Andrew Ryan

Biography

Andrew Ryan (formerly Andrey Rayanovsky) is the founder of Rapture and the head of Ryan Industries. He is the main antagonist for most of BioShock. He is the Chairman of the City Council, the owner of Hephaestus, and one of the most important people in the city. He appears in person in Rapture's Control Center.

Biography

The first years of life in Russia / RSFSR Andrew Ryan (Andrei Rayanovsky) was born in a village near Minsk (modern-day Belarus), during the time when Russia was ruled by the Emperor. In 1917, he witnessed the October Revolution that brought the Bolshevik Party to power.[1] This fact greatly influenced the formation of his worldview and personal philosophy: "Titans" - great people - create this world, but then so-called "parasites" come to power and destroy everything. In 1919, he fled to America, believing that this is the place where a great man can flourish.

Life in America

For a time, he was devoted to his new homeland, and with his intelligence and enterprise he made a huge fortune. However, the government social programs adopted in the 1930s increasingly undermined his loyalty to America. Ryan began to despise the ideals of socialism. In his opinion, one could only earn something through one’s own labor. For example, he once owned a private forestry business and many envied him. When the government tried to nationalize his property, Ryan burned it down so that no one could take it for themselves. [2] The last straw for Ryan was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In his opinion, the bomb destroyed his ideals - science and research were used for destruction. The creation of such weapons gave parasites the opportunity to take over and destroy the world.

Delight

After leaving the United States, Ryan spent his entire fortune building Rapture on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a city where "the artist fears no censor, where the scientist is unfettered by sanctimonious morality, where the Great is not limited by the small," the one place he believed the parasites could not reach. He created a surface front company called Warden Yarn (an anagram of his name), through which he dealt with suppliers such as Scarlet Souvenirs to obtain the materials he needed to build his city. Once Rapture was completed, Ryan populated the city with several thousand of the "best men in the world," and for a time Rapture was everything he had dreamed of: a free, prosperous paradise. From 1946 to 1958, Rapture experienced significant economic growth and solid political stability. As Ryan had predicted, the citizens of Rapture developed an excellent entrepreneurial infrastructure with numerous businesses. There was also unprecedented scientific progress, culminating in the discovery of ADAM by Brigid Tenenbaum.

Delight

Ryan was hesitant to appreciate this discovery and refused to fund ADAM research. Tenenbaum then turned to the king of the local black market, Frank Fontaine, who had become rich thanks to ADAM and had become a dangerous rival for Ryan in his struggle for control of the city. Ryan, meanwhile, was gathering supporters around him to maintain control of the city. Among them were the artist Sander Cohen at Fort Frolic and Dr. Steinman at the Medical Pavilion. Ryan also hired a man named Carlson Fiddle to build Ryan's Fun Park, a theme park that was in fact a propaganda tool for the children of Rapture. Ryan himself designed many of the rides and sections of the animatronic sets that warned children of the dangers of the surface.

The Decline of Rapture

However, by filling the city with ambitious experts, scientists, and distinguished artists, Ryan created a system in which the majority of Rapture's citizens felt themselves above such necessary work as food production, cleaning, and maintenance, and thus neglected them (as Frank Fontaine put it, "Someone's got to clean the toilets"). The citizens' basic needs were left unmet when these jobs were abandoned, leading to Rapture's eventual economic collapse. The resulting social conditions allowed Frank Fontaine to wield considerable influence over the population, and Atlas to become a powerful political force and openly challenge Andrew Ryan's leadership. Additionally, when Ryan strictly forbade contact with the surface to keep Rapture hidden from the "parasites," he inadvertently created the conditions for a thriving smuggling market, which in turn led to Frank Fontaine's criminal activities. Ryan forbade contact with the surface to maintain his sole control over Rapture, but in doing so, he laid the foundation for the city's decline and eventual civil war.

