter. His family escaped, but McDonagh was captured and executed by Ryan.

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• Advice Backfire: His suggestion that Ryan challenge Sofia Lamb to debate her philosophy was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. He, of course, never anticipated that Ryan would perform so ineptly that it actually made the situation worse.
• Almighty Janitor: Quite possibly the most sensible person on Rapture's council. Too bad Ryan ignored virtually all of his advice, even on the bleedin' plumbing.
• Ascended Extra: In the BioShock: Rapture novel. In the game he's a secondary Posthumous Character, in the novel he's the closest you get to a hero. He even gets his backstory padded out, adding not just a career pre-Rapture but also a wife and daughter who aren't mentioned in the game.
• The Bartender: The Fighting McDonagh's tavern, which he built and managed.
• Broken Pedestal: When Ryan nationalized Fontaine Futuristics, McDonagh lost the last of his faith in the man.
• Cool Old Guy: On the surface he was honest, fair-dealing, and took pride in his work, even at personal expense. In Rapture, he's one of the few voices of reason when the civil war starts to escalate.
• The Consigliere: To Ryan, at first. BioShock: Rapture shows he was the closest thing Ryan had to a genuine friend, but that gradually falls apart as Ryan becomes increasingly irrational.
• Deadpan Snarker
  "Leaks... Lunatics... And now, bleedin' ghosts. Ain't Rapture grand?"
• Defector from Decadence: He was one of Rapture's staunchest evangelists until Ryan went off his nut.
• Go Out with a Smile: In the novel, after knowing that his family got out safely and that Ryan never completely stopped caring about him, as evidenced by the fact that he couldn't bring himself to come to Bill's execution and watch him die.
• Ignored Expert: Blatantly so. His first Audio Diary is a message explaining to Steinman that if pipes in Rapture aren't heated, the cold ocean water will make them freeze and burst. The diary is found near an area that's frozen.
• Nice Guy: Especially noticeable in BioShock: Rapture, where he's one of the most genuinely moral of Rapture's citizens and the closest the book has to a main hero. He’s so nice that even his executioners offer him a quick death instead of brutally dying on the pillar, due to liking him.
• The Only Believer: Even as Ryan tosses his philosophy out the window once he's getting beat at his own game, McDonaugh feels so strongly about keeping Rapture intact that he's even willing to kill Ryan for it.
• Only Sane Man: Among Ryan's advisers, although he eventually stopped listening to McDonagh.
• Posthumous Character: The player can find his body displayed alongside several others in the entrance hall to Ryan's building.
• Resign in Protest: When Ryan nationalized Fontaine Futuristics—and thus betrayed the founding principles of Rapture as a city of completely free enterprise—McDonagh realized that his former friend was Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and publicly gave up his seat on the City Council in retaliation. Sadly, it wasn't enough.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Considering the hacks and morons he had to work with on the Council, it's amazing McDonagh tolerated it for as long as he did.
• Take This Job and Shove It: After Fontaine was killed in a shootout with Ryan's men, McDonagh implored Ryan to leave Fontaine's assets alone, and not "put it in the pockets of us, who put him into the ground." However, Ryan got greedy and nationalized Fontaine Futuristics, contradicting all of his big talk about "free enterprise." McDonagh resigned his position on the city council in protest, knowing Ryan had just doomed Rapture.
• True Craftsman: He first met Ryan while he was installing the bathroom plumbing in Ryan's posh Manhattan suite. Ryan balked at McDonagh using brass fixtures instead of the cheaper tin ones that were ordered, and McDonagh replied that he would pick up the extra cost of the fixtures, as a point of personal pride that none of his work had ever leaked. This impressed Ryan, and is what caused them to become friends in the first place.
  "The next day I finds out... I'm Ryan's new general contractor!"
• Unfazed Everyman: For all the crap that happens in Rapture, McDonagh does a damn fine job of hanging onto his sanity; even as everyone around him loses theirs.
• We Used to Be Friends: As the situation in Rapture worsened, McDonagh realized the only way to save his beloved city was to kill his benefactor, Andrew Ryan. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful; his body was impaled on a pillar outside of Ryan's office.
• Working-Class Hero: He's a real self-made man, unlike Fontaine (who is a fake one). McDonagh represents the mission of Rapture as originally intended.

