Regardless, BioShock is a dark and astonishing masterpiece.  

This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts.
Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades:
narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.

I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can't believe what I'm seeing, what I'm doing.  BioShock has five.