On Halloween of 2015, I got married to someone who loves BioShock as much as I do (we have a lot more in common and I love him for more than that, but that’s the part that relates to this post so lololololol whoops).

We didn’t have a huge budget for our wedding so we did a lot of the stuff ourselves when it came to decorations, invites, etc. The photos in this post take a look at some of the things I created and worked on (including a thing I worked on well after the wedding) – all of which came out way better than I thought they would!

The two photos above are of the centerpieces we had on all the tables. I cut a city skyline out of thin clear plastic with a Silhouette Cameo (those things are magical), spraypainted them black and then attached them to themselves to make them circular. Those went in a vase of rocks, water, and sand and had a blue light stuck in the middle of the city while the vase itself sat on a charger plate decorated with shells and blue butterfly confetti (had to get our love for BioShock 2 in there!). The table names were all places in Rapture and the names were cut out (again, with the magical Cameo) of folded blue paper, then I attached a piece of vellum on the inside of the card and set them each over a tealight (battery-powered, not a real one! XD) so you could see the glow through the vellum.

The next three photos are our RSVP card and our actual invite – which I designed and ordered from Vistaprint. The fancy address labels came from there too! The purple backings for the invite were cut to size by my mother-in-law (who was my soon to be mother-in-law then!) and then I punched the corners and sides with an art deco-style punch. My hands were sore after all that punching.  The printed part of the invites (which was the part ordered from VP) were then attached to the purple backings with photo corners.

The last four photos are of a picture frame I made for our one-year anniversary that had a favorite photo of ours from the wedding. The first two photos of it are similar, but you can see the texture from the paint job on the frame way better in the second photo. The whole thing was two wooden frames I bought, painted and put together. The touches I added on it were all related to the wedding – the paint colors, gem colors (on the silver mask) & peacock feather included our wedding/decor colors, the silver mask was for the whole BioShock/masquerade thing we had going and obviously the pictures added on the side are Rapture-related!

I didn’t even have space here for all the photos and rambling of the masks! Maybe one day I’ll post about those crazy things too.

(Many thanks to JeremyDesignz for the centerpiece photos and the wedding photo I put in the frame! :D)

As we looked at dates (after getting engaged in June of 2014), we realized that in the next year, Halloween would be on a Saturday! We went with Halloween because it’s one of our favorite holidays and it’s in our favorite season. That took care of our date. It also took care of the fact that we’re the worst procrastinators ever so it gave us a lot of time to figure things out and work on stuff. We found a place (thanks to my mom for taking me over to it so many times since she needed a key from the office that owned it to get in!) and a caterer fairly quickly. This was awesome to us because we had already taken care of two of the biggest things we were worried about. Of course, we still didn’t have any idea what this wedding was going to be like. We just knew it was going to be on Halloween. One night we were sitting at dinner with my mom and her boyfriend and he said – jokingly, “Why not have a BioShock wedding?” Nate and I looked at each other with wide eyes and my mom and him were like, “Oh, oh that was a joke lol” and we’re all, “IT’S TOO LATE YOU ALREADY SAID IT AND THE IDEA IS PERFECT.” They both like BioShock though too, so even though they were joking, they didn’t try to talk us out of it.

Besides being one of our favorite video games of all time, BioShock was one of the very first things we talked nerded about when we first started talking. In fact, one of the first things Nate said in a message to me regarding a photo in an online profile was, “IS THAT YOU DRESSED LIKE A LITTLE SISTER FROM BIOSHOCK?” It was.

Anyways, we had people ask if they should come to the wedding in costume because it was on Halloween. We said no, but they were welcome to come dressed with a 40’s/50’s vibe if they wanted. We explained BioShock on our wedding info website so everyone could get an idea of what it was — although, a lot of the people who were there knew because they are fellow gamers. We were also on a very tight budget since I had lost my job in February of 2015. So it was fun (most of it was fun, some of it was “fun”) to try to figure out everything we wanted/needed and how to keep it all not too expensive. Trying to do something related to swanky Rapture parties on a budget GOOD LUCK, US.

So fast forward to the wedding (and a little bit before the wedding)! Here is a slew of pictures and explanations on what we did with everything.

