Before diving into this week’s Bioshock discussion, would you kindly give last week’s episode covering Hunt: Showdown a listen?
At the inception of Safe Room, Neil and I had both made mental checklists of games we simply HAD to talk about on the show. Games that we felt so passionately about that one of us would have to whack the other with a stick to get a word in edgewise.
For me, that game would be Bioshock.
Experiencing the descent to the underwater dystopia of Rapture will forever be a formative moment in my gaming history. It sounds like hyperbole, but at the time, Bioshock truly opened my eyes to the storytelling potential of video games.
In an era where my high school days primarily consisted of playing shooters until the wee hours of the morning with friends, Bioshock presented me with a rich, thematically laced world that I’d only thought possible in film and literature.
And 15 years later, the wonderment of what Irrational Games, 2K Boston and 2K Australia were able to achieve within the seemingly simple framework of a first-person shooter is not lost on me.
Helping Neil and I to unpack why Bioshock and its influence are still notable with the medium all these years later is writer Michael Pementel. Apart from being a massive Bioshock fan, Michael is an essayist and pop culture critic who currently writes for Bloody Disgusting and is the staff writer over at the heavy metal news site The Pit. – Jay Krieger
Safe Room is a weekly horror video game discussion podcast with new episodes every Monday on
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