What is the BioShock reference hidden in HBO's Westworld?
Watch Season 1, Episode 3 of Westworld, "The Stray" (aired October 16, 2016). As Bernard follows Dr. Ford through his workshop office, the camera passes a small table holding a white-faced bust. Viewers froze the frame, and the face is BioShock's own: Sander Cohen, the artist who rules Fort Frolic, Rapture's theatre district, in the 2007 game. The only thing missing is the mustache.
The sighting was first credited to a Reddit user named Raptoropteryx, and it was documented with comparison images by Polygon, Mental Floss, Looper, and W Magazine. Four outlets, the same conclusion.
Here is the honest part: HBO never officially confirmed it. What makes the bust read as deliberate anyway is the timing. Days earlier, at New York Comic Con, co-creator Jonathan Nolan had publicly described BioShock as a formative influence, and told the story of playing BioShock Infinite alongside its creator Ken Levine, marvelling at all the crafted backstory written for background characters: "Isn't that tragic? And the player just ignores it all. The bastards."
That complaint, background lives built to be walked past, is close to the seed of Westworld itself. The bust is the signature under it.
THE GAME IT POINTS TO
BioShock, 2007
WHY IT FITS
The influence is on the recordWestworld's premise is a park of crafted characters whose written lives the guests ignore, mistreat, and shoot through on the way to something else. Nolan said, in public and before the episode aired, that this exact tragedy in BioShock's design stayed with him. Whether or not an HBO props master ever files the paperwork, the bust is best read as a tribute placed by people who had just finished telling the world how much the game meant to them.