Including cats for the player to discover actually IS a game-within-the-game.
While it is still unknown who originally designed the black-and-white cat and put him/her in the original Bioshock, all the level designers of Bioshock 2 participated in finding fun places to stash kitties. And...
We have Steve Gaynor to thank for putting NAMED cats in Minerva's Cave.
All Hail Steve!!
All Hail Steve!!
There are THREE cats - one for each level of Minerva's Cave. The names of each feline honor someone important to the development of computing - which is of course very important in the Cave storyline. I found Babbage and Turing, you may remember.
Armed with this information, I set about to find the third kitty on my second playthrough - and discovered:
Armed with this information, I set about to find the third kitty on my second playthrough - and discovered:
Lovelace
According to Wikipedia, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace is recognized as the World’s First Computer Programmer, having written the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine.
For whose computer did she write this? Charles Babbage’s.
Babbage called her the Enchantress of Numbers and wrote of her in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864):
I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.Fun facts:
- Ada was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron.
- The computer language Ada created by the US Department of Defense is named after her.
- The British Computer Society awards a medal in her name.
- There is a movement to have an Ada Lovelace Day (which this year was October 7).
I didn't know any of that, so I am now a better informed person because of Bioshock's dead cats. :)
Many thanks and virtual cupcakes to Steve for allowing me to interview him on the subject of virtual kitties. He's a wonderful fellow and you can follow his tumblr and his twitter.
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