Boss Rush: Did Bioshock Deserve Its “Worst Boss” Reputation?

Frequently, at the end of a videogame level, there’s a big dude who really wants to kill you. Boss Rush is a column about the most memorable examples of these, whether they challenged us with tough-as-nails attack patterns, introduced visually unforgettable sequences, or because they delivered monologues that left a mark. Sometimes, we’ll even discuss more abstract examples, like a rhetorical throwdown or a tricky final puzzle or all those damn guitar solos in “Green Grass and High Tides.”

When it comes to the legacy of Ken Levine and Irrational’s Bioshock, two things can be true at once: It remains one of the most memorable and cherished experiences of my life as a videogame enthusiast, and it tends to feel progressively more dated each time I return to it.

The latter should probably be no surprise: Bioshock is 17 years old, and significantly more time has now passed since its original release than had passed since the release of System Shock (1994) when Bioshock first rolled onto the scene in 2007. It’s somehow already been more than a decade, in fact, since our last dip into Rapture during the Bioshock Infinite expansion Burial at Sea. Through all that time, Levine has remained largely out of sight, tinkering away at the long-delayed release of sci-fi immersive sim Judas, while his reputation has been harmed by accusations of a toxic workplace and his most famous creation slowly accrues barnacles in our collective memories.

Of course, there are aspects of Bioshock, or crystalized moments in the gaming experience, that will always remain unimpeachable. The initial plane crash, descent into the lighthouse and bathysphere, and the grand reveal of the underwater city of Rapture will forever stand as one of gaming’s most bewitching moments–an incredible smorgasbord of artistic inspiration and implied gameplay being laid out in front of the player to tantalize you in the opening moments of your journey, hinting at where the experience will take you. As Randian city founder Andrew Ryan sonorously intones his ideals of individual human exceptionalism, and marine life threads itself eerily through the tubes and towers of the neon-lit, underwater Art Deco cityscape, Rapture looms as a vast, undiscovered playground for the user’s imagination. In those moments, you can imagine being able to freely explore every nook and cranny of an impossibly wide, unknowable urban metropolis unlike any the world has seen before. The possibilities feel endless.

This will forever be one of the unforgettable moments in immersive sim history.

The reality, of course, is that the bevy of choices implied by Bioshock’s opening are not quite as varied and consequential as they initially seem–a theme that reverberates through both the game’s intentional narrative and also the less intended limitations of its gameplay decisions. No, you can’t actually carouse and explore through every one of the grand structures you see during your initial descent, as progression through the city is eventually gamified in a fairly linear way to serve the narrative. And no, you can’t actually exploit the genetic blank sheet promised by the gene-altering substance ADAM to recreate yourself from the ground up–those genetic augmentations largely serve as weapons to simply add another layer to the game’s combat system rather than radically altering how you interact with the world around you. At the end of the day, Bioshock is still a first person shooter just as much as it is an immersive sim, complete with all the elements expected of an FPS. And that includes boss fights, culminating in a battle that has for years routinely been regarded as one of the least satisfying final boss fights in gaming history.

But is that reputation really deserved? I think most fans of the series would agree that at the very least, Bioshock does not want for memorable antagonists on a narrative level, whether it’s the despotic or deluded kingpins of various neighborhoods like Dr. Steinman or that wonderful peacock Sander Cohen, or the overarching presence of Ryan as the monolithic creator of an entire culture. So too does Bioshock pull off its big twist with aplomb, revealing that the player character is himself a lab-grown genetic assassin, crafted by mobster Frank Fontaine (in the guise of your guide, Atlas) to assassinate Ryan at an opportune moment. That moment, the revelation of the carefully coded phrase “would you kindly?”, stands as one of the great immersive sim story beats of its generation, thrusting the player into unavoidable self-reflection over their own complicity in following orders presented to you by the game itself, in order to seek the all-important stimuli of progression. Bioshock had been marketed as a celebration of player choice; the reveal questions whether such a thing actually exists. Or in other words: Perhaps “because a nice Irish man said to” was not an acceptable motive for murder after all.

But the anarchic spirit of that clever moment is subsequently undone, at least to some degree, by the game’s third act that follows in its wake. Once Fontaine has been revealed as the puppet master pulling your strings, he becomes your natural target, but Bioshock doesn’t allow the player much agency in how you’re going to go about this. It culminates in a series of actions the player must undertake leading up to facing Fontaine that see you “become a Big Daddy,” but they register as dissatisfying, both in a gameplay sense where it transforms very little–especially in comparison with Bioshock 2, which did the combat aspects of this transformation much better–and a narrative sense, where you simply switch to following the commands of another character in the form of Dr. Tenenbaum. Your voiceless character is effectively railroaded into sacrificing whatever little humanity he has left to his name, without any kind of proper choice, nor genuine reason why the sacrifice is specifically necessary. And the boss fight this material leads into will just make you wish you’d stuck around in Rapture until it finally ruptured for good.

