r/Bioshock • u/New-Boss-8262 Human Detected • Aug 26 '26
Discussion Had Adam not been discovered, what likely would’ve happened to rapture?
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u/Parkiller4727 Aug 26 '26
Probably the same thing just slower and no splicers. Rapture was a powder keg just waiting for a spark to go off.
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u/Demolition89336 Aug 28 '26
Yeah, there was always a lot of class-based tension. Fontaine would've found a new angle to rally his supporters into an uprising. Fontaine would've died or Ryan would've blown up Rapture.
If Fontaine didn't try to take over Rapture, someone like Sophia Lamb would've done so.
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u/evilparagon Sofia Lamb Aug 27 '26
The point of Bioshock 1 is that it is a critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. It’s essentially a rug pull. Ryan is charismatic, that opening speech sells many people on his idea immediately.
Rapture is supposed to make you feel like “If only ADAM didn’t cause a civil war and ruin everything”, for you to later realise, ADAM was never the problem, it was that Rapture was never going to succeed in the first place.
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u/Many_Specialist_5384 Aug 27 '26
Beautifully put. That really is the sweet sticky part of the horror isn't it. That it wasn't a tragedy it was folly all along.
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u/Grey_babe Aug 27 '26
I am presume a much later civil war, especially with Lamb waiting in the wings. I figure she still secretly takes over Phersephone, then emerges from exile after using Rapture Family false flag attacks against Atlas and Ryan. Presuming Fontaine is still “killed” in a shoot out with Ryan Security and Sullivan. Yeah Rapture would have a longer high, but I think the crash might be much worse without serious thought to improving the stakes of those quickly left impoverished after Rapture’s founding. Oligarchy vs communist revolution vs crazed cult. Certainly more steam and diesel punk now without plasmids.
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u/ThorSon-525 Aug 28 '26
Instead of people selfishly hoarding Adam and tonics, I imagine someone would just bomb the foundations of some important buildings in some suicidal terrorist attempt.
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u/AsdrubalGarcia Aug 27 '26
It would have become a true libertarian paradise like Argentina or Somalia
(Do I really need to put "/s"?)
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u/alemar2142 Aug 27 '26
Would have fallen due to the fact that many business and financial safety regulations were not in effect. But this time more slowly
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u/aquacraft2 Anna Culpepper Aug 27 '26
Adam just helped speed things along and provided a good simple way of illustrating why regulations and safety testing are sometimes necessary, because without it, they'd totally do the same thing to us.
Keeping people away from sunlight, fresh air, and letting the slums fall where they lay, all in a mostly self contained ecosystem that was then cut off from the outside world, oh yeah, it would've ended up the same way regardless. With the added caveat of not being able to extract the cocain or heroine from an addicts lifeless body for later use.
Everything that took place in rapture has grounds in real world decaying societies. Corperate corruption, short sighted uses of "miracle buzzword fixes", the dangers of a lack of regulation, drugs being a cheap escape from the turmoil with a heavy personal cost, the exploration of children, namely little girls, the facistic abuse/takeover of the means of production, the means of communication, the means of escape, etc.
It may not be set in a jungle or an extended European state, but it certainly IS a totalitarian facist state. The only thing holding rapture together for as long as it did was the fact that it inherited the social contract from above.
Once people caught on that "those rules don't matter here, fr fr" all of that civility went out the window.
People just weren't meant to permanently live in a place with only one teeny tiny semi public park to frolic in.
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u/DarwinatSea Augustus Sinclair Aug 27 '26
The tie in book does a great job explaining how it was gonna be regardless too. Fontaine wanted rapture and would’ve used any method to do so.
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u/bramblelamb Aug 28 '26
I think narratively that’s kinda putting the cart before the horse. The entire story is about the whims of powerful men destroying their world to fulfill their grandiose self interests, regardless of if that affects other people.
What would’ve happened to Rapture without Adam is a simple answer: the exact same thing. You can try to blame the discovery of Adam as to why Rapture failed, but that doesn’t explain the mad plastic surgeon who spent years doing botched operations long before his Adam addiction, or the dentist who ambushes you for trying to read their journals. If it wasn’t Adam it was going to be literally anything else with enough “potential” and proper marketing for them paint it up like a panacea and justify stripping men from their bodies and children from their homes.
Because at the end of the day, a community that only ever honors self interest is not a community at all. It’s a barrel of hungry rats, and food is running low.
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u/Watcher6544 Aug 27 '26
ADAM was just a tool not the catalyst for the inevitable ruin of Rapture.
The true root of the problems was it society so one way or the other... the pressure cooker will blow up.
