[ Author: Ben Gelinas; Title: BioWare Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development; Tags: video games, incomplete, business; Genre: nonfiction ]
[ FOREWORD by CASEY HUDSON ]
As a kid I was fascinated by books like The Art of Star Wars, as they seemed to offer secret insights into the grand magic trick of bringing entire Fictional worlds to life. I pored through every page, studying production paintings, marker renders, and pencil sketches—knowing that these artworks were the beginnings of what would become fully realized universes for millions of people around the world. Those books inspired me to create my own art, but more importantly they opened my eyes to the idea that there were real people out there, with real jobs, responsible for imagining new worlds—and that maybe someday I could have a job like that.
I was incredibly fortunate to be hired by BioWare in the early days, and over the years we have made a number of art books for our own games. But even though they include early concept art and explorations of various creative ideas, you're still seeing a somewhat polished end product: art that ultimately became part of a major video game. It creates the impression that video game development is a linear process: earnest, professional, methodical, and done by people who know exactly what they're doing. But that's not the full story.
The real power of the video game medium is that it's constantly evolving. Video games combine traditional arts with technology innovations to create something just a little bit beyond anything you have experienced before. That combination of art and technology innovation creates a very challenging creative space where art, design, and technology must come together to create a cohesive experience. In other words, the process of making games is messy. It involves starts and stops, creative explorations into things that don't work out, great ideas that can't be used, features that get cut, and entire projects full of passion and promise that never see the light of day. The result is that much of the work that a game development company does will never be seen outside the walls of the studio.
This of course is a bit of a tragedy, as I believe the best way to honor someone's hard work is to make sure it gets seen. Normally this means ensuring the game they're working on actually gets made, which is a tall feat in itself and sometimes doesn't happen. And often while working on the early stages of a game I would look through the art folders on our network drives to find inspiring images, and I'd come across countless concepts and paintings that I knew no one would ever see. That gave rise to the idea of a different kind of book—one that included ideas and concepts for things that didn't work out and revealed more of the messy process of making games.
So this is not just an art book or a "making of" book. It's also not a hard-hitting expose, or an exhaustive history of the studio. It's a scrapbook of sorts. A collection of art, anecdotes, secrets, and experiences from twenty-five years of game development at BioWare—pulling back the curtain on the making of games millions of people have played, and ones that were canceled before they were even announced.
This is the story of BioWare, and the sometimes strange and silly paths we've taken from humble beginnings to industry-scale expectations. I hope that fans of our games, other game developers, and aspiring game makers might find some inspiration from this book—or at least enjoy an inside look at what the heck we've been up to all these years.
***
[ BIOWARE: ORIGINS — WITH A BOUT OF SUCCESSFUL STOMACH SOFTWARE, BIOWARE FORMS OVER LUNCH ]
 "It was very few people, each one carrying a huge amount of responsibility. It was a whole lot of stress and a whole lot of hours. Fail and we'd have to get real jobs, and real jobs seemed to suck."
—Trent Oster, who brought Shattered Steel to Bioware by way of Lloydminster
Bioware assembled groups of eager, inexperienced developers from all corners of Alberta, growing quickly from its three founders to a studio of dozens in just a couple of years.
The story goes like this. Three med students in the freezing wilds of Edmonton, Alberta, meet in the late eighties and bond over foosball, amateur coding, and a love of video games.
They split up for a while, doing practicums and placements at hospitals across Canada like young doctors do, before returning to Edmonton with an idea: the medical training software they used when they were in med school sucked. Why not try to do better?
So these doctors made a couple of patient simulators: one for acid-base physiology intended for med students and a second focused on gastroenterology that was distributed to family doctors across Canada by way of Janssen-Ortho Pharamceutica. The doctors' approach to medical software included gamified elements and honest-to-god graphics, making it more accessible and even a little fun to use.
But now these doctors—Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine "Aug" Yip—had a problem. They liked making software. Especially the parts that felt like games.
So they got lunch.
"Literally, BioWare formed over lunch," Ray says. "This medical education thing, there wasn't a lot of money for it. It was tough to sell the products we made. So we were like, why don't we just make video games?"
He remembers thinking how cool it would be to make games when he was a kid. "But I never really pursued it seriously. It didn't seem feasible."
"It didn't seem like a real option for two kids from Edmonton," Greg says.
They decided, what the hell, why not try it? They'd keep their licenses to practice while also taking the leap headlong into game development. With significant investments from each founder, BioWare began as a studio of three. Then four. Then complements of fledgling devs from Grande Prairie and Lloydminster joined and made twelve. The studio started developing games. And shipping games. They moved into increasingly larger spaces. Aug returned to medicine, while Greg and eventually even Ray gave up their practices to focus on BioWare full time.
Over the years since, BioWare has crafted some of the best games in the Star Wars and D&D universes, created multiple universes of their very own in series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and made mechanics like player choice damn near ubiquitous in games.
This is the story of a little game company from a city only hockey fans had ever heard of that grew to hundreds of employees in multiple studios and created some of the greatest stories ever played.
 "The entire company was self-taught or came right out of school. That actually was an edge."
—Steve Gilmour, who joined the company in its second year
***
[ ADVENTURE GAMES FOR STOMACH DOCTORS — THE MAKING OF ACID-BASE SIMULATOR AND GASTROENTEROLOGY PATIENT SIMULATOR ]
The genesis of BioWare was in medical software that doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip created when all three were still practicing medicine.
"We were going to med school in the late eighties," Greg says. "We'd played a ton of games and actually made stuff ourselves."
"We were sort of self-taught programmers," Ray says. "I was never very good. Just good enough to understand the logic of how it was done."
The doctors were not at all impressed with the quality of the software available to students and found themselves comparing it to video games they were playing at the time. Very little effort seemed to have been put into the user experience. The interfaces were bad. The software was slow and difficult to use. It often lacked any kind of graphics, instead defaulting exclusively to text.
"They're like: 'You see a patient.' Well, show me a picture of the patient!" Greg says. "And we're like: 'This is shit! We can make stuff better than this.' And then we did."
The doctors' first piece of software was Acid-Base Simulator. They hard coded it using C/C++. Aug did the art. Then came a second piece of software, the aptly named Gastroenterology Patient Simulator, this time written with Authorware.
The doctors' software actually showed patients on the screen. They gave players clues and tasked them with diagnosing an array of issues.
"It was like: here's their x-ray. what do you think?" Greg says. "What's hilarious in retrospect is that it was kind of like an adventure game for stomach doctors."
The focus was on giving players clues to help them figure out what was wrong with each patient.
Players would have to make choices in order to accurately diagnose patients in the games.
"Choose A, B, C, or D, like a make your own adventure book," Ray says. "You had to solve the puzzle, which is really medicine in a way."
The doctors sold Gastroenterology Patient Simulator to a pharmaceutical company that distributed it to family physicians across Canada. Acid-Base Simulator was used by medical students at the University of Alberta, the doctors' alma mater, for the better part of a decade, to help flrst-year med students with acid-base balance physiology understanding.
***
[ BIO-TRIVIA — HALF OF BIOWARE'S INITIAL DEVELOPMENT TEAM NEARLY DIED ]
Employees seven through twelve moved to Edmonton from Grande Prairie to work at BioWare. James Ohlen was driving Cameron Tofer, Marcia Tofer. Ben Smedstad. Cassidy Scott, and Dean Andersen down an often-hectlc Highway 43 in Northern Alberta when Ohlen decided to try passing three logging trucks in a row. He didn't see the truck coming the other way and missed a head-on collision by only a few seconds.
"I counted one thousand, two one thousand, and then it whipped by." James says. "That would have been half of the beginning of BioWare dead before we got there."
***
[ WORKING THE NIGHT SHIFT — THE FOUNDERS OF BIOWARE BURNED THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS ]
Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk continued to practice medicine for years after founding BioWare.
For Greg, the realization that he could make games full time without pulling double duty as a doctor came in 1999.
He was lying in bed at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, working the overnight shift in geriatrics. "I'd work during the day at BioWare and do overnight calls," Greg says. "They paid me to sleep. But then sometimes I didn't sleep and that was bad, going to work the next morning."
This was more than a year after the release of Baldur's Gate.
'I was lying there going: 'You know, I don't think I have to do this anymore,'" Greg remembers thinking. "'I think this Baldur's Gate thing is good enough.'"
"When did we start taking salaries?" Ray asks him.
"I think it was around then," Greg says.
By the turn of the century, BioWare had secured multiple publishing agreements and had a handful of promising games in development, including MDK2 and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. Things were looking up.
Still, Ray continued to work as an emergency room doctor well into the aughts, albeit it on an increasingly casual basis. "I did weekends typically. Once a month, or once every two or three months, I'd go and do an ER shift," he says. "My hobby became my career and my career became a hobby."
Not that those weekends in the emergency room were easy. Ray most often worked as a rural ER doctor, driving out to smaller Alberta towns like Valleyview and Redwater. Places where, for that weekend, he was the only doctor who could handle a trauma.
On some weekends, Ray would go forty-eight hours with zero sleep. In those early years, the doctors also worked during their holiday "breaks." While the rest of the studio had paid time off, Ray and Greg were treating patients.
"Because we weren't taking salary, I'd be like: 'I gotta work because I'm technically bankrupt at the end of the month if I don't work,'" Ray says.
Like Greg, he did eventually stop, around the time he got married in 2002—though Ray still keeps his medical license in his wallet and only let It expire in 2018.