The Decline of Rapture

Ryan dealt with problems in other areas in a similar manner. The initially benevolent psychologist Sofia Lamb, whom Ryan had brought to Rapture to help citizens cope with the psychological problems that came with their isolated existence, came out in open opposition to Ryan's philosophy. Lamb espoused a collectivist, altruistic outlook; it was hard to imagine anything more different from the philosophy of the city's founder. Ryan debated Sofia and tried to regain public support, but the masses generally sided with Lamb. Sofia was eventually eliminated by being incarcerated in the Persephone Penitentiary. Feeling how far he had "gone from the greater purpose," as one of his audio diaries puts it, Ryan, realizing the magnitude of the threat, decided to curb Fontaine's influence. In an attempt to penetrate to the heart of Fontaine's smuggling operations, he sent agents like Sullivan to gather information on Fontaine and his men. But while these efforts were often successful, Fontaine himself remained elusive, never leaving behind any evidence to indict him. Frustrated by the situation, Ryan turned his back on his own beliefs. Despite widespread protests, he passed a deeply unpopular law making smuggling punishable by death.

The Decline of Rapture

Sometime around 1956, Eve's Garden dancer Jasmine Jolene becomes pregnant by Ryan. Further proof of Fontaine's foresight, he buys the embryo from Jolene. By this time, much of Rapture's security infrastructure had been encoded with Ryan's genetic code, an attempt to cope with the threat posed by an unstable society. Fontaine knew that Jack, as Ryan's child was named, could be a powerful ally. Jack had inherited Ryan's genetic code and had access to areas that only Ryan or his relatives could access. When Ryan discovered what Jasmine Jolene had done, he killed her in a fit of rage. Ryan decides to draw a final line under Fontaine's problem, and Fontaine is about to, as Bill McDonagh describes it, go down "like fucking John Wayne" at the final line. The famous Rapture newspaper headline: "Ryan Shuts Down Smuggling Operation... Fontaine, Thugs Killed in Shootout!" on September 12, 1958. However, unbeknownst to Ryan, his main rival had concocted a fake death scheme.

The Decline of Rapture

As Fontaine later recounted in one of his audio diaries, "Ryan wanted Frank Fontaine dead, and I simply gave him what he wanted. As Atlas, I got a new face, a clean slate, and a new life." Although Frank Fontaine was dead, from his ashes arose Atlas, an even more dangerous adversary, since Frank was viewed by much of the public as a gangster, while Atlas was beloved by the masses and represented a legitimate alternative to Ryan's increasingly tyrannical rule. After Fontaine's apparent death, Ryan took a step that would prove to be another betrayal of his philosophy: nationalizing Fontaine Futuristics. Though he had built Rapture to escape the kind of "powerful government" that could appropriate private businesses, Ryan used the same tricks as the "parasites" he had once fled. The move shook Rapture to its foundations and became the culmination of its downfall. Even Ryan's longtime friend Bill McDonagh resigned from the Central Council in protest of the move.

Civil war and collapse

New Year's Eve, 1958. On television that night, Ryan acknowledged that the past year had been full of challenges and raised a toast to 1959 being Rapture's best year yet. Alas, it was not to be. Minutes after his speech, the citizens of Rapture were alerted to the "incident" at the Kashmir Restaurant. This incident would become the most significant and decisive moment in Rapture's collapse as a civilized society. That night, a masquerade ball was held for Rapture's elite at the Kashmir Restaurant. During the festivities, a group of Atlas revolutionaries opened fire on the crowd. Ryan and Atlas entered into a devastating civil war that left the city devastated and countless civilians dead. There was hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, that Ryan would be forced to address the grievances of Atlas' supporters and solve their problems. However, Ryan refused to compromise with the "parasites" and was determined to fight to the end, even if it meant destroying the entire city. Plasmid technology played a major role in the conflict with their "genetic arms race", as Bill McDonagh called it, leading to the production of numerous combat Plasmids and gene tonics. Ryan's hard-line approach alienated many of his former supporters, even his closest friends, McDonagh and McClintock. Ryan survived at least three assassination attempts by people who could get close to him. The bodies of such former supporters were hung on the wall leading to his office as "trophies."