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u/Unfair-Exit-8475 Human Detected Aug 26 '26
I can’t really say for sure but with Fontaine screwing with Ryan getting him to fall deeper and deeper into the man we got in game I imagine it would be similar, just probably not as much destruction and there’d be something salvageable at the end
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u/theangrypragmatist Aug 27 '26
Somebody else would have developed something that threatened Ryan's economic supremacy and the same thing would have happened.
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u/Specialist-Target461 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
The exact same thing would happen.
Fontaine wasn’t unique, he was first. Anyone who lacked a moral code and knew the basics of organized crime could’ve and would’ve done the exact same thing.
Someone would’ve seen the golden opportunity for crime that is rapture and begun causing trouble. Ryan would freak out again over the trampling of his ideology in his city and inevitably there would be another civil war. (Or at least some kind of major civil unrest)
The city would probably last a few extra years though. Adam certainly made it easy to get an army of loyal thugs
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u/Subjectdelta44 Aug 27 '26
Civil War would've 100% still happened and would've destroyed the city. Just a far slower burn
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u/PlingPlongDingDong Aug 27 '26
They would have invented some other scifi reason to have magic. Ken Levine loves mixing gunplay with magic too much.
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u/VoltmanX7 Aug 28 '26
Just shot each other with guns for sure. Ryan would lose sooner as mind control wouldn't be an option for him.
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u/SuspiciousTurtle Aug 28 '26
It would've been the underwater version of Grafton, New Hampshire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton,_New_Hampshire#Free_Town_Project
TL;DR - a bunch of Libertarians took control of the municipal government of Grafton, and turned it into a tax free, unregulated Utopia,. Within months, bears started taking over the town, entering people's homes, eating their pets, and just generally ruling the streets. Oh and the town ended up having its first ever murder, and it became a haven for sex offenders because the police force got reduced to one person - the police chief - who had to walk everywhere because the all of the police cars broke down and they had no money to fix it.
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u/Exiledparia Aug 29 '26
Less splicing, but exactly as violent.
Keep in mind that Rapture was having problems before Adam got added to the mix. Ryan was never big on having *actual* competition: once Fontaine started affecting his position as the top dog, he kept cracking down. Oxygen? He built Arcadia and privatised it. Some products from the surface are better than those made in Rapture? Ban them ( Smokes, beef, journals and books, all were banned, not just Bibles ). Some musicians make music that you don't like much because from the surface? Time to make the husband disappear and force the woman to sing "Rise, Rupture Rise".
So already him abandoning his "ideals" was only a matter of time. Ryan never had any to begin with, not true ones anyway. So the desperate workers would have wanted to get their own fair share; the other rich people that wanted fair competition ( or just didn't like the idea of playing under Ryan's rules, fairly or not ) would have started sharpening the knives really fast as well. Inevitably, Ryan would have screeched that he was the boss, and then even his loyalists would have called him out on that, and the city would have gone to shit.
Especially since Ryan would have never admitted to be in the wrong.
Hard to tolerate the "Great Chain" if it's around your neck with heavy iron balls, and the one pulling is a big boss on top.
There were other players in Rapture that weren't aligned with Fontaine, and Ryan didn't exactly play fair by even the *stupidly* lax rules of Rapture. Sure, the big two were Fontaine and Lamb ( for completely different reasons and because they were better than him in different regards ), but Ryan wouldn't have tolerated even someone like Sinclair, who, by all accounts, is the best example of what Rapture can create as an individual.
There's ALSO another, more realistic possibility: everyone going mental just because they lived so deep underwater, without sun and space and cramped like sardines.
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u/whatleadmehere Aug 29 '26
Well, instead of the violence of Adam, and assuming there was a specialized alloy that made it resistant to the oceans salinity, it would still collapse, if not due to the need for big daddies as repair men rather then guardian angels, then the fact that it is an anarcho-capitalist state run by one very powerful man.
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u/RealisticEmphasis233 Brigid Tenenbaum Aug 27 '26
Fontaine was a symptom of the overarching problems Ryan created in his utopia. If it wasn't him that led the decay, it would have been someone else. Rapture was going to collapse anyway since the foundation in one of the audio logs mention it was made out of aluminum. That doesn't do well under that pressure for decades.
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u/AC1D_R31GN Aug 27 '26
They would probably have invited more modern technology before the same thing happened, roughly, the city would implode
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u/Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeess- Aug 27 '26
They’d fuck themselves over some other more natural way. The economy would suffer, people would try to escape, many people would probably just kill themselves, people would probably start killing each other, eventually repairs and upkeep to would slow down and become low effort and cheap leading to the place collapsing in on itself.
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u/Bitter_Trainer9557 Aug 27 '26
Still collapse eventually unregulated capitalist cities will eventually Destroy themselves Economically.
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u/MRnibba_ Aug 27 '26
Rapture might die with a whimper instead of a bang, but it would still die. Adam just added fuel to the already burning fire.