"My wife-to-be said: 'You're doing your MBA. you're working like one hundred hours a week, some weeks at BioWare, and you're still doing this medical stuff?'" Ray recalls.
"You need to sleep sometimes," Greg says.
Ray's wife gave him an ultimatum. She told him that something had to go. "I remember she said: 'If something doesn't go it's going to be me,'" and I'm like: 'All right. I'm quitting medicine.'"
After retiring from practice, Ray and Greg were careful not to be the studio doctors. If someone was sick enough, they'd refer them to practicing medical professionals. But that didn't mean their training in medicine was useless in the office.
"It actually translated in other ways," Ray says. "As a doctor, you learn how to communicate better with people. You learn the importance of teams. Working in the ER, I learned the importance of a multidisciplinary team and how you have to make sure everyone's skills are valued and respected."
 "My hobby became my career and my career became a hobby."
—Ray Muzyka. BioWare cofounder
In the early years, founders Ray. Greg, and Augustine divided their time between game development and their medical practices. Augustine eventually left BioWare to return to medicine full time.
***
[ BIOWARE'S FIRST HEADQUARTERS WAS IN GREG ZESCHUK'S BASEMENT ]
Before BioWare Corp, was an international game development company with multiple studios and hundreds of employees, it was just founders Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, working with Scott Greig, BioWare's first director of programming and lead programmer on Baldur's Gate, in the basement of Greg's house.
"It was one of those really old houses, so the ceiling was, like, below six feet," Ray says. "I would stand up and because I'm six foot five, I actually knocked myself out one time."
"My hair would hit it," Greg says.
While a lot of BioWare's basement studio history was eaten up playing LAN games like Dune and Warcraft, the four friends also found time to work on their medical software and an ambitious new game they were calling Battleground: Infinity that would become Baldur's Gate.
***
[ WHAT'S IN A NAME?: WHY BIOWARE IS CALLED BIOWARE ]
Contrary to popular opinion, the founding doctors of BioWare didn't come up with the company's name because they were making medical software. They already knew they wanted to make games for the general public when the name stuck.
"It was sort of a play on words," Ray Muzyka says. "We thought it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the founders being medical doctors."
The idea of the human-machine interface was also part of the rationale behind the name, leading to the company's first official logo, which depicted one robotic and one humanoid hand, reaching out to the user.
"BioWare" is the correct spelling of the company and never "Bioware" with a lowercase w. The latter is actually a Finnish line of renewable paper cups.
"Industry heavyweights scoffed at the name BioWare. They told us that with the name BioWare, 'You're never going to be a brand in the industry.'" Ray Muzyka says.
***
[ BLASTEROIDS 3D AND THE LLOYDMINSTER CONNECTION — THE ASTEROIDS CLONE THAT LED TO SHATTERED STEEL ]
Before there was BioWare, Trent Oster and a small team of friends, including his brother Brent and Greg Zeschuk's cousin Marcel, gave themselves the summer of 1994 to make a game in their hometown of Lloydminster, a small city on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.
"The deal was, if we finished a prototype by the end of summer and we had a game, we were going to go for it," Trent says. "We were going to become professional game developers."
The prototype they ended up making was Blast-eroids 3D: a first-person Asteroids clone released via shareware for DOS in 1994. It was pretty raw, even as far as prototypes go. The Ul was drawn in Corel Photo-Paint. But it was playable.
While they were working, Greg would visit. He was doing a locum over that same summer in the nearby town of Vermilion.
"This is really cool," Trent remembers Greg saying about home-based video game development. "I got some other guys and I want to do something like this."
Those other guys were Drs. Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip. Trent and his team moved to Calgary after completing Blasteroids, now convinced they had what it took to make video games. They went to work creating a new title as Pyrotek Game Studios. This game was far more ambitious: a mech shooter they called Metal Hive.
When BioWare formed, they initially worked with Pyrotek, and later brought Trent to Edmonton, who in turn brought a mostly finished Metal Hive. The project evolved into Shattered Steel, the first video game released under the BioWare name.
***
[ THE MAKING OF SHATTERED STEEL — BIOWARE'S MECH DEBUT ]
KEY FACTS:
Game: SHATTERED STEEL
Release Date: September 30,1996
Genre: Mech sim/shooter
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS
Developed in Edmonton
Published by Interplay Entertainment
BioWare's first game was strung together on playing-card-castle code and a handful of voxels.
The first-person mech simulator called Shattered Steel was entirely hard coded, making every bug an ordeal to fix. Memory constraints meant only 256 bullets could be rendered across the entire game space. When number 257 was fired, it replaced the first bullet, which disappeared. In a multiplayer game that supported up to sixteen players, this wasn't really enough bullets.
The game dropped at the worst possible time too: in the fall of 1996, the same window as a major expansion to MechWarrior 2, its chief competitor in the genre.
While Shattered Steel boasted thirty-two missions, co-op play, death matches, and literally groundbreaking elements like destructible terrain, the game only sold a modest number of units.
But it did exist. Players could buy it And play it. In an industry as raw and wild as PC game development in the nineties, that was enough.
[ SHATTERED STEEL ORIGINALLY WASN'T A BIOWARE GAME ]
The project began as Metal Hive, an idea born out of a fledgling studio called Pyrotek staffed by brothers Trent and Brent Oster along with Greg Zeschuk's cousin Marcel. The three Lloydminster kids had just spent the summer hammering out a shareware Asteroids clone called Blasteroids 3D and were riding that momentum in service of a much more ambitious mech sim.
"The idea was the enemies had a queen and were kind of this metallic flesh hybrid," Trent says of Shattered Steel's original name. There wasn't much more to the story at that point. The small team's focus was on building the game and making it playable. Eventually Pyrotek put together a singleplayer demo, with the help of new eyes like John Winski, and enlisted the help of BioWare to pitch the game to potential publishers.
In the midst of all this, Pyrotek moved to Calgary, brought on still more new devs, including artist Mike Sass, struggled to find funding, and was forced to fold.
Trent moved north to Edmonton with Shattered Steel in tow, joining BioWare on one condition: they vacate the Garneau location in favor of some place better suited for game development. The doctors obliged and they got to work, dividing their time between mechs and the Battleground: Infinity project that would become Baldur's Gate.
[ POLISHING SHATTERED STEEL ]
Shattered Steel boasted single and multiplayer combat with multiple mechs and an arsenal of weapons, including lasers, missiles, plasma guns, and even nukes.
Greg took on the role of producer, working with Trent and a small dev team that included John and Mike to finish the game, while Ray, along with newly hired Baldur's Gate lead designer James Ohlen, hammered out a story with others on the team to give the action more context.
"You wrote it, like, two days before we shipped,"
Greg says to Ray. Interplay had recorded a bit of sound. But there wasn't much tying things together. "They made these audio cues to start each mission," Greg says. "And then these guys were like, well, we gotta make a story to make these make sense."
They came up with a postapocalyptic setting where everything was run by rival megacorporations. The story they wrote appeared entirely in text, both in game and in supplementary materials. But writing even the most functional setting, ensuring it matched what was there, gave the game context. "That was part of the genesis of why we thought story was so important," Ray says.
[ PITCHING TO PUBLISHERS ]
When it came time to pitch a demo of Shattered Steel to publishers, Ray and Greg singled out ten they thought might be interested.
"We divided the list and just cold-called people," Ray says. "Most of the publishers aren't even in existence anymore."
"EA snubbed us," Greg says. "They never made an offer."
The rep at Interplay was also ignoring the demo. It was just sitting on a pile, Greg says. "But he kinda got fed up with us bugging him."
"He was just like: 'Can you stop calling me?'" Ray says. "And I'm like: 'Well look at the demo already.' And then the next day, basically, they're like: 'Hey, we looked at that package you sent. We tried the demo. Do you guys want to fly down here? Maybe next week?' And you know, they made us an offer."
In the months leading up to fo Shattered Steel's release, the Edmonton Journal newspaper interviewed the doctors about the game and their ambitious for the studio. The article described Shattered Steel that belabored way Some newspapers still tend to describe video games, branding it "a full-motion video space adventure of startling realism."
The article went on. "Now, with the action game not ever released, BioWare has a contract to produce several more," Charles Mandel wrote in the Edmonton Journal. One, Zeschuk nervously refers to only as an electronic version of 'a fantasy role playing game.'" Suffice to say, BioWare artists were busy creating animations based on the game books for Dungeons & Dragons.
Upon Shattered Steel's release in 1996, games publications lauded its advanced graphics, especially when running on the highest settings at the time.
[ BUG REPORT: CROTCH ROCKETS ]
Release: Shattered Steel
Priority: 2 (Moderate)
Description: Code got crossed at launch and the shoulder-mounted rocket launchers on the mechs were zeroed out. This means the position of the rocket launchers was reset to the origin of the robot: the lower middle region, where the torso meets the legs. The rockets still fire, but do so from the mech's groin, making for what Trent Oster describes as "Crotch Rocket Game." Because this bug is on the disc, all players who have not downloaded the patch will in theory experience this.
"In that era we put a patch up and said, 'You should download this. It will make the game better'," Trent Oster says. "But who knows how many people played Crotch Rocket Game and never knew."
[ BIO-TRIVIA — THERE WAS GOING TO BE A SHATTERED STEEL 2 ]
After the release of the first Shattered Steel, a small team got to work on Shattered Steel 2 as well as an expansion to the first game. Both were teased In an ending screen after beating the original.
