When video games dabble in sex, the results are often problematic, laughable, or just plain bad. A traditional love story of boy Pac meets girl Pac (while being chased by ghosts), boy and girl Pac chase one another and then a teeny little baby Pac is delivered via stork to form a full Pac family. Her game was faster and more varied than her husband’s, and in-between rounds spent dashing around its dot-filled mazes were some of the first and most iconic cutscenes in gaming. After a whirlwind of edits and a presentation to Namco that legitimized the entire project, Ms. So eager, in fact, that they ultimately gave up on waiting and embraced an American team’s conversion kit that transformed existing Pac-Man cabinets into an all-new sequel. Adjusted for inflation, it's made over $7,000,000,000 to date, most of that within just its first year of availability! After such insane success, it’s understandable that Midway, Pac-Man’s North American distributor, was more than eager for Namco to deliver a follow-up as the calendar flipped into 1982. The original Pac-Man had been a culture-shaking success in 1981 – an arcade game so popular that it's still the highest-grossing video game of all-time, entirely due to the sheer avalanche of quarters shoved into its coin slots over 30 years ago. The video game industry's first leading lady was created out of impatience. Suddenly, you are the biggest monster in the place. “A man chooses, a slave obeys.” Suddenly, you’re no longer a survivor of a plane crash stumbling upon a strange world. But the “Would You Kindly?” moment instead makes us question if we ever had any choice at all. There are plenty of revelations in video games where the player or the villain are revealed to be something else. It’s not until you stumble upon Jack Ryan’s office that you understand that everything you thought was true was a complete lie. Through most of Bioshock, you’re guided through the libertarian/art deco nightmare world of Rapture by the kindly Atlas, an Irish family man with a curious way of requesting things. Like Verbal Kint in the aforementioned noir drama, Ken Levine and his team do a masterful job of hiding the ball while immersing you in a story. Like the twist in The Usual Suspects, the twist in Bioshock completely changes how you view the story, both inviting you to reexperience Rapture and encouraging you to continue to see how it ends. It’s hard to understate how impactful the Bioshock twist is to the gaming world.
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