Our invites and RSVP cards were a lot of fun to fiddle around with and make. The invites were hand-cut and border-punched by me and Nate’s mom then we added the printed info on with photo corners. The RSVP cards were postcards and they were designed to look like they came from Rapture. We waited for a sale on Vistaprint and got the RSVP cards, invite info, and address labels printed! We thought the address labels worked well with the theme and then wouldn’t have to handwrite our address so many times. Also, we of course had to include Would You Kindly on the invite because that has to be somewhere! To people who didn’t know, it sounded sweet and classy and to people who did, hahahahah we’ve conditioned you to come to our wedding.

And I didn’t get a photo of these at the venue, but these pictures are usually on the wall in our dining room and we took them with us with the rest of the decorations for the venue. There was a fireplace in one of the rooms and we put these on the mantle with a blacklight in front of them! (Here is a link where you can see them under a blacklight. :D)

The other thing that I got photos of (the rest after my janky photos will be really nice ones by the photographer at our wedding) was the box we made for people to put cards in — somehow we wanted to pull Circus of Values into the decor and here is where we did it. We got a box with a magnetic flap from a craft store, cut a hole in one of the sides, spraypainted it, turned it upright, and added a weathered picture (or pictures since it’s four pieces of paper put together) of the Circus of Values clown. We also added a sign to let people know it was for cards so they didn’t just think it was a creepy clown staring at them from the back of the room. The sign and the CoV picture were splattered and smeared in rust/green/yellow/black/etc. ink – there are some closer shots below! (We wanted to make it so that when someone slid a card in the box would say WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS OF VALUES but we didn’t have time to try it out!)

The photos from here on out (except for the very last collage of photos which I took very recently) are from the wedding day and were taken by the very awesome and talented Jeremy of JeremyDesignz!

We couldn’t have a BioShock wedding without masks! My mom found these awesome cracked cat masks online that were very fitting so of course, we had to put them up in the venue. Couldn’t have a BioShock wedding without the Rapture New Year’s Masquerade print either! Sure, it was a party for NYE, but it was still a party and it was BioShock so we had to bring it. Also, Jeremy got a nifty photo of our rings on the bunny mask.

We weren’t able to theme everything BioShock, but it was okay because everything was fitting for us as a pair, which was very important when planning this whole shindig. On our program, we used the same fonts on we used for the invites/RSVP cards – we also used a lot of peacock feathers in decorations around the venue. That delicious thing with an angry Donald & an adorable Daisy Duck Tsum Tsum (dressed for Halloween!) on top is a brownie cake. Which was basically a tower made up of different types of amazing brownies. We talked about getting a super fancy cake but those can get really expensive and I always feel bad eating them because they’re ALWAYS SO PRETTY. We also had a candy bar – we had to keep the traditional Halloween in there somehow – with all of our favorite candy in it. (Other things we snuck into the wedding that weren’t BioShock but were us included the DJ playing Alone in the Town from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack during the cocktail hour. There had to be SOMETHING Silent Hill in the wedding. ;D)

We kept touches of the game in places like the guestbook table (where there was also a robot frame full of pictures of us being derps) and the signature drinks we had.

We had our favorite little Big Daddy doll on our table up at the front. Those amazing weathered/distressed/Rapture-is-leaking-and-rusted letters were a gift from our really good friend Ashley, who is also a BioShock fan and was sad she couldn’t make it (she had gotten married the previous month and also lives in Texas which made it a little hard for her to just pop on over to Virginia ;D). I had a set of H & N letters I was going to cover in BioShock images but I never had time to do it, so when these showed up in the mail it was beautifully perfect. Thank you again, Ashley! <3

We couldn’t have done any of this without our amazing friends and family. They helped out with everything from masks (which we’ll get to very soon!), decorating the venue the night before the wedding (climbing on ladders for lights and finding places to put decorations we brought), keeping me sane (AS MUCH AS IT WAS POSSIBLE) — I love them all dearly. Up there with us are our super best pals Denis, Ronnie, Bryce, my fabulous sister Valerie and Erin (who gave an amazing surprise toast I HAD TO TRY NOT TO CRY). And Roger (who you’ve seen in some of our cosplay pictures) came as a splicer!