"Then Interplay said. 'Hey, we don't really want to do Shattered Steel 2." Trent Oster says. "'But there's a rumor that Shiny doesn't want to do MDK2 and MDK was a big hit for them. Do you guys want to do MDK2T And the team was like. 'Yeah, let's do it!" Work on the sequel and expansion was shelved Indefinitely as BioWare Instead focused on MDK2. along with Baldur's Gate.
"We worked for about six months on the Shattered Steel sequel, largely doing some technology testing, and while we were working on it MDK came out, and was a decent success." Greg Zeschuk says. "Interplay approached us about doing MDK2 instead of Shattered Steel 2. At that point, the 'big robot battling' games seemed to be on the decline and character-driven action games were rising, so we agreed to swap to MDK2."
When Shattered Steel 2 was shelved, much of the work that had gone into It was instead adapted to fit in MDK2.
"The team had done some great technology development work on the sequel already and I suggested they consider morphing it into MDK2' Ray Muzyka recalls. "They took the idea and ran with It. and Interplay loved the result."
"***
[ THE GARNEAU BOOT-UP SEQUENCE — GROWING TEAM TURNED ON THEIR COMPUTERS IN SEQUENCE EACH MORNING TO AVOID AN OUTAGE ]
BioWare's Garneau office was above a bicycle shop.
After moving out of Greg Zeschuk's basement— the original home of BioWare when it was just the founders and programmer Scott Greig—the doctors found a tiny office above a bicycle shop in a quaint university neighborhood called Garneau, just south of Edmonton's river valley.
As 1995 turned into 1996, the staff grew from four to twenty, packing into the creaky second floor of a walkup building that absolutely could not handle more than a dozen computers running at once—at least not without some creative power management.
Enter what the doctors call the "boot-up sequence." In all, this office had four breakers. Each could only handle a certain number of computers before it blew. Knowing this, every morning the staff at BioWare would systematically take turns booting up their stations, calling out as they took their turn.
"So you don't overload the wattage of them, you would turn everybody's computer on in a certain order," Ray Muzyka says. "We had to do this by trial and error to figure out, like, you know, how do you get twenty computers to go into an office that's probably meant for, like, six or something."
When one breaker neared its limit, or they felt that breaker was nearing its limit (this wasn't an exact science), the team began booting up computers connected to the next breaker.
If someone wasn't there for the boot-up, another dev had to turn on their computer for them to maintain the order. "As far as we knew they had to all be on," Greg says. "If they came in later and put it on, it could blow everything up."
[ FRUIT FLY INFESTATION ]
Problems at bioware's Garneau location didn't end at iffy wiring. One Saturday, Ray Muzyka came in to find a bowl of soup by the front door. He noticed it because it looked like someone had put a lot of pepper in it. Like, way too much pepper.
"And I lean down and it's completely covered in fruit flies," Ray says. Fruit flies became a constant nuisance in the office. It took some detective work, but Ray figured out why. Their lead programmer liked pop. Sugar liquid. "He would leave these halfdrunk Coke cans everywhere. All over the office." Ray says. "So, of course, the fruit flies loved this."
They made him switch to bottles with screw tops.
***
[ FROM GARNEAU TO WHYTE AVENUE — THEY STAYED SIX MONTHS ON A TWO-YEAR LEASE ]
Between a ballooning head count, power issues, fruit flies, and the constant weed smoke wafting up from the bike shop, it quickly became apparent BioWare needed to ditch the Garneau location for more suitable digs.
"We actually stayed there only six months," Greg Zeschuk says. "We had a two-year lease, but we quickly outgrew it."
"It was only six months?" Ray Muzyka asks. "It felt like years."
The doctors found a new studio space above a bookstore on trendy Whyte Avenue, only about fifteen blocks away from the old office. They rented a cube van and the entire studio got to work packing up and running trips between Garneau and Whyte, pulling into tight spaces behind each, lugging desks in and out. They did it all themselves. Greg had experience with larger vehicles, so he drove the van.
"When we rented it, you were like, 'Nah, we don't need the extra insurance,'" Ray remembers. "I always get the all-inclusive, just-walk-away insurance."
Greg was confident they wouldn't need it, but Ray insisted; their dynamic has long been Greg shooting from the hip, with Ray advocating for more calculated risks.
Everything went well until it came time to return the rental van. Greg had to back it up into a narrow bay. "I get out and I'm trying to guide him," Ray says. "I yell. 'Hey! Stop!'" It was too late.
"Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr," Greg says, mimicking the sound of the van scraping against the side of the bay. "I'm like, that's not a good sound. And there's this arm sticking out tearing a six-foot hole into the box part of the van."
"And it also lifted up this... fuel tank or something?" Ray says.
They parked the van and Ray went in to let them know what had happened. It turned out, people had been watching from the window. "The entire place is just kinda looking at us," Ray says. "And the guy at the counter said: 'Do you have the just-walk-away insurance?'" Ray nodded yes. "And he's like: 'Just give me the keys and get out of here.'"
The doctors left the rental office and let out a massive sigh of relief. Except they didn't actually.
"We didn't have any money. The company was month-to-month and it was tight," Ray says. "I don't think we were able to breathe a sigh of relief, if we ever did, until we had regular royalty streams coming in from released products, and multiple products under development with multiple publishers."
If they'd had to pay for the van repairs during the move to Whyte, it might have broken them.
"Good choice in the insurance, Ray," Greg admits.
***
[ THE MAKING OF BALDUR'S GATE — BIOWARE'S FIRST BIG CAMPAIGN BEGAN AT THE KITCHEN TABLE ]
KEY FACTS:
Game: BALDUR'S GATE
Release Date: December 21,1998
Genre: RPG
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS
Expansion Content: Tales of the Sword Coast
Developed in Edmonton
Published by Black Isle Studios (division of Interplay Entertainment)
Before Baldur's Gate came along in the late nineties, a lot of people were saying RPGs were dead.
Those people weren't working at BioWare.
Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Wizardry, and other favorites, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk had long been working on their own original fantasy RPG—one that would bring the experience of a tabletop campaign to a computer screen.
When it came time to pitch their idea for an isometric CRPG, titled Battleground: Infinity, they first sent a demo to Interplay, who were happy with BioWare's work on Shattered Steel. But Interplay had their own plans for the role-playing genre. Armed with the Dungeons & Dragons license, the Los Angeles publisher had already released a real-time strategy game set in the D&D universe called Blood & Magic and were readying a firstperson dungeon crawler in the Forgotten Realms setting called Descent to Undermountain.
"They said, 'Yeah, we're not interested in anything. We got our own stuff,'" Greg recalls. "And then they heard we're going to Virgin Interactive, which was across the street, showing it to them and they're like, 'Well, since you're down ..
"It was Feargus Urquhart," Ray says. "He heard that and he was like: 'Wait, wait, they're taking a meeting with you with all their executives?"
"Guys flew in from Europe for it," Greg says.
"And then he finally looked at the demo that we had sent again," Ray says, "and he realized, 'Hey, actually this is pretty cutting edge.'"
[ A CAMPAIGN TESTED ON THE TABLETOP ]
And Io, the foundation that was Battleground: Infinity became an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons game. Like Descent to Undermountain, it used the Forgotten Realms setting. And it was going to be huge. Maybe. The sliding bitmaps were neat, at least.
Around this time, as Shattered Steel was still in development, James Ohlen and the rest of the Grande Prairie crew were hired on to work on Baldur's Gate, effectively doubling the size of BioWare's team. James was BioWare's first credited designer, though his job was more accurately described as doing "everything Ray needed done."
James and other early BioWare devs from Grande Prairie contributed now legendary characters like Minsc, Shar-Teel, Edwin, and even Sarevok to Baldur's Gate from their high-school D&D campaigns.
"That's the story of Baldur's Gate," early BioWare developer Trent Oster says. "They were all characters from this pen-and-paper campaign that's now this immortalized piece of pop culture."
WRITING KITCHEN TABLE
CAMPAIGNS FOR A COMPUTER SCREEN
A story-heavy setting like Dungeons & Dragons needed writing. A lot of writing. More than the team was equipped to handle without at least one actual writer on staff whose job it was to write words and nothing else. So BioWare hired Luke Kristjanson (who now jokingly calls himself "Writer Zero") after BioWare producer Ben Smedstad happened to see Luke's collection of nerd stuff in his apartment.
"Ben looked at all the shit on my walls and went, 'Do you write?' The answer was yes. How could it not be yes?"
Technically. Luke had never been paid to write, but he had paid a lot for an English degree. "The only thing I was doing with my English degree was playing tabletop with my friends, and turns out that's what got me the job."
He got to work hammering out a forty-page module in the Champions setting over the next couple of weeks.
"I was late for my interview because it took four hours to print out," Luke says.
Luke says the intent of Baldur's Gate was not to make a serious fantasy for serious people.
"D&D for us was the kitchen table," Luke says. "It's your friends doing something fun. And occasionally one's a jackass and does something weird and you roll with it." That was the vibe they wanted from Baldur's Gate: the kitchen table campaign on your computer screen.
"The intent of the simulation was not a fully realized medieval world. It was a simulation of playing Dungeons & Dragons."
