A player artist has created a massive cutaway illustration of Rapture from BioShock, consolidating scenes and facilities scattered throughout the game into a single underwater metropolis. In the original game, the city is ravaged by civil war, and players typically explore only along corridors and flooded areas, making it difficult to grasp the full scope of this Atlantic seabed metropolis.
This artist previously posted large-scale artworks themed around The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout on Reddit. This latest piece was created in Photoshop, employing a multi-layered tower structure with the front exterior wall removed, allowing Rapture's interior spaces to be displayed simultaneously.
The upper section of the cutaway features residential floors and neon signs, followed downward by clubs, laboratories, technical tunnels, and machine halls, with gates and bathyspheres visible at the lowest level. The publisher also released six progressively zoomed-in images to facilitate viewing of the details within the artwork.
The focus of the piece is not the city's silhouette, but the individual scenes within each room. The artwork includes slices of daily life as well as recognizable moments from the game's plot; hidden in the lower levels are Power to the People stations, which players could use in the original game to permanently upgrade a weapon.
This composition also evokes the cutaway illustrations of castles and ships found in children's books: a single image that displays multiple areas simultaneously, revealing the spaces behind the walls. It is particularly fitting for Rapture, as the city built by Andrew Ryan relies not only on its Art Deco facade but also on pipes, pumps, and sealed bulkheads for its operation.
Inspired by this artwork, players have proposed several game concepts that do not yet exist, including a Rapture management simulation in the style of Fallout Shelter, a Disco Elysium-style RPG focused on investigation rather than gunplay that depicts the city's decline, and a technical compendium featuring cutaway diagrams of various districts.
None of these concepts currently have corresponding titles. Cloud Chamber is developing a new entry in the BioShock series, but little information about the project has been made public over the years.