Beware potential spoilers for a random (or is it?!) assortment of games. The only major story spoilers here are for BioShock 2: Minerva's Den and BioShock: Infinite; but details about Firewatch, Gone Home, and the BioShock franchise in general might be unsafe if you're looking to play any of them completely fresh.
There's also mentions of System Shock and Telltale's The Walking Dead, but no spoilers, unless you consider the fact that one's set in the future and the other one's about zombies a spoiler. In which case, I apologise for letting that slip just now.
Recently, I finished playing Firewatch for the first time. It’s a short but (to my mind) perfect game, and I can entirely see why it swept the more artistic game awards categories when it was released a couple of years ago. While clicking around the internet for lore (something I always do when I finish a game, book, or show, because I am a lore addict), I discovered that Firewatch takes place in the same universe as at least two other, seemingly unconnected, games: Gone Home and BioShock.
Gone Home makes a lot of sense: Firewatch is pretty openly inspired by it, plus they both take place during the same sort of era (1995 and 1989, respectively) and in naturalistic settings, telling perhaps two of the most true-to-life stories in any video game. Its canonical coexistence with alternate-1960s science fiction FPS BioShock is a little bit left field, though, until you learn that three of Gone Home’s developers worked on the BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den DLC. It’s two degrees of separation but, technically, it does mean that Firewatch takes place in the BioShock universe.
Or, I should say, one of the BioShock universes, since BioShock: Infinite established that there are many. (Indeed, quite possibly an infinite number.) But since the floating sky city of Columbia seems to have been openly acknowledged by the US government in its own universe(s), while the existence Rapture was kept a secret by its paranoid founders, it’s safe to say that Firewatch is operating in a Rapture-yea Columbia-nay incarnation of the multiverse; which is especially easy to believe since the crossover character in Gone Home comes from Rapture, and apparently lived through the in-universe events of BioShock 2 at the very least.
(Firewatch also has strong connections to Telltale’s The Walking Dead, being the first production by a company formed by Season One’s dev team. But the thing about zombie apocalypses is it’s very hard to put them in a shared universe and pretend that somewhere else in the world there are people who don’t know about it.)
The connections themselves are light, appearing at first glance more like Easter Eggs than anything deeper. Firewatch’s player character, Henry, reads The Accidental Saviour, a book written by Terry Greenbriar, the protagonist’s father from Gone Home. Fair enough: there’s literally no reason to believe that Gone Home and Firewatch shouldn’t take place in the same universe, since they’re both seemingly set in the “real world” anyway.
In Gone Home, meanwhile, a SNES cartridge for a fictional game called Super Spitfire, published by CMP Interactive, is a subtle but unmistakable reference to Minerva’s Den protagonist Charles Milton Porter and his game Spitfire. Tastes just like a chocolate bunny, but the writers have confirmed it’s more than an empty nod. Porter is one of the few confirmed survivors of Rapture, and the creators decided that after returning to the surface, he formed a company, named it with his own initials, and eventually re-released a lot of the technology and software he had been working on ahead of its real-world time, including the game.
If you really want to twist up your brain a bit further, consider that the BioShock series is itself a spiritual successor to the System Shock games, with some unconfirmed reports that they are also intended to take place in the same universe. Fortunately, this is fairly academic, since the two System Shock games are set in the years 2072 and 2114 respectively, so we needn’t worry our pretty little heads too much about how that might bear relation to Firewatch’s 1989 setting.
These are interesting connections, but they don’t imply anything particularly meaningful in terms of the games’ canon. Except, to my way of thinking, they do. As a BioShock fan of some years’ standing, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that while this huge sci-fi drama was playing out somewhere beneath the Atlantic ocean in the 1950s and 1960s, the vast majority of humanity apparently never knew that anything diverged from our “real world” history. It’s cool to me that by the 1980s and 1990s, the world that happened to contain Rapture would be basically indistinguishable from ours, except containing the hidden ruins of this art deco Atlantis that may never even be rediscovered. Firewatch’s Henry and Gone Home’s Katie live through personal mysteries that are extremely ordinary when compared to Rapture’s thousands-strong conspiracy of impossible undersea engineering and genetically altered humans; but these are the most important things ever to happen in those characters’ lives to date. They focus on what they care about because they don’t know all the limits of their world, just as no real person ever does, and I just find that extremely cool to think about.
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