[ NO ONE KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING ]
Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah started at BioWare as a programmer on Baldur's Gofe—after hammering out an installer for Shattered Steel in his first week. Mark was employee number thirty-five at BioWare and hadn't even finished school when he accepted the job. He ended up programming all of Baldur's Gate's gameplay as well as the game's combat engine and the system that managed the dialogue.
"I don't know if you should put someone straight out of school in charge of your entire gameplay systems," Mark says, "but a lot of Baldur's Gate is the product of people who didn't know any better brute forcing their way through problems."
Devs were punching well above their experience level. Mark, who turned down an entry-level programming job at IBM to work on the game, says it shouldn't have worked as well as it did.
"In some ways the team was too stupid and stubborn to fail," he says.
[ SHIPPING BALDUR'S GATE ]
BioWare had grown to about sixty people by the time Baldur's Gate shipped in 1998. Even with dozens on the team, getting the game finished was a feat some weren't sure the studio could pull off.
"Our first isometric RPG," Luke says, "and what we decided for our first isometric RPG was to make one that was nine hundred thousand words."
There was a lot of pressure. The doctors still weren't pulling a salary and were taking medical shifts in between development to support themselves and make sure everyone else was paid.
"We were all so tired," Ray recalls. "We were working seven days a week for months on end."
But it was worth the work. Baldur's Gate was a massive critical and commercial success that cemented BioWare's reputation in the games industry.
Now they just had to make a sequel that was somehow even better in every way.
"One of the things that was the secret sauce for BioWare: you need to identify the right people and you need to empower them entirely," says Lead Designer James Okien, who would assing Mark Darrah tasks in those early days and just let him run away with them. "He was the programmer. But he would just design things... He didn't need me."
[ THE BIRTH AND EVOLUTION OF BATTLEGROUND: INFINITY — BALDUR'S GATE DIDN'T START OUT AS BALDUR'S GATE ]
Prior to getting the Dungeons & Dragons license, and even prior to shipping Shattered Steel, BioWare's first game was supposed to be something called Battleground: Infinity, an ambitious RPG about clashing pantheons of gods and demigods. The game mashed up deities from Norse, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology.
"You'd pick your pantheon, you'd pick your world, and you'd make your character," Greg Zeschuk says. "Then you'd go fight and do quests based on your pantheon."
"It was gonna allow total player choice and freedom," Ray Muzyka says. The setting was inspired by Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life.
Players would play low-level characters in this world, fighting to ascend through the ranks of their pantheon of choice against friends in an isometric tactical RPG that was almost MMO-style before MMO was even a term. The closest term they had at the time was MUD: a multiuser domain for role-playing.
Most of the initial demo work for Battleground: Infinity was done in Greg's basement. They enlisted the help of programmer Scott Greig. While they'd previously worked with Trent Oster and other developers at Pyrotek Game Studios, Greig was BioWare Corp.'s first official hire. Greig also drew Battleground Infinity's key art (see opposite page).
"It was pretty funny," Greg says. "He's like, 'I showed at some guy's house, these... doctors, and they wanted to give me a job. I thought: I got a good job now but ah, what the hell!'"
The guts of the game had potential, and it had some neat tech, like sliding bitmaps, but the narrative wasn't clicking. It needed something else.
It needed Dungeons & Dragons. So, after securing the D&D license from Interplay, BioWare set out building what would become Baldur's Gate using Battleground: Infinity as a base.
[ DRS. CORAN AND AJANTIS ]
Many of the original Baldur's Gate portraits were based on BioWare developers working in the studio at the time. The lawful good Ajantis llvastarr and chaotic good Coran, for example, are based on the also lawful good Ray Muzyka and very chaotic good Greg Zeschuk.
***
[ SOME EXPERIENCE REQUIRED — BEFORE BIOWARE, DEVELOPERS HAD SOME PRETTY ODD JOBS ]
When your video game studio is founded by medical doctors, you're liable to hire developers with some pretty unique backgrounds. Here are some memorable jobs that developers had on their resumes prior to working at BioWare:
- 9-1-1 Operator
- Garbage Man
- War Correspondent
- Hotel Night Manager (Hotel was across the street from BioWare's Calgary Trail studio
- Comic Book Artist
- Comic Book Store Owner
- Line Cook
- Coal Miner
- Candlestick Maker
- Pilot
- Fruit Fly Geneticist
- Monastery Maid
- Vampire Effects Artist (Made vampire skin sparkle, made dogs talk, and gave Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson wings when he played the Tooth Fairy)
- Pharmaceutical Sales Rep
- Lip-Synch Performer (With backup dancers, performing songs promoting bicycle safety at an amusement park)
- Bank Teller
- Olympic Bobsledder
Before joining BioWare on Mass Effect: Andromeda, editor Ryan Cormier worked as a justice reporter and war correspondent.
[ LIZARDMAN AND THE UNDERDORK — EARLY BIOWARE CREDITS WERE LOUSY WITH NICKNAMES ]
Flip through the manuals of Baldur's Gate or Shattered Steel and you're liable to uncover a swath of devs with some pretty weird nicknames. In true BioWare tradition, many required no context; they already told a story. And while the practice of including nicknames in the credits more or less went by the wayside with MDK2, it sure was a thing in those early days.
Writer Zero Luke Kristjanson, who somehow managed to avoid being nicknamed, blames the practice on some combination of youthful frivolity and Greg Zeschuk, who would wander the halls muttering gibberish that often stuck to people.
"We were kids who didn't know how to be professionals," Luke says. "Half of our business cards even had nicknames."
What follows is a modest sampling of nicknames, collected from the original credits of Shattered Steel, Baldur's Gate, and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn:
- Dean "Macgyver" Andersen
- Webb "Pizza Repair Man" Anderson
- Derrick "the Underdork" Collins
- David "I'll be done with BG and working on MDK2 next week, honest" Falkner
- John "King of Couth" Gallagher
- Scott "Get the hell out of the art department Scott!" Greig (Scott Greig, then the lead programmer, now works as an artist.)
- Scott "do I have to go home now?" Horner
- Graeme "Squishy Retrieval System" Jahn:
- Scott "Lizardman" Langevin
- Jon "is this for the shareware?" Liu
- Raymond "pocket full o' RAM" Muzyka
- Raymond "Zuke" Muzyka
- Marcia "Marsha" Olsen
- Trent "Problem" Oster
- Denis "Mr. Positive" Papp
- Rob "I wish I could dunk" Sawchuk
- Allan "slob++" Theriault
- Daniel "Superman" Walker
- John 'The Evil Genius" Winski
- Augustine "ook" Yip
- Greg "The Son of Silicon" Zeschuk
[ FROM A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MINSC AND BOO ]
In this excerpt from marketing text done for Baldur's Gate, writer Luke Kristjanson answers questions as everyone's favorite neutral good human ranger and his miniature giant space hamster:
Interviewer: OK, I want the real scoop: How did you find Boo? What sort of counsel does he provide when he "speaks" to you?
Minsc: You ask how he speaks with your tongue in your cheek, but I say to you that he talks like the best of any of us, with words that ring true for those that wish to hear, and far clearer too, for the only thing in his cheek is the occasional nut. His counsel is my focus when I find it... difficult... to think clearly, either from the guile of villainy or some long persisting headache. Certainly there are rangers that prefer the company of perhaps a giant bear or some great cat or another, but I am large enough on my own and need not compensate. As for how Boo and I met. I owe that to a nameless traveling merchant. Dynaheir and I had been drawn to rout a nest of villainy while traveling through Sembia, and though we were victorious, I suffered what I agreed was "an astounding blow to the head." For weeks I was a shadow of my former self. A large shadow perhaps, but still not nearly as effective. When we met the merchant he directed my stumbling gaze to a small cage, and explained the special nature of what was inside. It would be grand to say that Boo came to me from his home amongst the stars, but, in truth, I purchased him for a goodly sum and we have been together since.
Interviewer: What makes you think he is a miniature giant space hamster? Does he have any special abilities associated with his extraterrestrial nature?
Minsc: What makes you think he is NOT a Miniature Giant Space Hamster? Who would have more insight into the attributes of my animal companion than I, Minsc! Besides, the merchant had an honest face. He was very insistent too, waving his pipe as he named the stars that Boo might have seen. There were many more words amidst his "thee"s and "thou"s that I did not even recognize, but everything became clear to me as he spelled it out. His price seemed more reasonable as well, even as he raised it once or twice. But enough about Boo, he is blushing because of the attention. He is pink under his fur regardless, but I can tell when he is nervous.
Interviewer: Any advice for burgeoning rangers who want to walk the path of righteousness?
Minsc: Evil is a maze of deceit, and the cheese it hides is never worth the running. Oh, and never trust an ice weasel when your hamster is on the line.
Interviewer: You are a pretty good-natured fellow. What is it that sets you off? Any pet peeves? What bugs you most about evil?
Minsc: What bugs Minsc and Boo most about evil is that it is THERE. We need not dwell on tiny details trying to decide if someone is "a little evil" or "very evil." Ask a villain if Minsc is "a little large" or "very large" when I am in their face and they will not have an answer. Why? Because all that matters is that I am there and they are there, and that I will learn their nefarious heads a thing or six about justice before they become so utterly villainous that we must comprehend their deeds in bite-sized chunks of bad, instead of all together as a depraved whole that must be filled! I have no peeves, only a hamster.
Interviewer: What the hell's the deal with that purple tattoo on your head?
