10 Horrifying Hellscapes That Video Game Heroes Call Home

What’s the worst kind of hell? Why, one that was supposed to be a paradise of course. Built during the 1940s at the behest of ideologist Andrew Ryan, Rapture is a miracle of engineering, existing on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Ryan invites all of the world’s greatest minds to come and live in his new utopian society; engineers, scientists, surgeons, and so on and so forth. There’s only one key rule in Ryan’s dream vision; capitalism rules.

Andrew Ryan detests governments who take heavy taxes as much as he despises those who rely on welfare programs or handouts. Ryan believes that a person should have only that which they earn and instills that belief in Rapture. This works at first but cracks soon appear as the poorer members of society suddenly have no method of bettering themselves. After all, not everybody can be a top-ranking engineer.

Ryan’s solid ideology begins to crumble however when another businessman, Frank Fontaine, begins to grow in power and influence until he rivals Ryan himself. Fontaine controls Plasmids, Rapture’s greatest invention. Like super-powers in a bottle, the problem with these DNA-altering liquids is that they are also highly addictive. A civil war ensues and Rapture falls into complete disrepair.

We find the city, cold and leaking. Everything is ruined. The remaining citizens of Rapture have gone made, spliced out of their minds on cocktails of plasmids. They stalk the streets and murder anybody they find. All of them desperate for more plasmids. Ghoulish little girls wander the city, accompanied by the immense and powerful Big Daddies. Rapture was a glimpse of the paradise that fell into hell.