BioShock mouse pads for the desk

Our BioShock mouse pads and desk mats are Padrift designs inspired by the undersea and sky-high cities of 2K's series. Each design is printed in high resolution to every edge of a 3 mm neoprene pad that has a fabric top, a non-slip base and stitched edges to stop fraying, and the print holds its color without fading. There are eight desk sizes to choose from, beginning at 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) and ending at 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm), and each product page names the sizes that particular design comes in. Pads are printed to order, one at a time.

BioShock was released in August 2007, developed by 2K Boston, the studio better known as Irrational Games, together with 2K Australia, with Ken Levine as creative director. It is 1960, your plane goes down in the Atlantic, and the only shelter is a lighthouse with a bathysphere waiting inside. The bathysphere carries you down to Rapture, a city built on the seabed in the 1940s by the industrialist Andrew Ryan as a refuge from government and religion, and already falling apart by the time you arrive. Its look, Art Deco architecture, brass fittings, neon signs and the ocean pressing at every window, is unlike any other game's.

A shooter born on the PC

BioShock launched on Windows on the same day as the Xbox 360 version, and it grew out of System Shock 2, the 1999 PC game Irrational Games had helped make. It plays as a first-person shooter with a twist: guns share the work with Plasmids, genetic powers such as fire, electricity and telekinesis that you switch to at a keypress. On a desk that means mouse aim, a row of number keys for switching powers and plenty of quick turns when something drops from the ceiling. The fabric top keeps aim smooth, and an XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm), leaves the mouse room for wide sweeps of the camera.

Art Deco lines around a keyboard

Rapture's architecture is pure Art Deco: stepped towers, sunburst motifs, chevrons, fan shapes and bold geometric lettering. That style is built on symmetry and frames, which suits a desk mat unusually well. A design with a Deco border running around all four edges, gold lines on black, turns the mat into a frame and the keyboard into the thing on display, the way a doorway in Rapture frames the ocean behind it. Because the decoration lives at the edges, the middle stays plain for your hands, and a centered keyboard looks deliberate rather than placed on top of art.

Brass, glass and deep-sea blue

The materials of Rapture make an easy guide to matching a design with a room. Brass and gold come from the fittings, railings and lettering. Black and ivory come from lacquered walls and marble floors. Teal and deep blue come from the ocean outside the glass. A brass-and-black design suits a walnut desk, a vintage lamp and warm lighting. A design that leans on the sea's blue-green glow suits a dark room with teal or cool blue lighting. Both stay rich and dark, so the monitor remains the brightest thing on the desk.

A porthole on a small pad

Everywhere in Rapture there are windows onto the sea: round portholes ringed with rivets, long glass tunnels and tall windows behind grand staircases. A porthole is a perfect subject for the 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad. A brass ring in the upper half, with dark water, a drifting fish or the lit towers of the city visible through it, gives the small pad a single strong shape that your hand never covers. On a long mat, a row of portholes along the back edge turns the desk into the wall of an undersea corridor.

Neon under water

The first view of Rapture, from inside the bathysphere, is a city of towers lit by neon signs, glowing through the deep water. Neon lettering in pink, green and electric blue against black sea is the BioShock design that belongs on an RGB setup: the colors of the signs can match the lighting on your keyboard and case. Keep the signs toward the back of the mat and the darker water toward your wrists, so the glow sits between the keyboard and the monitor.

Big Daddies and Little Sisters

Rapture's most recognizable figures are the Big Daddies, huge guardians in armored diving suits with round porthole helmets, and the Little Sisters they protect. The lights in a Big Daddy's helmet change color with its mood, yellow when calm and red when provoked, which suggests two versions of the same design for two kinds of desk. A Big Daddy with a Little Sister holding its hand is a strangely tender image and makes a good long-mat subject, with the pair at one end and an empty corridor stretching behind them. The brass helmet alone, glowing at the top of a small pad, works just as well.

Vintage advertising for a light desk

Rapture is covered in advertising. Posters sell Plasmids with cheerful 1950s illustration, and vending machines such as Circus of Values, El Ammo Bandito and the Gatherer's Garden greet you with painted faces and jingles. A desk mat styled as one of those posters, with bold lettering, cream paper and bright illustration, is the lightest way to bring Rapture to a desk. It suits a white or light wood setup, looks like a piece of retro graphic design to visitors and carries a dark joke for anyone who knows what the products actually do.