Minsc: Many warriors of Rashemen bear such trophies, mostly as scars from battle, but not everything important happens at the end of a sword. Yes, that surprised me too. On the journey with Dynaheir I met many people, and one was a valiant warrior from a land with traditions like my Rashemen, if a bit more reserved. She was well impressed with Boo and I on the battlefield, but was concerned that my fury might some day overwhelm Boo's calming influence. She had proven herself to me. so when she offered an exchange, I accepted. I am told the marking stands for balance and is well respected in her home. I wear it proudly, just as she wears the symbol of the Ice Dragon Berserker Lodge, though not placed quite so prominently... ahh, but Boo's stare has reminded me of an oath long promised, and I will speak no more of it.
Interviewer: If you had to choose between kicking evil in the head or the behind, which would you choose, and why?
Minsc: I'm not sure I understand the question. I have two feet, do I not? You do not take a small plate when the feast of evil welcomes seconds.
Interviewer: What is your favorite sword and why? Bow or crossbow?
Minsc: Now this topic I know well, though I care less for the weapon than the target. A fine sword will serve for years, but if evil will not wait for the forging then a chair leg will do in a pinch. Yes, I have held many blades, though I am not fond of those found near Beregost. They seemed to break faster than the heads I hit with them. I have heard of something called "Crom Faeyr," but now I hold "Lilarcor," and it is well suited to my battle fury. All swords are meant for combat, but I never had one actually tell me so! I tell you, I thought I was hearing things, but Boo assured me I was not. It is a good weapon, but my favorite... and you will be disappointed... my favorite was not magical at all. A simple two-handed blade, now at the bottom of Lake Ashane with the man that gave it, and again I will speak no more. Bow.
Interviewer: Final question: You've traveled much of Faerun. Any favorite vacation spots?
Minsc: So often Boo and I are at odds with the places and people we meet. You know, opposing a strange cabal here, deposing some villainous overlord there; it is hard to truly enjoy the sights when they are burning or under siege. Still. I hold high hopes for the future. Boo would like to see the jungles of Chult, but that is just the giant rodent in him speaking and he may find it too stressful once we arrive. I hear good things of Neverwinter, though I prefer my North good and cold. I have important business here in Amn you know, hero-ing and all, but I might cross the Trackless Sea someday. I think an old companion went that way.
And, of course, one day we will go home, right Boo? (squeak)
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: OWEN BORSTAD HAS HIS HEAD IN THE GAME ]
It was programmer Owen Borstad's second day at BioWare and he was only starting to get his bearings in the rabbit warren that was the Whyte Avenue studio:
I grabbed breakfast in the lunchroom and was walking up the stairs to the second floor, where my office was. I misjudged the last step and tripped and promptly fell forward, putting my head through the wall.
Like, I left a hole that big in the drywall, "that big" being basically the size of my head, because it went thunk! Straight on. And I'm sitting there, kind of stunned. I'd missed the internal reinforcements by like an inch. And Ray Muzyka comes out of the office that I had just thunked into the wall of and he's like. "Oh my goodness, are you okay?" That office was Matt Goldman's and he was doing pitches of Jade Empire at the time to Ray. And then Ray insisted, being a doctor, that I go get checked out for a concussion and so the receptionist, who was Theresa Baxter at the time, drove me to the hospital and I got checked out for a concussion.
I had been harassing Theresa for a few weeks to get hired. And you know, the next day or two days after going through onboarding and the interview process and everything, she's like, "Okay, I'm taking you to the hospital now. This is a really interesting start to the company." And I'm like. "Yeah, that's how I get ahead. I'm really leaving my impact on the company."
FACTS:
- Owen isn't the only BioWare developer to accidentally put their head through a wall at the studio. His story was just the one we decided to include in the book.
- Concept art for Baldur's Gate was hand drawn by John Gallagher in stunning detail, with a penpective to mimic the in-game isometric view of the environments.
- In 2020, two decades after the release of Baldur's Gate and its sequel Shadows of Amn, Wizards of the Coast announced the series' long-awaited follow-up, Baldur's Gate III, developed and published by Larian Studios.
- To promote the release of Baldur's Gate, James Ohlen and Luke Kristjanson wrote a comic with art by lead artist John Gallagher that featured characters and locations from the game.
***
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: LUKE KRISTJANSON ON WRITING ANIMAL COMPANIONS ]
Luke Kristjanson has been writing for BioWare games since the first Baldur's Gate. Among his most memorable characters were Minsc and Boo. Here Luke gives some thoughts on why Boo in particular became such a favorite of fans:
Why are sidekick animals popular? Maybe they are easier to like than people. Animals are generally seen as more accepting, forgiving, and demanding all at once. They can be used to express complicated emotions without a potentially annoying lecture, say from some halfling joker you eventually want to punch. And perhaps the limitations of Al are easier to forgive when applied to a nonverbal pet. NPCs that players don't directly control are all pretty much big dumb dogs. What the player sees as a stupid move by a human could be interpreted as fairly smart for an animal. It's all perception. We are predisposed to think they are capable of more than they seem. Owls are wise, cats are dexterous, bulls are strong, and hamsters... uh... are from outer space and insist that we stop thinking so hard.
Baldur's Gate was the first game released using BioWare's Infinity engine, named for Baldur's Gate's predecessor the unreleased Battleground: Infinity. BioWare also used the Infinity engine for Baldur's Gate II: Shadows ofAmn, and through Interplay, licensed it for the creation of other isometric Western RPG classics, including Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series.
***
[ BE ALERT BERT AND STORIES OF THE SEVENTH FIRE BIOWARE'S BRIEF FORAY INTO BIOANIMATION ]
In the early years, BioWare contracted out their computer animation department to create sequences for television shows like Be Alert Bert.
In the mid to late nineties, computer-generated (CG) animation was making waves on kids' shows and in theaters. BioWare, still trying to figure out what it was exactly, decided to use its game animation team to also make broadcast-quality CG for TV under the name BioWare Active Media.
"At that time, it wasn't clear whether we were going to be doing this stuff or video games," recalls Steve Gilmour, who worked at BioWare for twenty years in various animation roles on nearly every release from Baldur's Gate to Anthem.
As a member of BioWare Active Media, Steve also made logo animations for QuickTax software and animated a mother wolf and her cubs for a short-lived Canadian TV series called Stories of the Seventh Fire, which featured stories passed down among local indigenous peoples.
BioWare's work on the show's "Wolf Tale: Legend of the Spirit Bear" episode marked the first time the team animated fur, Steve says.
Then there was Be Alert Bert, which marked the first time BioWare animated a spider with a mustache.
A mostly live-action show. Be Alert Bert starred giant anthropomorphic bees—or, more accurately, actors in bee costumes—who taught kids the importance of safety.
"They wanted to have some CG, but it was expensive enough that they were limited to small pieces," Steve says. The project had ultra-aggressive deadlines, even by video game standards. "I remember our first daughter was born, and three days later, I was working for six weeks straight making the opening title sequence for the show. I did voice acting. I wrote the script, I made the storyboard. I sat the animators down and said: 'Here, this is what you're doing.'
"I was grateful when the Be Alert Bert stuff exploded because (a) I hated it, so much, and (b) it was the video game stuff that was really interesting."
BioWare's Active Media arm continued to have a place on the company website until 2001, when BioWare finally abandoned its dreams of animating bees and tax software in favor of finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights.
***
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: LUKE KRISTJANSON'S CHIMP FACTOR 5 ]
As a designer, it can be tempting to hold a player's hand, to make sure they experience carefully crafted game content without a lick of frustration-in precisely the way the designer intended. It's easy to go too far in this respect, taking away the challenge entirely.
This approach tends to irk Luke Kristjanson, who believes designers should respect a player's intelligence enough to ask them to think a little.
"There's a staircase in Baldur's Gate," Luke says. "You have to go up it to find the next step of the plot. Ray Muzyka was concerned that people wouldn't realize there was a staircase, so he had me create a character to stand next to the staircase to say: 'There's a staircase here.'"
Luke said to Ray: "'Okay, fine, but I'm calling this bug Chimp Factor 5, because it's the dumbest thing.' And then I bought chimps, and I carved '5' in their chests."
Luke defines Chimp Factor 5 as a "reminder that to most players would seem patronizing." For Luke, and only Luke, it has become shorthand when discussing this ever-recurring tendency in game design.
"If the player needs this prompt, how did they get the disc in the tray?" he says.
After the staircase, Luke started keeping a small army of Chimp Factor 5 toys on his desk. "Because I dwelled on stuff like that back then," he says, adding that in hindsight, Ray may have been right about the staircase after all.
Luke still has the chimp figures squirreled away, but he doesn't really use them anymore.
"A deliberate mantra on our current project is: we will respect the player," he says. "That includes respecting that they're smart and there to play. That doesn't mean we deliberately confuse them. But it means that we trust that they're not going to go and make a sandwich midsentence."
***
[ THE MAKING OF MDK2 — THAT TIME BIOWARE GOT PRETTY BIOWEIRD ]
KEY FACTS:
Game: MDK2
Release Date: March 30, 2000
Genre: Action platformer
Platforms: Dreamcast, Windows, PlayStation 2 (as MDK2: Armageddon)
Developed in Edmonton
Published by Interplay Entertainment
When a rumor started going around that the sequel to the platformer MDK was up for grabs, BioWare pounced on the opportunity, developing it with Interplay once again publishing, this time for the fledgling Sega Dreamcast.
