Andrew Ryan
From BioShock Wiki
"It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea, it was impossible to build it anywhere else." -Andrew Ryan
"A man...chooses...a slave...obeys."-Andrew Ryan
"Andrew Ryan...the bloody king of Rapture." - Atlas
[edit] History
His childhood experiences under Soviet rule led Andrew Ryan to his personal philosophy- the modern world was created by great men who strove to make their own way. Anytime "parasites" gained control of such a world, they destroyed it. He emmigrated to America in 1919, believing it was a place where such men could prosper.
For a time, he was devoted to his adopted country, grateful for it rewarding his intellect and determination with wealth and fame. However, the social programs adopted in the late 20's increasingly tested that devotion. Ultimately, Ryan was a very selfish individual, and considered those who benefited from others "parasites". Ryan soon came to dispise the ideals of charity or generosity. In his mind, one could only own what one earned.
He once owned a large forest as a personal retreat, one that many groups envied. Ultimately, the government attempted to nationalize it as parkland. His response, before surrendering it, was to burn it to the ground.
The final straw for Ryan was the destruction of Hiroshima with the Atomic Bomb. In his eyes, the Bomb was the ultimate corruption of his ideals - science and determination harnessed for destruction, creating a weapon that gave the "parasites" the ability to destroy anything that they could not seize.
Ryan's response was to use his entire fortune to build Rapture - a community where "the artist would not fear the censor, the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, the great not be constrained by the small", in the only place he felt the "parasites" could not touch - the depths of the Atlantic ocean.
Ryan filled his city with several thousand of the world's best and brightest, and for a time, it was everything he dreamed it would be - a paradise of freedom and wealth.
There was only one flaw in his plan - the reason he built the city in the first place. To keep Rapture safely hidden from the "parasites", he strictly forbade contact with the surface - thus creating a market for smuggled goods. And this caused the rise of the one thing Ryan had been unable to imagine - a brilliant and determined man for whom freedom, wealth and comfort were not enough. A man who could only be satisfied by control - former mobster Frank Fontaine.
Fontaine's life prior to becoming a citizen of Rapture provided the skills that allowed him to dominate the small, yet unavoidable black market in smuggled goods. By being the first to sponsor Bridgette Tenenbaum's research into a mysterious sea slug, he became the primary distributor of ADAM. As Rapture was completely isolated from the surface world, few were aware of the chaos of the post-WWII reconstruction era, and Fontaine was easily able to sway the lower classes with promises of revolution. With these factors in his favor, it took him less than three years to gather enough wealth, power and support to challenge Ryan openly.
The idealistic Ryan was totally unprepared for the brutality of armed conflict as opposed to the genteel honor of economic competition. As Rapture fell into chaos due to the machinations of first Fontaine and later Atlas, he grew ever more desperate in his efforts to protect his utopia. Out of obsession with his enemy, he became his enemy. One by one, he abandoned all of his ideals until he was just a tyrant spouting monologues of self-determination while smiting his enemies like a spoiled god. He had become one of the very "parasites" he had built Rapture as a sanctuary from, and he was destroying it - just like he believed all "parasites" did to great things.
This is the state of affairs in which Jack finds the city at the beginning of Bioshock.
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Ryan is an ever-present voice while Jack travels through Rapture. Although Frank Fontaine set Jack on his journey to kill Ryan using the would you kindly trigger phrase, Ryan knew exactly what was occurring.
When he laid eyes on Jack however, he instantly recognized him as the son he might have had with Jasmine Jolene, had she not sold him before he was born. His own flesh and blood, reduced to a puppet, was the ultimate insult this world could have given him.
Looking at his life and his works, now all in ruin - by his own hand as much as his enemies' - he decided to die as he had lived: on his own terms, by setting Rapture's self-destruct mechanism. But Ryan sees one last hope in Jack in preserving his ideals, which reveals his tragic flaw. With the trigger phrase, he could have controlled Jack as Atlas did, and directed him against his enemy. Instead, he educates Jack about his true self, his birth, and the phrase would you kindly which has controlled him completely up until now. He then hands Jack a golf club, telling him, "A man chooses, a slave obeys". Believing that men are ultimately driven by free will once shown they have a choice, Ryan orders Jack, "Kill!" Dumbfounded that Jack strikes him with the golf club instead of following a newfound knowledge that he could choose not to kill, Ryan repeats, struggling to speak through his fresh head injury, "A man chooses... a slave obeys!" But Jack strikes him two more times, obviously breaking bones in Ryan's head. Frustrated, Ryan shouts, "OBEY!", but Jack strikes Ryan, killing him with a penetrating blow to the head.
The player will discover that Ryan had made the decision to turn off the local Vita-Chamber to prevent the device from resurrecting him - revealing that this was Ryan's true and last hope.