Hacking pipes as a pattern

In the first BioShock, hacking a turret, a safe or a vending machine means solving a pipe puzzle: you flip tiles on a grid to route a flow of fluid before it spills. That grid of bent and straight pipe segments repeats beautifully across a desk mat. It looks complete however much a keyboard covers, it suits an industrial setup in brass, copper and green, and only a player will recognize it as a minigame rather than a piece of plumbing art.

From Arcadia to Fort Frolic

Each district of Rapture has its own color. Arcadia, the forest and tea garden that supplies the city's oxygen, is green and gold under artificial light, a natural choice for a desk with plants. Fort Frolic, the entertainment quarter ruled by the artist Sander Cohen, is all theater marquees, shopfronts and red velvet, warm and theatrical. Hephaestus, the industrial core, is iron and orange glow from geothermal machinery. Neptune's Bounty, the fishing wharf, is wet planks and green-gray water. Picking a district is the simplest way to match Rapture to a room.

Columbia above the clouds

BioShock Infinite, from 2013, leaves the sea for the sky. In 1912, Booker DeWitt arrives in Columbia, a city of buildings floating among the clouds and joined by rails called Sky-Lines, to find a young woman named Elizabeth. Columbia's palette is the opposite of Rapture's: white marble, gold, flags and bright blue sky, which makes it the BioShock choice for a white desk in daylight. Early on, you choose a brooch for Elizabeth, a bird or a cage, and either one is a neat, simple shape for the small pad. Songbird, the huge mechanical creature that guards her, is a dramatic silhouette for one end of a long mat.

Noir for a monochrome setup

Burial at Sea, the two-part story expansion for Infinite, brings Booker and Elizabeth to Rapture before its fall, on New Year's Eve in 1958, with Booker as a private detective. It is the series' noir chapter, and its style suits a black-and-white desk: a detective's office with venetian-blind shadows, a desk lamp, a glass and a single spot of red. A noir design looks right next to a black keyboard on a white desk, and it is one of the few BioShock looks that works without any blue at all.

BioShock 2 and the seabed

BioShock 2, released in 2010, puts you inside a Big Daddy's suit as Subject Delta, a prototype searching for Eleanor, the Little Sister he once protected, in the Rapture of 1968. Some of its quietest moments happen outside the city, walking across the ocean floor among kelp, rock and drifting light. A seabed design, deep blue fading to black with a city glowing in the distance, suits a dark room and a cool blue light, and its calm makes it easy to look at all day.

Sizes for Rapture and Columbia

The available sizes are listed on each design's own product page. These are the ones that suit BioShock art.

Setup	Size	Good for
Mouse only	S, 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm)	A porthole or Elizabeth's bird brooch
Laptop desk	TCG Mat, 14″ × 24″ (35.5 × 61 cm)	A vintage Plasmid poster beside a laptop
Compact keyboard	M, 11.8″ × 27.6″ (30 × 70 cm)	A row of portholes along the back edge
Keyboard and mouse	XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm)	A gold Art Deco frame around the keyboard
Deep desk	XXL, 23.6″ × 35.4″ (60 × 90 cm)	Neon towers rising out of the dark water
The whole desk	4XL, 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm)	Columbia floating among the clouds

The L, 11.8″ × 31.5″ (30 × 80 cm), stretches a corridor of portholes along a shallow desk, and the 3XL, 19.7″ × 39.4″ (50 × 100 cm), gives a Deco frame a little more height than XL without filling the whole desktop.

Gifts for a citizen of Rapture

BioShock makes a thoughtful gift for a player who descended to Rapture in 2007, one who caught up through BioShock: The Collection, the 2016 package that brought all three games to newer hardware, or one waiting on the next game, which 2K announced in 2019 was in development at Cloud Chamber. Can't tell whether they prefer Rapture or Columbia? A gold Deco frame or a porthole sits comfortably between the two. When you don't know their desk, go with an XL; it takes a full keyboard and a mouse on almost any setup.

August 21, the original's release date, is a good day to have in mind. Production takes 1–3 business days, and from Turkey the pad generally needs 2–5 more business days to arrive in the US.

Keeping the brass bright

Black-and-gold designs show dust and pet hair, while pale poster and Columbia designs show wrist marks first. A damp cloth once a week keeps both in good shape. For a deeper clean, hand wash in lukewarm water with a mild soap, rinse, press out the water with a towel and dry the pad flat, away from a heater. Never use a washing machine, a tumble dryer or an iron on it. The pad rolls up for travel and settles flat again within a few hours of unrolling.

A note on names

BioShock, Rapture, Columbia and the names of the series' characters and places are used here to describe what our designs are inspired by. Padrift is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by 2K, Take-Two Interactive or Cloud Chamber.