Andrew Ryan is the man behind Rapture, an underwater city that we’re thrown into through fate in BioShock. A passionate businessman and a cutthroat leader, he considers Rapture his greatest creation and a paradise away from the worries of the surface.
Ryan is a highly political man, his thoughts grounded in objectivism, which rejects altruism and encourages the pursuit of one’s personal interests. However, despite his devotion to Rapture, he soon as a civil war in his hands and he ends up having to reap what he sow. Today, we present you the 10 worst things that Andrew Ryan, one of the main antagonists of the game, has done.
10 Burning His Forest
Through different voice recordings we slowly find out why Ryan came to build Rapture, and one of the reasons was his loathing towards government intervention and taxation. He despises any sort of centralized regulation, and is an avid supporter of the free market principle.
Therefore, when the government decided to nationalize his forests, Ryan’s logical reaction was to take a match stick and burn it all down. He hates the idea of helping the less fortunate so much that he would rather destroy his own property than share it with those who need it.
9 Not Introducing Regulations
One of Ryan’s greatest products that were introduced to the market were plasmids. These enhancements would allow people to become stronger and adopt various abilities like telekinesis and pyromancy. Essentially, they allow the genetic code of a person to be rebuilt.
While the products were a success, Ryan remained completely ignorant to the fact that this genetic splicing had a number of harmful side effects. As a result, he failed to introduce any kind of regulation or quality control to ensure that his plasmids would be safe for use, and so they were made in the cheapest possible way.
8 Running A Monopoly
Ryan often expressed his distaste towards politics on the surface. Having come from the Soviet Union, he claimed to have known first hand what socialism could do to mankind and how damaging it was. As a response to this, he created the concept of the Great Chain, a sort of invisible chain that everyone had to pull on for their own benefit, a sort of free market.
Despite instating this system in Rapture, Ryan still established a monopoly of his own company, Ryan Industries, making him the worst hypocrite of all for going against his very own beliefs. This is further proven by how he grew to dislike Fontaine, his competitor.
7 Attempted Assassination
Despite how much Ryan claims to love the free market and how he built Rapture to be the ideal heaven for all capitalists, he feels greatly angered and threatened when Frank Fontaine, leader of his main rival company Fontaine Futuristics, begins to challenge his market share.
Fontaine’s growth angers him, so much so that he orders his head of security to set up an assassination of Fontaine to wipe him off as a competitor. Not only does this go against his founding principles, he also behaves like a tyrant in deciding who gets to live and die.
6 Nationalizing Fontaine’s Business
After Fontaine went into hiding and falsified his own death, Ryan believed his worst competitor to be out of the picture. The first thing he did then was the very action that inspired him to build and create Rapture: nationalize Fontaine’s company Fontaine Futuristics.
His decision was not seen in positive light by many of Rapture’s citizens who had begun to see him as a hypocrite of the highest degree. Despite this, Ryan silenced those who disagreed with his decision and stood behind it as though it wasn’t clashing with his initial beliefs at all.
5 Forcing Jack To Kill Him
Ryan isn’t exactly the most stable man when we finally meet him in BioShock. He’s been locked up in Rapture for some time now, watching over the city. He’s grown incredibly paranoid and unstable, but he recognizes Jack when he finally appears before him.
Ryan pities and looks down upon Jack, calling him nothing but a slave by showing him that he responds to the “would you kindly” line. Through this command, he tells Jack to kill him, and states: “a man chooses, a slave obeys”. This line, although his final words, strikes deep into Jack who realizes he’s nothing but a tool.
4 Blindness To Rapture’s Issues
Ryan initially planned Rapture to be a paradise for those who supported his idea of the free market and selfishness. However, it instead became a dystopia as people were turned crazy through unregulated plasmids and their thirst for more ADAM. Moreover, with so many contraband items, it made crime flourish and turned the city into a battleground ripe for civil war.
It was through this that Atlas rose from the darkness, posing as the city’s liberator and Ryan’s worst enemy. Ultimately, it was Ryan’s ignorance of these issues that sent Rapture spiraling down into full-blown civil war and turmoil, leaving hundreds dead and those alive crazy.
3 Killing His Friends
As Ryan’s tyrannical rule over the city progressed with increasing chaos ruling the city, he began to turn more and more paranoid himself. Around every corner he believed the “Parasites” to be lurking, looking to destroy his hard work and dedication which he had poured into Rapture.
As we learn through the story and upon our arrival to Ryan’s office, he has essentially killed every single one of his allies and impaled him in the entrance hall to his office. The bodies now serve as a warning to anyone who would dare to come inside and challenge his authority.
2 Imprisoning His Political Enemies
Ryan didn’t simply kill those who believed differently than he did. He also set up a prison and holding cells for people who in his mind expressed questionable political beliefs or seemed like “Parasites”. In BioShock 2, we learn that he actually created Persephone for this very purpose.
Worse yet, these people were sold by Sinclair, owner of these facilities, to Ryan Industries and Fontaine Futuristics as test subjects for brand new plasmids bound to enter the market. Once more, it’s obvious Ryan never had qualms to take away one’s freedom if the person happened to get on his nerves.
1 Creating Rapture
Ultimately, the worst thing Ryan could have ever done was to create Rapture in the first place, due to all the horrors that followed the city’s initial creation. From plasmids turning humans into splicers to a civil war that left the city in absolute chaos and ruins, so much suffering and waste could have been avoided had people never come to Rapture.
You can even hear this regret in many of the audio logs found around the city, as some wish they had never come to Rapture in the first place, given everything that had transpired.
NEXT: BioShock: 10 Mysteries That Another Game Could Solve
