With today’s release of Irrational Games’ latest title, Bioshock Infinite, I look back with some fondness to the first game in the series: BioShock.

It was a game that blew most everyone away with it’s ease of gameplay, unique art direction and, most important of all, a story that made people think that gaming was close to reaching the level of art for the genre. It was a game that dared to use as one of it’s themes Ayn Rand’s own take on the philosophy of Objectivism. It was a game about choices. A game that put the player into making the moral choice of rescuing the creepy Little Sisters or harvesting them for a rare resource that meant killing them.

I’ve played the game so many times and have made choices both good and bad, but it was always difficult even knowing how things already turned out to make that first decision to either “rescue” or “harvest”. Below are the version of this very scene that fully sold the game and it’s story to me the first time I played it way back in 2007.

Harvest

Rescue