Sullivan

Voiced by: John Ahlin (English)^note Other Languages:Vadim Maksimov (Russian)

"Hanging now, is it? That's what we've come to? Now look, I don't make the laws here, I just enforce them. But I didn't come to Rapture to string men up for running contraband. If Ryan and his crew have their law, then they can have my badge!"

Rapture's head of security. He quickly became disgusted by Andrew Ryan's policies as he cracked down on dissenters. He resigned after murdering Anna Culpepper on Ryan's orders after she offended him and Sander Cohen, and eventually committed suicide.

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• Ate His Gun: He is probably the corpse in the Upper Wharf of Neptune's Bounty, since the corpse is wearing a full police uniform and is holding one of his diaries. Rapture also indicates his plans to off himself in Neptune's Bounty before he walks out of the story.
• Brooklyn Rage: Sullivan is a New York native who worked "the meatball beat" in Little Italy. Hilariously, none of his RICO experience prepared him for the likes of Sander Cohen.
• Cowboy Cop: "Give 'im a taste, Patrick." (ZZZZAP!)
• Dead Man Writing: In his suicide note, Sullivan left behind an incriminating security tape of Ryan's lover. This put Ryan on the trail of his illegitimate son, making Sullivan inadvertently responsible for Jasmine Jolene's murder.
• Despair Event Horizon: Being used as a personal assassin for the City Council members finally broke Sullivan; near the end of Rapture, he shows up drunk and relates his desire to go to Neptune's Bounty and eat his gun.
• Dirty Business: In addition to his usual duties, he also took care of Ryan's dirty laundry, though he often questioned his employer's ethics.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Seen in BioShock: Rapture, especially as the city begins to fall apart.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Torturing and executing criminals is fine but assassinating people who simply criticized Ryan and his sycophants is too much for him. He saw Cohen's accusations towards Anna as a feud between artists and he is saddened by the role he ends up taking in it.
• The Fettered: He had a sense of justice and a sense of standards, which made him a good cop. Being pushed past those standards is what eventually breaks him.
• The Ghost: He's never explicitly located in BioShock in the flesh. Some say his corpse is the one containing one of his diaries in Neptune's Bounty, but it's still a bit inconclusive.
• Heel Realisation: In the audio diary he recorded just after he killed Anna Culpepper, he's obviously not far from breaking into sobs of self-disgust.
  When it was done with Culpepper, I left her as she was in the bathroom. I seen she had a blanket half-knitted by her bed. It was nice, you know, black and red, real pretty. So I took it, so I could, you know, have somebody finish it. So it could be of use to someone. It just didn't seem right to leave it lying there, lying there all by itself...
• Just Following Orders: After eliminating Fontaine in a fiery shootout, Sullivan was assigned another case: Anna Culpepper, a composer who earned Sander Cohen's ire for dubbing him "Ryan's Songbird." Cohen exploited his connections to have Culpepper named Public Enemy No. 1, which Sullivan deeply resented.
• My Greatest Failure: He killed Anna Culpepper in her apartment at Olympus Heights while she was preparing a bath. Disgusted with what he did, he took a half-finished knitted blanket from Culpepper's flat to remind himself of the deed.
• Police Brutality: Electrocuting suspects for info? Okay.
• Punch-Clock Villain: In the beginning, Sullivan was put in charge of stopping Fontaine's racket, a job he performed using whatever measures he deemed effective (such as torturing and executing suspects). It came as a rude surprise when he found himself acting as Ryan's goon squad against a bunch of hapless, innocent critics of the regime.
• Take This Job and Shove It: When Ryan introduced the death penalty, Sullivan threatened to hand in his badge. It is implied that he did so, then Ate His Gun, since the audio diary that tells of his decision is near what seems to be his corpse.

