“In a totally non-[litigious] way, we very lightly imply that [Gone Home] also takes place in the same universe as BioShock,” Gaynor said. “And in Minerva’s Den, again in a totally non-litigious way, we very lightly imply that BioShock takes place in the same universe as System Shock. So, in theory, if you were to make a lot of logical leaps, all of those games have been linked together by our ridiculous retconning.”“In Minerva’s Den, there’s the world’s first video game, in theory, because there’s a video game down there and it was from the ‘50s or whatever. It’s called Spitfire. I don’t know if you found it when you played it, but it’s like a vector graphics, like an Asteroids kind of thing. It’s playable, the idea being that it was a super simple representation of a fighter plane in World War II shooting down enemy Zeros,” Gaynor explained. “In Gone Home, we wanted to make Super Nintendo cartridges that we put in the game, so one of them is called Super Spitfire. And the publisher is CMP Interactive, which stands for [Minerva’s Den protagonist] Charles Milton Porter, because he survived and made it back to the surface.”
“There’s a couple of other little winks,” he continued. “The airline that Katie takes to go to Europe, we never named the airline, but their logo is an ‘80s brand update to the airline that Jack’s plane crashes into Rapture. So in a completely unenforceable way, theoretically, we have caused all of these universes to coexist.”
As for how Super Spitfire could have ended up coming to fruition, Gaynor theorizes that, “the art is very Japanese-style art, so what I think happened is [Charles Milton Porter] did start a computer company when he got back to the surface, and it’s been 50 years or something, so probably the company that he started licensed the IP for that game to a Japanese company, which then made a Super Nintendo version of it.”
Gaynor went on to explain that conversations during BioShock’s development theorized that, since Rapture has such advanced inventions, scientists there could have kickstarted the technology behind SHODAN in System Shock, which also links those two universes.“The computer that’s nicknamed The Thinker [in Minerva’s Den] is nicknamed that because its designation is RODIN, spelled like the artist, and that’s why there’s a Thinker statue in the thing, and they nicknamed it The Thinker because of that,” he said. “That stands for the Rapture Operational Data Interpreter Network, which going up to the surface would be shortened just to ODIN, the Operational Data Interpreter Network. And SHODAN stands for the Sentient Hyper Optimized Data Access Network, idea being that the acronym morphed over time.”
Gaynor explained that he’s always enjoyed shared universes, citing connections like the community shared between William Faulkner’s stories, or Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. As for the future of The Fullbright Company, Gaynor said he “would not be surprised if the rest of the games we make are technically in the same universe as Gone Home,” adding that Gone Home “is essentially just in the real world. It has different brand names because we couldn’t clear them, but all of the dates of the surrounding events that happen in Gone Home are just the normal world. The only things that are specific to it are the characters and the concept of Boone County, Oregon, which is not a real county.”
For much more from Gaynor’s conversation with Chung, listen to the full episode. Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.