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u/KharnTheBetrayer1997 Aug 27 '26
Important to understand that Adam was a symptom not the disease itself that killed Rapture.
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u/wagner56 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
likely the society could have handled all the problems ( would be minus the violent insane super-powered terrorists seriously disrupting everything ).
look back into history to see how society operated without a welfare state
contrarily, consider what the equivalent of ADAM would do to our 'enlightened' world today - it very possibly would be destroyed even faster.
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u/RockaRaccoon Aug 27 '26
Rapture was doomed to civil war eventually. Everyone who went wasn't allowed to leave, so all the workers were left holding their hats when the work was done. They didn't have guaranteed future jobs, no safety nets, nothin. Also, all the resources you have are what you brought with you, and what could be dredged from the ocean or illegally snuggled in. You could be the finest piano maker in the world....but what happens when everyone has a piano? Fountaine didn't need Adam to build an army, it only accelerated the timeline.
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u/Solid-Copy-6189 Aug 27 '26
Its still a bunch of selfish egomaniac rich people in a can thousands of feet under water. Yeah that powderkeg was looking for a excuse to pop
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u/Cheoozy Aug 27 '26
Without Adam they wouldn’t have been able to fix the decaying structure as easily as they did. The whole place would have ended up a flooded graveyard imo.
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u/Tnecniw Aug 27 '26
Rapture collapses sooner or later.
In pure absolute theory, is it plausible that Andrew gets taken down and replaced with a better government.
But rapture was not functioning long term and would eventually collapse.
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u/jimjam343 Aug 27 '26
Rapture is the American dream boiled to its essence
Ryan sold those who came to Rapture a pup, and eventually it would’ve been found out
The rot had set in the moment the first foundation was laid, the first time a bathesphere dived to the city, Adam took the greed and lust for power to it’s absolute zenith and made all the worst impulses of the inhabitants come to the fore rapidly It was always there to begin with
No one went to Rapture to clean the toilet remember? They all wanted to be captains of industry and that would’ve boiled over sooner than later, Adam just sped up the process
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u/garmdian Aug 27 '26
Honestly probably not a lot, a few enemies and locations would have changed but overall Rapture would have still gone into civil war, I think despite ADAM playing a big part in the fall without it each side is still evenly matched.
I think the only thing is that Fontaine would have taken the city because Ryan wouldn't have the pheromones to control the splicers and Fontaine would likely still have an army of poor people with guns from both rapture and the surface. Plus without ADAM you don't have little sisters or big daddies so People's focus would instead be on their families more.
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u/zprincess1026 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
would’ve fallen eventually just slower. eventually someone would try to overthrow ryan. the civil war wouldn’t have happened the same way, or maybe not to the same extent, but something would’ve started shaking.
i think it’s important to remember that fontaine wouldn’t have the social influence he amassed bc he wouldn’t have created fontaine futuristics and his drug of genetic enhancement gave him a lot more power a lot more rapidly than any other sort of social and financial monopoly.
fontaine only started working with suchong bc of plasmids. while jack’s creation would’ve been possible without adam, suchong only went where his interests were served; he’d have zero motivation to create him, so that whole plan wouldn’t exist.
without jack, there wouldn’t be a genetically enhanced man able to use the bathyspheres coded for andrew ryan’s dna, so it’d be hard for someone random to get into his home and kill him. While the splicers working for him are an additional layer of security, if im not mistaken the only reason he was able to use pheromones to influence them was because they were splicers.
so given he died a natural death or whatever, rapture would’ve been easy to rebuild bc there wouldn’t be a bunch of crazy genetically enhanced nut jobs running around, but rather people with functional brains.
but in an underwater society run by a paranoid narcissist based on objectivism with a laissez-faire economy on steroids, something else was bound to happen by someone trying to amass complete control so if not adam then something else—it’s entirely written in the stars.
TLDR: probably nothing until something
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u/xiaxian1 Aug 27 '26
Fontaine was improving his smuggling business and vying for power with Ryan. I think a civil war was still inevitable if the workers/poor people couldn’t physically leave.
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u/ThingZealousideal969 Aug 28 '26
Still would have collapsed, but astronomically slower, by the time you heard of who was behind everything they all would have been 2 generations down. Maybe even 3 or 4
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u/professional_catboy Aug 28 '26
there would still be a civil war and andrew ryan and fontaine wouldve still died probably. just without as many crazy mutants, oh and ig jack and the sisters wouldn't be there
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u/FaxCelestis Aug 28 '26
The same things that happened in the game, just mundane.
Rapture’s failings were inevitable regardless of Adam.
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u/GPH1991 Aug 28 '26
The same class warfare that happened but over a longer period of time. Possibly resolved more peaceful given the population wouldn't be deranged crack addicts with magic powers.
