The City of Rapture Moderators

"I am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No,' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.' 'No,' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.' 'No,' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small..."

In the 1940s, an entrepreneur named Andrew Ryan had an idea. Weary with the 'parasites' of the world whose Socialist and Collectivist values intrinsically contradicted his own, he set up a city on the ocean floor for the elite of the world could gather as one in an Objectivist utopia, where everyone would work to further their own goals, unrestrained by the faults of altruism. The city took entrepreneurship to new heights, taking genetic research further than anyone on the surface had taken it before with the development of plasmids and gene-splicing.

Despite Ryan's determination to keep Rapture isolated from the surface with its parasites who decry the ideals upon which Rapture was formed, a disturbance in the dimensional fabric of spacetime has begun to make that work difficult. People from foreign universes and all walks of life are now being pulled toward the Lighthouse, Rapture's single surface point in the North Atlantic.

And you, lucky bastard that you are, just happen to be one of them.

With Andrew Ryan's hold over surface travel tightening and no way out of the city, you have little choice but to adapt and forge your way ahead within Rapture's Objectivist, capitalist society. Even in the upper bounds of Rapture's infrastructure, civil unrest has begun to arise - rebel figures and martyrs, those who would question Ryan's policies. How much or little you comply with any of the factions beginning to form is up to you. All you know is that no matter what path you take, what ethical or moral stance upon which you settle, there will always be consequences, and nothing in Rapture is ever free.

( SETTING )