"At the time, we weren't an RPG studio," says writer Luke Kristjanson. "We had done Shattered Steel. BG I. And that's it" So why not make an action game?
When Shattered Steel 2 was shelved, the team and project pivoted to MDK2. While the final product may bear little resemblance, MDK2 and its mech predessor remain among BioWare's purest action games to date.
MDK2's focus on action platforming was a departure for BioWare in retrospect, but it made sense at the time. The studio was still finding its niche in the industry, and building a reputation meant taking on opportunities wherever they could be found. A sequel to Shiny's MDK that doubled down on the absurd seemed just as random as BioWare's isometric RPG and the mech shooter that came before it.
[ MDK2'S TEAM MADE IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG ]
By the time MDK2 came out in 2000, there were still only a couple of developers in the studio who had made games anywhere else.
"It was a time when as a group we had a diversity of different skills, but no one had ever done it before, really," MDK2 level artist and designer Casey Hudson says.
So when Casey was asked to "help out" on MDK2, he ended up doing everything from level design and audio work to animations for boss deaths.
"You would just jump in," Casey says, "and it was more about trying to see if you could do something, as opposed to knowing what your job is and what you should be doing."
"No one had any idea what they were doing. No one had any idea what an idea of what someone who did know what they were doing should look like either," says Dragon Age creative director Matt Goldman, who got his start doing art for MDK2.
"I would draw something. But how did it get into a computer?! I slowly figured out 3D modeling. Slowly because knowledge was guarded like Fort Knox. Yay, now I have a model, but how did my model get across the room onto a Dreamcast?! Why did anyone even make this model anyway, since it has nothing to do with MDK2?1. This was my first taste of the art director dilemma."
Occasionally, the team would butt heads over the best way to do something. And because no one had done it before, people tended to think their idea was the best.
"This was before professional comportment was invented," Matt says. "One day after the team nearly got into a rumble fight, we ended up eating pizza at Greg's house and working it out. Ah, the olden days."
"One of the thinys I learned from MHZ is that even if there is no creative direction whatsoever, the personalities on the team will yive it one," MDK2 artist Matt Goldman Says. The artists on the project each brought wildly different inspirations. Matt was into I950s industrial design. Another artist loved Jack Kirby. Yet another was really into camp like Little Shop of Horrors.
"And it turned into something. There was a synthesis," Matt says- "It wasn't planned. We were just totally ad-libbing and having this weird idea jam, and it turned into something. It has a personality. It's a really weird one- But it is kind of endearingly strange, right?"
[ EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK (INCLUDING A TOASTER) ]
"Nobody knew what their roles were supposed to be," recalls Dragon Age creative director Matt Goldman, who got his start creating environment art on MDK2. "And it was simple enough to do things back then that you were like, 'I'm going to draw this and model it and put it in there and it'll be cool.'"
This is why MDK2 had, among other things, references to Edmonton, Tommy Tutone, and the legendary, Bakelite-inspired atomic toaster, with a retrofuturistic fifties aesthetic tying it all together.
"There was the flying jet powered picnic table jumping puzzle," says Matt, listing off more weird stuff they worked to get in the game. "There was the hydroponic gardens on huge hydraulic arms that were swinging around, and you had to dodge them, and then they punched a hole through a window, and then a space carrot flew out and said, 'Kill meeeee,' right before it was sucked into the depths of outer space."
Not that everything made it in. But it was fun to dream up the wildest ideas and then see how they might fit.
"I still like to work that way," Matt says. In his current role on Dragon Age, he takes care to give his creative team a lot of room to play with what could work. "There's a direction, but it needs to be fairly broad," he says. People will come up with impossible ideas. Some may be off note and will need to be scrapped. But other ideas may land perfectly. That's when Matt says you "change the definition of what good looks like to also allow that idea."
That idea then steamrolls into another and suddenly you've got a heck of a unique game on your hands.
"As a group, we had a diversity of different skills, but no one had ever done it before, really," says Casey Hudson, who has credits in level design, art, and additional programming for MDK2. "So it was just like: Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could do this? I think it's possible. Let me try it!"
MDK2 mashed up futuristic science fiction with a retro aesthetic. Each level in the game was given a cover art treatment inspired by the Golden Age of comic books. These covers by artist Sean Smailes appeared in the loading screens between each mission. Large posters were made of favorite covers, which were hung in a BioWare Edmonton meeting room named after the game, along with a display case housing a pristine MDK2 toaster.
Around this time, BioWare was producing mountains of original artwork on paper for projects like Shadows of Amn and MDK2. "We would just lay out all the area maps on a drafing table with grid paper," MDK2 artist Derek Watts says. "We'd have sheets and sheets of original artwork, not that we took care of it. We kind of just threw it in big piles.
[ EVEN GREG ZESCHUK'S OFFICE RAMBLINGS MADE IT IN THE GAME ]
The writing in MDK2 was a lot of in-jokes. "And Greg's stream-of-consciousness ramblings," Luke says. "Greg would just wander the office and just make up poetry and shit 'cause why not.'" A lot of the character names, including Zizzy Ballooba and Schwang Schwing, were named for stuff Greg Zeschuk just said that somehow fit.
[ MDK2 LAUNCHED FIRST ON SEGA DREAMCAST ]
MDK2 was BioWare's first console game and their only game for the Dreamcast
"MDK2 shipped rock solid," Trent Oster says. "The team was able to do that because it wasn't a PC. You didn't have variable memory. You didn't have all these other things happening. And the Dreamcast was actually a decent platform to develop for, for its time. Decent documentation. It just never really succeeded as a console."
MDK2 tested the limits of players, if not the limits of the Dreamcast. In all Trent's years playing games, testing MDK2 was the only time he broke a controller.
"Max is rocket-packing up through this incredibly long bullshit level and you've got to hover near the fuel tank and you've got to do it just right to build up enough fuel that you can make it to the next one," Trent says. "I'd screwed it up and I just squeezed the controller and I leaned into it a little bit. I didn't notice I was leaning into it quite that hard and it went snap and shot the VMV across the room... I went and got the VMV, popped it back in, set the controller down, and pretended everything was fine."
[ GOOD GRAVY! — MDK2 LINES BEFORE AND AFTER REVISIONS ]
Like all writing, good video game words are hard to get right on the first try. It takes iteration, editing, polish, and a heck of a lot of spitballing to find just the right way to say the silliest things. Here are some memorable MDK2 line edits.
EDMONTON EXCLAMATIONS!:
Original - Doc: 65... Good Lord that's Edmonton!
Rewrite - Doc: 85... My goodness! That's Edmonton!
TIMING IS IMPORTANT:
Original - Doc: You there! This is your last warning: Get off my ship!
Rewrite - Doc: You there! Bulbocranial alien interloper, get off my ship!
"BRITCHES" IS FUNNIER:
Kurt: What thing?
Max: That Schwang thing!
Max: Big guy. Schwang, I think.
Original - Kurt Schwang Thing? I have no idea. All I remember was waking up and I'm strapped half-naked to steel gurney. Humiliating!
Rewrite - Kurt: Must have been the same one that got me. At least you didn't wake up stripped to your britches on a steel gurney. Embarrassing.
Original - Max: No. SCHWANG SCHWING!
Rewrite - Max: Too much information, Kurt. Don't go there.
SCHWANG SLANG:
Original - Sehwang: 'Ahem* Yes, well, soon you won't have to worry about anyone setting foot there ever again.
Rewrite - Schwang: Too little, too late.
Rewrite #2 - Schwang: Too little, too late. The Device is set and in two minutes, it be off. up out, and all over your Earth:—Whaddya say to that, Fleabag?
Rewrite #3 - Schwang: The Device is set and in two minutes, it be off, up out and all over your Earth. Whaddya say to that, Fleabag?
[ MDK2'S ATOMIC TOASTER BECAUSE WHY NOT? ]
It's customary for a development team to receive gifts from the studio to celebrate the completion of a project.
These gifts are typically ornamental. Sentimental. A framed game disc with cover art and a plaque. Maybe a commemorative medallion.
MDK2 was not your typical project. When BioWare shipped the absurd run-and-gun sequel in 2000, the team got toasters. Atomic toasters like the ones in the game. Not exactly like the ones in the game, mind you. These toasters didn't irradiate toast, then send it bouncing around the room. These toasters mostly just matched the fifties aesthetic of the game and had an MDK2 logo on the side.
"I still use that thing every day," says Dragon Age creative director Matt Goldman, who began his career doing art for MDK2. "Every day, I think about MDK2 for a second when I make my toast or when I make a crumpet."
Matt has kept his toaster running for twenty years now. He refuses to get a new one. When it breaks, and it does break, he takes it apart and fixes it.
"It's actually not a great toaster," Matt says.
***
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: WHEN THE RIOTS CAME TO BIOWARE ]
A riot famously broke out in Edmonton on Canada Day in 2001. A crowd of revelers turned destructive as the bars let out along a five-block stretch of Whyte Avenue, a popular party strip near the university.
According to some reports, as many as 1,500 people took to the avenue, hurling chunks of concrete, rocks, and bottles, smashing windows, and destroying phone booths and bus benches.
BioWare's Edmonton studio just happened to be on Whyte Avenue at the time, recalls art director Derek Watts:
We'd built this deck that was on the third floor of a building right on the comer above Chapters (a bookstore). The Chapters was the first and second floors and ours was the third and fourth. One of the IT guys decided they were going to go and check on the building, because they were worried somebody might be trying to get in there. They probably also wanted to go to the deck and overlook the riot It probably looked pretty cool. So. there was a back door that you could go in through the alley. And I think they went in that way and wandered up to the actual office, got in there, and went to look out from the balcony to see what was going on.