Civil war and collapse

As the civil war deepened, Yang Suchong proposed an unconventional way out of the impasse. He proposed altering the structure of commercial plasmids so that citizens would be susceptible to the psychic effects of pheromones. This was the ultimate betrayal of Ryan's objective philosophy: citizens were denied even free will. But Ryan agreed to it, justifying his actions by saying that Atlas and his supporters would turn the population into slaves, and freedom would eventually disappear anyway. Thus the situation takes the form of a paradox: in fighting the enemy, he himself becomes the enemy, one of the "parasites" from which he wanted to protect Rapture. Pheromones turned the tide of the civil war in Ryan's favor. In this desperate situation, with only a few members of the population like Johnny not mutating, Atlas resorts to his "ace in the hole."

Bioshock

Andrew Ryan is featured in BioShock 2, which takes place eight years after the events of the first game. Although he is already dead, many of his audio diaries are scattered throughout the levels. His ideals are also shown in Ryan's Amusement Park, with mechanical devices depicting human life on the surface, presenting it as a "Parasite World". The relationship between him and Sofia Lamb can be heard throughout the game in audio diaries. In the prologue, Andrew Ryan can be seen on television screens offering a toast to the New Year of 1959 as Subject Delta walks with Eleanor through the halls of the Adonis Resort in search of ADAM-laced corpses.

Facts

The philosophy of Rapture creator Andrew Ryan is very similar to the popular in the USA and Europe concept of rational individualism or objectivism, created by the writer Ayn Rand (And[rew] Ryan is an anagram of the name of the writer Ayn Rand) - an emigrant from Russia, who believed that the moral purpose of life is the pursuit of one's own happiness and that government interference in the life of society is unacceptable if it limits the personal rights of a person. The creators of BioShock show the negative result of an attempt to implement this theory taken to the extreme in life in Rapture, where "parasites" - the state, the church, etc. - are not restrained by any morality or prohibitions. — talented people begin to do immoral things — conduct scientific experiments on children (Tenenbaum and Suchong), use human corpses to create statues and other works of art (Sander Cohen), or perform disfiguring plastic surgeries on patients to achieve "aesthetic" perfection (Dr. Steinman), while ordinary citizens, who are not limited by anyone, striving to become better, smarter, stronger, eventually turn into mutants obsessed only with finding new doses of ADAM. It is noteworthy that under these conditions, Andrew Ryan, in order to maintain at least a semblance of order in the city, had to take extreme measures (such as the death penalty, nationalization of enterprises and, shortly before the collapse of Rapture, the use of subordination pheromones that deprived the inhabitants of Rapture of free will) and effectively become a dictator, which made him like those very "parasites" from which he built his own city.

Facts

Andrew Ryan's character was largely based on John Galt, a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Judging by Ryan's appearance, he never used ADAM to modify his body, or only injected himself with it for medicinal purposes. Ryan's murder scene and his dying speech are considered one of the most powerful and climactic scenes in Bioshock, leaving the greatest impression on the player. Andrew Ryan, Sander Cohen, and Frank Fontaine's mutated version are the only characters in BioShock to have their own unique models. Unlike other NPCs, Andrew Ryan's corpse cannot be interacted with. It cannot be searched, frozen, burned, moved with Telekinesis, hit, or attacked with bees.

Facts

In BioShock, Andrew Ryan has blue/gray eyes, while in BioShock 2 he has brown eyes. In BioShock 2, the achievement/trophy "9-Irony" can be obtained by using Telekinesis in Ryan's Amusement Park to pick up the golf club in the very first Journey to the Surface production and break the Ryan animatronic with it. This is a direct reference to Ryan's death in BioShock, and possibly a nod to the "Irony" trophy that can be obtained in the same game by taking a picture of Sander Cohen's corpse. In BioShock: The Collection, Ryan's model was reworked and updated, and his death animation was improved.