When it came to seating everyone we wanted to make something that fit with BioShock. What was big in imagery of Rapture and the game? The masks! The interrupted New Year’s party was one of the first areas you visit in the first game which had masks galore and of course, there are splicers who still roam around Rapture wearing them. We made everyone a mask (made = painted some of them, added gems/feathers/flourishes/etc., added wooden sticks) and put a tag on each of them that said their name and where they were seated. We made special ones for our family and the wedding party (they all got cats in our wedding colors and had ridiculous stickers on the insides of them) and they took some time and effort but we’re really happy with them and we were really excited for people to get them at the wedding.

We had masks for ourselves too even though we knew where we were sitting, hehe. We wanted crazy ones so we modified some that we bought from a store online that has A GAZILLION DIFFERENT TYPES OF MASKS. We knew we wouldn’t have time to make ourselves crazy ones. And we made a tiny mask for my nephew (who was also our ringbearer :3)! It was held up to his face for .02 seconds before he backed his head away with a “WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST DO” expression.

Obviously we couldn’t take the venue and sink it somewhere in an ocean (or could we) so we had to figure out a way to at least remind people of the ocean somehow. We rented a bunch of uplights and turned them to blue and strung little blue lights all the way around the main room – it wasn’t much, but it was enough for us and it ended up looking a lot better than we expected. (Also the DJ’s dance floor lighting was A+!) We had a whole mess of glowsticks we had been collecting so you might see those scattered around in photos too. In fact, you can see my nephew in the photo on the upper right dancing with a giant foam glowstick in one hand and Uncle Ronnie’s hand in the other. The bottom left is le nephew again and my mom and I just wanted to post this picture because it’s really cute (also there’s a bat on his face from when I kissed his cheek). Bottom right is Mace Windu. My family would be very disappointed in me if I didn’t bring Mace because he goes everywhere. (We need to update that so bad because he looks great in his tuxedo, okay.)

One of our absolute favorite things we pulled together were the centerpieces. We wanted to tie the centerpieces back to the city itself. Each table was named after a place in Rapture. The cards that said which table was which had the names cut in one of the same fonts we used on the program and then a piece of vellum was attached behind the letters. A tealight (battery operated!) was put under the folded card and gave an effect we really liked! In the middle of each table, there was a charger plate with a cylinder vase on top. Each vase was filled with water and had sand, rocks and then a cityscape we cut using a magical CAMEO (electronic cutting tool thingie), that was spraypainted black and attached to itself. The cityscapes sat in the gravel and had a blue submersible light in the middle of them. On the chargers around the vase, there were seashells and blue butterfly confetti. We had to stick blue butterflies somewhere since we loved the way that imagery looked in the second game. The last photo up there was the city on our table (we were Minerva’s Den because that DLC is A+++++). We had a long and short vase and our city ended up being too tall for our vase so it stuck out of the water. Whoops! We were close.

As for us, Nate ended up going with a vest and no jacket (the wedding party guys did the same) and a tie that matched my dress. Why dark blue? Since I was a kid I always said I didn’t want to wear white at my wedding. I don’t know why – maybe cause I knew it got dirty easily, it wasn’t my favorite color, I just never wanted to. So I didn’t! I found this dress and fell in love with it and it came in a bunch of colors but I kept going back to this one. I knew I wanted a dress that was a classic style, could fit with the theme, and wasn’t super over-the-top extravagant. My mom found an awesome place that did my hair because we weren’t sure we wanted to try our hand at styling a 40’s/50’s look with my hair the day of. My makeup was done by Beth, who is amazing at this kind of thing and needs to get paid all the time to do it. My necklace was an art deco style pendant and the shoes– well, I looked for 40’s/50’s style heels and such but none fitted what I was looking for or matched the dress well. I have a pair of shoes like these in burgundy except they’re flats. When I saw that they had heels in the same style on sale and this silver shade… usually I don’t flip out about shoes but I was pretty excited about these. D: SO MY SHOES CAME FROM THE FUTURE AND DON’T MATCH THE THEME AT ALL.

Overall we know there were more things we probably could’ve tied in with the BioShock theme but budget constraints (and time constraints after we finally figured out an idea of what our wedding would be like!) kept us from going forward with all of them. What was important to us was that the wedding fit who we are and celebrating the marriage with our family and friends. Both of those things happened and were a helluva lot of fun so we’re 100% content!

(100% content even with the fire alarm at the venue going off in the middle of the reception!)