Anna Culpepper

"Cohen's not a musician. He's Ryan's stable boy. Ryan's corrupt policies crap all over the place, and Cohen flutters around clearing it up. But instead of using a shovel, like you would with a proper mule, Cohen tidies with a catchy melody and a clever turn of phrase. But no matter how nicely it sounds, he can't really do anything about the smell..."

A popular musician in Rapture, who got on the bad side of Sander Cohen, and by extension Andrew Ryan, who has her murdered.

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• Advice Backfire: She tells Jasmine Jolene that she needs to find a way to become financially independent of Andrew Ryan. Jasmine decides to sell her unborn child to Tenenbaum for a large sum of money, an action that leads to her death at the hands of Ryan.
• Deadly Bath: You find her drowned in her own bathtub.
• Nice Girl: In the Crapsack World of Rapture, she stands out as being nothing less than a genuinely passionate artist and social activist who just happened to get on the wrong side of the men in charge.
• Posthumous Character: By the time you find her, she's long since been murdered.
• The Rival: To Sander Cohen. It ends up getting her killed when he decides to frame her as a Communist sympathizer.

Jasmine Jolene

“A star, mama! Mr. Ryan said he's going to make me a star!”

A sex worker at Eve's Garden and 'Andrew Ryan's Favorite Gal!'

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• Abusive Parents: She meant well, but she essentially sold Jack into slavery under Fontaine in an attempt to become financially independent.
• Alliterative Name: Jasmine Jolene.
• Big "NO!": Her last words.
  "What are you doing?! No, no don't plea-! I loved you, don't, don't please, no! NO!"
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Despite her mistakes, she comes off as a genuinely sweet (if somewhat naive) person.
• Missing Mom: She is Jack's biological mother, who sold him as a fetus to Fontaine. By the time Jack find her, she was already killed—by his biological father, no less.
• Posthumous Character: When you enter Eve's Garden, one of the first things you see is a ghost sequence leading up to her murder.
• Stage Name: Her real first name is Mary-Catherine.
• Statuesque Stunner: In the book, described as being taller than Ryan.
• The Mistress: Was this for Andrew Ryan, until she sold their unborn child to Fontaine, and Ryan killed her.
• Two First Names: Like Andrew Ryan, she took one of these.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Her act of selling the fetus that would become Jack to Fontaine was a well-intentioned attempt to gain financial independence so her life didn't hinge on Ryan's goodwill, and it's likely she never knew the full implications of what she did. Not only did this deprive Jack of his childhood and his free choice, it ended up giving Fontaine the perfect Tyke Bomb to use on Ryan.

Mariska Lutz

“Maybe we never should have come to this place.”

A Czechoslovakian woman who went to Rapture with her husband Samuel in search of a better life and, had a child, Masha together only for things to horribly wrong once their daughter Masha went missing.

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• Despair Event Horizon: Both Mariska and her husband Sammy reach this after learning about what happened to their daughter Masha.
• Driven to Suicide: You can see her and her husband in the Fighting McDonagh Tavern in Room 7 together on a mattress after they realised their daughter was turned into a Little Sister and didn't recognise them. The tape beside their bodies expresses their despair.
• From Bad to Worse: Her daughter Masha (who saw trees for the first time in Arcadia and thought they were monsters and Mariska started to regret her choice to go to Rapture) went missing during the civil war and her frantic attempts to find her resulted in nothing until her husband recognised Masha and to their horror was transformed into a Little Sister.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Mariska and Samuel don't take what happened to their daughter very well.
• I Will Wait for You: Deconstructed. She and her husband desperately sent the code to their room in the Fighting McDonagh Tavern in Neptune's Bounty in hopes that Masha would find them. However once they found out what happened to Masha, they committed suicide.
• Kick the Dog: Andrew Ryan took her daughter to "save" Rapture without her or her husband's consent and both of them committed suicide when they found out their daughter turned into a Little Sister.
• Meaningful Name: Mariska and Masha's name can mean Star of the Sea. Considering the setting Bioshock is set in, the sea is appropriate.
• Posthumous Character: She's long dead by the time you find her.
• Together in Death: With her husband who you can find her with in their room. You can even find a photo of their daughter Masha right beside them.

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