To their surprise, there were dozens and dozens of people standing up on that balcony. They must have climbed up the side of the building and jumped up there somehow. There were lower buildings that connected to it. He started freaking out, like what happens if these people started to vandalize those windows and get into the office? Luckily nobody got in and they eventually all kinda crawled back down off the building. And BioWare survived another threat to the survival of video games in Edmonton.
***
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: ELEGY FOR A FLAT WORKING SURFACE ]
In the early years of BioWare, it was a rite of passage for new employees to build their own desks.
"Day one. There it is. Just an IKEA box on the floor," writer Jay Watamaniuk says. "It gave you some ownership."
Assuming you were lucky enough to get a desk. "The first table I worked on was a banquet table. For two years," animator Steve Gilmour says. Those early years were a bit improvised. On his first day at the company, Steve remembers it was Trent Oster who set up his computer, or as Steve describes it "This giant man sweating in a room that was covered with computer components."
Writer Luke Kristjanson used his desk for twenty-three years. It survived the move from Whyte Avenue to the Calgary Trail office, but sadly didn't make the trip to EPCOR Tower:
Those early days, we didn't know a lot of things, least of all, how to be a company. For a lot of years, we were just a growing collection of new friends. Which is probably why so many game studios flame out. Friends are often shitty bosses. But back then, we didn't care. Welcome to the weird club, here's a screwdriver, build your desk. And I did.
Mine was black instead of the more typical brown of the day. It had a rounded front edge, covered in a sticker of fake wood. All the others eventually shredded and peeled. But not this one. So I kept it Easy in those days, you moved your own shit. Then we got bigger, got dedicated facilities people. And I still kept it.
Is it ergonomic? No, pretty bad, actually. Is it adjustable? Depends what you shove under it. So why should it be moved, it weighs a crap ton. Well, it's got those old-school holes for cables. I like that. Oh, I use cinder blocks as monitor stands, so maybe you don't want another desk scratched to hell? Also, why not?
Kelly Wambold in IT made it his personal mission to keep it. And after he left, I just whined about it. We hired people to move stuff anyway; nobody spindly is breaking their back on the thing.
It lasted until the move to the new building downtown. Shiny and new, full of identical white planes that raise and lower by what I assume is the darkest ergomagic. They're carefully spaced and plugged in. You have to swap when you change offices. The old desk couldn t come, couldn't endlessly shoulder its way between these monuments of efficiency. I took its measure and measurements. No room at home. No room at the inn. After twenty-three years I bid my farewell, turned out the lights, and turned my back on it Though I'm not really sure of the order.
It had seen things you people wouldn't believe. But nothing was lost. It's all in the games.
And it's fine. It retired to a farm and opened a bar. It solves crimes. Shut up, it's raining.
***
[ TIMELINE OF BIOWARE EDMONTON STUDIOS — BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FIT 400 PEOPLE IN GREG'S BASEMENT ]
 "We had a power outage and went to flip the main breaker, and the transformer was so hot, we actually fried an egg on it. I was always sticking my head in the ceiling... Figuring out ways how to keep everybody working."
—Richard Iiwaniuk, Senior Director of Business
As BioWare grew from an initial team of four working in Greg's basement to legions in multiple countries, it was necessary to find bigger studios to house ballooning rosters of devs. Here is a rough timeline of BioWare's locations.
BIOWARE EDMONTON:
1995: Greg Zeschuk's basement
1995-1996: Second-floor walkup above bicycle shop in Garneau neighborhood
1996-2004: Multiple floors above bookstore on Whyte Avenue
2004-2019: Multiple floors in the Terrace Office Tower, attached to a Calgary Trail hotel
2019-Present: Multiple floors in EPCOR building downtown
After moving the studio to Whyte Avenue, Ray and Greg initially had fairly large offices. "Quite palatial" is how Ray describes them, with side tables and extra seating for meetings. As the development team grew, the cofounders' workspace was compressed more and more, eventually to a basic desk for each of them. "And a couple crammed--in chairs for impromptu meetings as we collectively ran out of room in the Whyte Avenue space," Ray says.
"Greg and I decided at some point that we would always share an office since everyone else had to share one too... and we continued that tradition from that point onward even in the next office building."
PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
***
[ WORK SHOWERS, INTERCOMS, AND SCREAM ROOMS — THE STORIED PERIOD WHEN BIOWARE WAS ABOVE A BOOKSTORE ON WHYTE AVENUE ]
In 1996, BioWare was ready to expand. A lot. Multiple games were in production. Shattered Steel was coming in hot like a missile. Baldur's Gate development was ready to explode, also like a missile, but this time a magic one.
BioWare needed a space that fit more than twelve people. Something more comfortable than their rickety Garneau spot with the on-again, off-again power supply.
Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk found their ideal space: an office they could grow into above a bookstore on Whyte Avenue, a bustling strip of bars and shops near the University of Alberta.
At first, BioWare's new location was limited to just a handful of rooms on the third floor.
"It was a normal, plain-white-wall-type office and was not yet strained by having too many game designer bodies in it," recalls writer Luke Kristjanson. "It certainly was a hallway with a bunch of rooms off it. And a shower. The shower would eventually hold unused copies of Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast."
The longer the studio stayed in the building, the more of it they annexed. Every time someone moved out, Greg's dad, Ed Zeschuk, knocked another hole in the wall.
"We were a privately run developer. And when we were expanding, it was out of a desperate need for space... In a lot of instances, we would literally blow a hole in the wall and continue on," senior director of business planning and development
Richard Iwaniuk says. "There were always five or six different color schemes."
Working on Whyte Avenue had plenty of perks. There were good places to grab lunch. It was near the city's river valley park system. Company meetings were even held in the nearby Princess Theatre, a cushy heritage cinema a couple of blocks from the studio.
But BioWare's office itself was kind of a nightmare.
"The entire office was boxes and random stuff everywhere," writer Jay Watamaniuk says. "We had our pretty meeting room that we would take important people into near the front desk, And then the rest of it was kind of A bit more primal."
[ THE HAMSTER TRAIL HEATING SYSTEM ]
Between the computers and dev kits, BioWare was pulling massive amounts of power into the building, and because the building was on the older side, there wasn't a good system for keeping things climate controlled.
"We had a power outage and went to flip the main breaker, and the transformer was so hot, we actually fried an egg on it," Richard says. He tried all kinds of things to keep the office cool enough to support human life. "I was always sticking my head in the ceiling... figuring out ways how to keep everybody working." At one point, they vented excess hot air into the space between the ceiling and drop tiles. When that didn't work, "IT actually taped together yards and yards and yards of recycled blue bags into the one room that had extra cooling," Richard says. "We basically created a hamster trail of blue bags into the other areas on the third floor that didn't have enough cooling."
It was a period of all-out war against the heat, especially in the summer.
Ray would often run to the store to buy armfuls of frozen treats.
"I would get bags and bags of Popsicles and Fudgsicles and just hand them out to people," he says. "I was worried about them as a doctor."
[ THE SCREAM ROOM ]
When BioWare first moved into the Whyte Avenue location, they shared a floor with psychological services. One of those services was scream therapy, where patients would yell and scream in the safety of a room with double-thick, soundproof walls.
When the therapy moved out, BioWare moved in, and the Scream Room became Ray and Richard's office, who was finance director at the time. The Scream Room doubled as a good place to have sensitive conversations about NDA'd plans and the like.
[ THE PARKADE ]
The parking garage below the studio went down five levels. But it was built so that it was one lane wide. "You absolutely would not fit two cars," writer Jay Watamaniuk says.
"You had to honk and flash your lights so you wouldn't hit anyone coming the other way."
And if oncoming traffic didn't get you, the automatic door did.
One day, the sensor on the door failed as Jay was driving out of the parkade. "I'm driving my 1984 Oldsmobile" (which Jay bought for $375 from his grandma).
The door came down on the front of his car. When he tried to back up, fearing at worst a scratch, the door instead ripped the front off his car the entire grille and a couple of inches behind it.
Jay says he had to duct-tape the hood back on.
[ THE INTERCOM ]
Before there was "reply all" email. BioWare had a "reply all" intercom. Everyone had access to a studio-wide intercom system at their desks. This was supposed to be reserved for essential communication.
"The way the phone system worked, anybody from any phone could use the overhead page," former studio general manager Aaryn Flynn says. "Occasionally people would use it for straight-up pranks." They would page fake or funny names. Have entire conversations over the intercom system, which could sometimes prove necessary when coupled with the office's cooling issues.
"There was an email that went out one time that basically said: 'Don't come into my office. It's 30'C in my office, and I'm not wearing any pants,'" programmer Owen Borstad says. "That was followed about thirty seconds later by a page that said: "'No, seriously, guys. He's serious. He's not wearing any pants. Please, for the love of god don't come in.'"
***
[ THE MAKING OF BALDUR'S GATE II: SHADOWS OF AHM — THE CLASSIC GAME MADE OF CHEWING GUM ]
KEY FACTS:
Game: BALDUR'S GATE II: SHADOWS OFAMN
Release Date: September 21,2000
Genre: RPG
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS
Expansion Content: Throne of Bhaal
Developed in Edmonton
Published by Black Isle Studios (division of Interplay Entertainment)
Baldur's Gate Ii: Shadows of Amn, widely regarded as one of the best role-playing games ever made, was a massive, lumbering exercise in improvisation made by a hyper-young team of game-dev rookies and flailing misfits—but you wouldn't know any of this as a player.