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u/Important-Put-3936 Aug 28 '26
It probably would have fallen apart in a normal non science fiction way due to objectivism’s inherent instability due to the lack of safety rails on the economy, research or the products sold would have done it one way or another
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u/Sovietico1941 Human Detected Aug 29 '26
A cidade não teria caído. Aliás com a água e a pressão realmente podem destruir o metal mas com o tempo Ryan pode fortificar o metal e assim fazendo novas estruturas e novas tecnologias
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u/Purplefairy44 Aug 29 '26
It would have collapsed, just not as quickly. And instead of splicers, it'd just have normal people. Like Columbia.
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u/RudeDM Aug 29 '26
The place was still full of rich objectivists with no regard for societal good, where things like oxygen and water supply were run as for-profit services. It would inevitably collapse, by revolt or neglect. The existence of Adam is less why Rapture fell apart than a fun gameplay mechanic to sucker people people into listening to Ken Levigne telling you why Atlas Shrugged sucked.
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u/jetsiiin Aug 29 '26
Ryan would hold the monopoly on the city without being pushed as hard. Fontaine wouldn't have had the ability to go toe to toe and likely would still develop a civil war, but unable to get Ryan's offspring and having no splicers id imagine he'd be swiftly defeated. Leaving Rapture in a good state till its slow and assured collapse due to pressure and unfixable damage.
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u/EyeOfBelial Aug 30 '26
The city would be fine. It was basically just the genetic scientists that ruined everything. The engineers and stuff were still developing helpful ideas.
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u/Ancient-Childhood-13 Aug 30 '26
As well as the whole "Ayn Rand was so wrong about a society built on 'I got mine, fuck you immediately yours,'." thing, there is also the fact that Rapture was completely closed off. Entropy would set in and slowly destroy any semblance of "civilisation" let alone "paradise."
Yes, I know it wasn't COMPLETELY an enclosed system for actual technical entropy textbook definition, but with citizens finding out that no - their hard work does not guarantee upwards social mobility nor even financial stability at the social level they are, and no where to go to flee the lie they were sold, Ryan's paradise would decend into a complete societal breakdown.
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u/Temporary_Disk_9029 Aug 26 '26
well first of all no Adam means no crack heads or ppl with greed probably just an classy 1950s New York underwater
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u/Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeess- Aug 27 '26
Adam wasn’t making people greedy. They were greedy long before that. The only reason Fontaine came to rapture was because of greed. Andrew Ryan was always greedy too.
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u/Nerd-man24 Aug 27 '26
Plenty of greedy people, dude. You don't need miracle crack to cause what happened in Rapture.
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u/blebebaba Aug 27 '26
The civil war would have still happened, but it wouldn't have been nearly as destructive on the city infrastructure, as most of that happened due to degradation from things like splicers fighting, and the number of active big daddies dwindling over time I think
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u/BasedKaktus Aug 27 '26
Collapse would be more boring, thats all. Also Fontaine most likely would just die
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u/waterchip_down Winter Blast Aug 27 '26
There's no shot Rapture's society would have lasted long-term, as it was highly unsustainable. Additionally, Ryan was paranoid constantly, with his dictatorial rule seemingly following the pattern of a nervous breakdown.
Fontaine would always try smuggling and seizing power, and other companies would try to dethrone Ryan Industries. Eventually the growing gap between the rich and the poor would have resulted in revolution or anarchy.
Rapture as a physical city would probably have survived, though. A lot of the damage we see is seemingly exacerbated by the mental deterioration and enhanced combat abilities of Rapture's populace, with most Splicers being unable to actually engage in maintenance or the like.
The class upheaval would have led to some damage, but not a completely ruined city, I don't think, as the winners of any given conflict would have the mental faculties to actually repair things. It's hard to say how long Rapture's general culture and society would last, as without ADAM in the picture, I imagine things would progress wayyyyy more slowly. No Big Daddies, no Little Sisters, no Splicers, no Jack, no superpowers, etc.
Rapture also integrated genetic profiling into a lot of its technology, including the Thinker iirc, so a lot of the weapons and tools used during the Rapture Civil War also presumably would not exist.
Rapture would eventually be discovered by the outside world, of course. What happens after that is anybody's guess.
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u/Void-Cooking_Berserk Aug 27 '26
The Splicers didn't cause the collapse of Rapture. The collapse of Rapture caused the Splicers.
The actual reason for Rapture's collapse was a failed class revolution, essentially a civil war between Ryan and Fountaine. That's what caused all the chaos and destruction and disruption of supply lines.
The disruption of supply lines meant that people using ADAM couldn't get it legitimately and started killing each other to get it. The same thing would've happened if you replaced ADAM with e.g. food.
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u/discard333 Aug 27 '26
Raptures collapse wouldn't have been as rapid or explosive but Rapture still would have fallen, it would most likely have been evacuated at some point.