That the player ultimately ends up opposing Atlas/Fontaine makes perfect thematic sense for Bioshock. Andrew Ryan is a classic decoy, and as we’ve already observed, the actual moment of the twist reveal–of both your identity and the way you’ve been controlled–is handled superbly. But this moment is now so indelibly associated with the game that many players have seemingly subsequently forgotten that the final boss battle with Fontaine even exists, mistakenly thinking that Bioshock ends shortly after Andrew Ryan’s poignant death on his own terms. It speaks to just how bungled and forgettable the final boss battle against Fontaine really is, that a not-insignificant number of players have seemingly scrubbed it from their memories to instead preserve the better parts of Bioshock.

But the Fontaine fight does in fact exist, and it’s the one part of Bioshock that feels entirely like a corporate mandate, rather than an organic way to end the story. The player stumbles into Fontaine’s chamber to confront him, only to find that the manipulative “mastermind” has subsequently shot himself up with so much ADAM that he’s just finished transforming into a raging, 10 foot tall Bio-Hulk. And then, as the culmination to your quest through Rapture … you shoot at him with all your guns. And occasionally stab him in the chest with a ridiculous, comically oversized syringe to drain the ADAM from him. All the while, he’s zooming around in his freakish Hulk body, shooting fireballs at you from his fists and howling like a demon. But wait, he’s not just howling–he also somehow has normal dialog, but it’s almost impossible to parse it because the words are drowned out by his frenetic movements and action sound effects. It’s like Fontaine’s dialog and physical action have become completely disconnected from each other: The guy is trying to give you an archetypal villain speech, while simultaneously drowning himself out with the loud, aggressively dumb nuts and bolts of the shootout. The entire thing reads as unintentionally comical.

Suffice to say, the nature of the fight feels like an immediate immersion breaker when it arrives at the end of Bioshock. Despite absolutely being an FPS, the shooting in general was never exactly the game’s strongest point, so why make a conclusion that is all haphazard shooting without a shred of intelligence or strategy? Why take such a diabolical villain, the guy who twisted you around his finger with a single turn of phrase, and then reduce him into a giant, hulking brute? What was Fontaine’s plan after becoming an impossibly large, shiny freak of nature, anyway? The guy won’t even be able to fit through a doorway in Rapture at this point. Why has he gone from brilliant to oafish in the span of minutes? It’s like the 20 hours of narratively compelling story leading up to this moment drop away entirely, and suddenly you’re in a boss fight from a Doom game instead. Even players with no particular insight into story structure can inherently feel that the entire encounter feels badly out of place, a boss fight that exists only because someone mandated that “shooters end with a boss fight.” The gameplay of the fight honestly has zero redeeming features–the only thing that feels at all appropriate is how it ends, with the Little Sisters ganging up on Fontaine to dispense a little undersea justice.

It has never taken a genius to see the easy fix to the scenario, either: The story of Bioshock was never going to be served by a traditional “boss fight,” and the easiest way to avoid this mess would have been to simply not create one in the first place. With that said, there are other paths that a final confrontation could have taken. Perhaps the player could have journeyed back up toward the surface through waves of splicers, revisiting some of the game’s locations as you lead the Little Sisters toward freedom. Perhaps you could have been tasked with stopping Fontaine by eroding the foundations of Rapture itself … after getting the Little Sisters to safety, of course. Perhaps you could have been offered a choice of what to do with Fontaine, which seems much more in keeping with the Bioshock ethos than simply engaging in a loud, jumbled shootout with him. There are many paths that could have been more generally satisfying.

More than anything, I would love to know what Ken Levine’s original concepts might have been for the game’s narrative conclusion, as he has repeatedly made it clear over the years that he was both dissatisfied with the ultimate endings of Bioshock, and presumably with the Fontaine boss fight involving a “giant nude dude,” in his words. And when even the series creator acknowledges these kinds of failings, it’s little wonder that there are precious few Bioshock ending defenders out there today. Most of us seem to have agreed to simply not talk about it, despite the fact that the entire third act of the game builds to it.

The idea of an alternate conclusion to one of the most broadly loved videogames of all time, however, still feels like something tantalizingly close … particularly after Bioshock Infinite, for all its own flaws, introduced so many concepts revolving around parallel universes and timelines. The time has likely come and gone for any “director’s cut” of the game to somehow reimagine its conclusion without the inclusion of a green-skinned ADAM Hulk, but I’ll never truly give up hope for that reality entirely. Bioshock was and remains a storytelling marvel with one of the most appealing settings ever for an immersive sim, and the idea of a perfected version is too potent to let slip beneath the waves. Andrew Ryan wouldn’t give up on it; how can we?

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.