"The key thing about Baldur's Gate II was that it was bubble-gum-and-duct-taped together by people who really understood the bubble gum and duct tape," says Trent Oster, an original BioWare developer whose subsequent studio Beamdog released an enhanced version of classic BioWare titles including both Baldur's Gate and its sequel.
The Shadows ofAmn team included many of the core developers from the first game, including concept artist John Gallagher, "evil genius" John Winski, and programmer Scott Greig, who had been contributing key design and code to BioWare's isometric adventures since the Battleground: Infinity demo that served as the blueprint for the first Baldur's Gate.
"In the final days of working on BG II there was a strangely serene feeling in the office. We didn't experience the headlong panic that is sometimes prevalent while finishing a game, but we certainly did experience considerable stress as we built 21 final candidates in 3 days. After a few long nights with the whole team playing the game over and over again, we reached a point where we built a good final candidate." —from Baldur's Gate II: The Anatomy of a Sequel
[ A BETTER GAME IN EVERY WAY ]
The small studio that built the original Baldur's Gate on the backs of their tabletop know-how took their newfound experience with CRPGs, hired a ton of new people, and ran with a similarly isometric sequel that was bigger in every conceivable way.
"The goal must be to make the game better, and not just to make the same game over again," Ray Muzyka wrote in a Gamasutra postmortem on the game. "You also need a mechanism to quantify your previous mistakes and learn from them. If you don't make a point of figuring out what you did wrong last time, you're not likely to fix it the second time around."
The team outlined fifteen features they wanted out of the second game, including better graphics, dragons, a death match mode, and character romances.
Complicating matters was the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which was released midway through Baldur's Gate Il's development. Baldur's Gate II was based on the second edition.
The new edition added a new sorcerer class, the d20 system, and numerous changes to rules on everything from combining classes to leveling up.
"There's a sorcerer in Baldur's Gate II because they wanted us to switch it to third edition," the game's lead programmer, Mark Darrah, says. "We were like: Yeah, noooo. That's impossible. It's held together by gum."
[ IT GREW AND IT GREW — UNTIL IT COULD GROW NO MORE ]
"The only story I ever tell about BGII is that it was the worst crunch I ever worked in my life," says writer David Gaider, who has not-so-fond memories of a sofa in BioWare's Whyte Avenue studio where he tried to catch snoozes between overnight writing sessions during the worst of it.
David says he had to work like that. It's not that they made him, but "if I didn't finish what I was writing, the whole plot was going to get cut."
The last three months of the game's development saw many in the studio working seventeen-hour days. Writers like David and Luke Kristjanson, running on fumes after pouring out some 1.2 million words for the game, were in bug-fixing mode, "sympathy crunching" alongside the programmers. Baldur's Gate II shipped with around 290 quests— and the team killed some 15,000 bugs to get the game stable enough for release.
"We were terrible at scope control. We just kept adding content," David says. "We literally could have stopped the game in the Underdark, and it would have been a perfectly acceptable game."
[ AT SOME POINT, IT JUST HAD TO BE FINISHED ]
By the end, the team was just about ready to kill the game's design and writing director, James Ohlen.
"My designers, and like the whole team, revolted against me," James says, "because I was like: You gotta add more; it's just not big enough."
For a while, James wanted to add an entire time-travel section where Sarevok used the Planar Sphere to reverse time and turn the whole Sword Coast into a dictatorship. The player and their party were the only ones who remembered that they had actually defeated Sarevok, and they would have to figure out how to get back to the Planar Sphere to undo his plot
Stuff like this is why it was so important for BioWare to have a publisher like Black Isle Studios, specifically its division director, Feargus Urquhart, whose job was to essentially throw cold water on the team for the sake of actually getting the game out
"It felt like, right up until we shipped, that we had made this big, convoluted mess and we were never going to be able to get it fixed," David says. "He's the one who actually introduced the idea of: well, maybe you could cut something."
Ray says the team came to this realization months too late.
"One of the dangers of development is that game developers have a tendency to always add content if they are given time," Ray wrote in his postmortem. "They don't naturally spend time limiting and polishing content; instead, more time means more stuff."
The isometric level art of Baldur's Gate II allowed players to explore highly detailed and beautifully lit worlds in miniature.
Along with Neverwinter Nights, Shadows of Amn is dedicated to the memory of graphic designer Daniel Walker, who passed away during production.
"He was an amazing soul," Ray Muzyka says, "and behind a good part of the art of the user interface and design in the final version of Baldur's Gate."
A modest library of core rule and art reference books kept at BioWare Edmonton's Terrace Office Tower location was dedicated to Dan's memory.
[ BALDUR'S GATE II: PANTS OF THE FATHER — NAMING STUFF IS DIFFICULT ]
When it came time to add a subtitle to the sequel to Baldur's Gate, writers threw a ton of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Here are a few options writer Luke Kristjanson had down in his notes:
- Ties That Bind
- Beyond the Gate
- End of Ages
- Puddles of Intrigue
- Shadows of Amn
- Amn Raider
- Of Amn and Endings
- Of Ham and Eggings
- Age of Passage
- Divinity
- Shadows of Athkatla
- Shadows of Tethir
- Athkatla
- Call of Dreams
- Blood of Dreams
- Mortal Dreams
- Mortal Ties
- In the Shadows of Gods
- Wake of the Divine
- Pants of the Father
- Hope You Kept the Pantaloons
- Ties
- Darkness Twining
- Immortal Bonds
- ImmOrtal bOndZ
[ ROMANCES WEREN'T GOING TO BE POPULAR — INTRODUCING ROMANCEABLE CHARACTERS IN BALDUR'S GATE II ]
Baldur's Gate II was the first BioWare game to feature romanceable characters. In all. there were supposed to be six romance plots for players: three men and three women. Writers David Gaider and Luke Kristjanson were each tasked with writing three—or that was the idea, anyway.
"We had no guidelines on how complicated to make our romances," David says. "We just assumed that the romances were just not going to be popular." They did have some data suggesting otherwise. The writers noticed that players were projecting relationships onto emergent interactions in the original Baldur's Gate.
"There were forum posts that projected romantic motivation onto combinations of Al behavior and random banter," Luke says. "It was entirely coincidental, there was literally nothing under the hood, but many players were convinced they were there. It showed there was a potential audience."
David took Anomen, Aerie, and Viconia, working with other team members to hammer out plots for all three. Each romance was fairly involved, tracking multiple conditionals and approvals to progress the characters' stories.
"And then I looked at what Luke was doing. I was like: 'Wow, your romance is so complex. How are you ever gonna finish the other two?'"
The answer was that Luke wouldn't.
"I don't even know if he'd been told about the other two yet," David says.
"Yep, news to me," Luke confirms.
One of the reasons Jaheira was so complex was her plot's timer system. The Baldur's Gate II tools allowed developers to gate progress around two types of timers. One measured the amount of time a player spent in game. The other measured time as it passed outside of the game.
"The Jaheira romance used both of those. So sometimes if you spent too much time resting or whatever, so that one timer passed the other set of timers, the romance would just die," David says. "It caused so many bugs that I remember at one point, right towards the end when we were doing all the cutting. James put a sign on his door that said: 'If anyone comes to me with another bug for the Jaheira romance, I am cutting the entire thing.' So we just didn't. That's why Jaheira, when she shipped, was very buggy."
An out-of-engine visualization tool called Dotty allowed the writers to take any conversation in the engine and create a visual representation of it, with nodes and lines showing their connections to one another.
"To view some of the larger conversations you had to zoom out so far you couldn't read the text," Luke says. "Some were beautiful, almost crystalline."
Each individual Baldur's Gate II character arc had more content in it than all of Baldur's Gate combined; Jaheira's in particular was so big that trying to view it in Dotty made the tool crash, simply due to the sheer amount of reactivity present in the plot.
"The Thieves' Guild plot also came perilously close to crashing the tool," Luke says.
[ BOTTLER'S GATE II ]
BioWare has a long history of beer culture. Founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk drowned the studio in local craft beer for special occasions and social events.
In the early years, other companies would have millions of dollars to spend on their convention booths. "We got nominated for booth of the show because we had beer." former business development lead Richard Iwaniuk jokes.
Greg even started a brewery after leaving BioWare in 2012.
Way back during the release of Baldur's Gate II, a local brewery made a special run of ale inspired by the game. This was the label.
"There was a beer for Baldur's Gate as well." Ray Muzyka says. "I remember lugging 36 bottles back for the team on a plane with a couple shoulder bags via carry-on, back in the days when liquids were okay to bring on board. The bottles were ceramic and really heavy and I was concerned the shoulder straps were going to break and bottles would smash when they fell down. I have multiple bottles from BG1 still. Oddly, I don't have a single one of the BGII bottles."
FACTS:
- Level art and weapons were given the same conceptual treatment as characters and creatures, drawn and inked in great detail by artists like John Gallagher. Unlike later games, where concepts cannot possibly capture the scope of a game's world, Baldur's Gate II's level concepts could show an entire area in the same perspective players would eventually see it from.
- Before bringing player characters face to face with NPCs, games like Baldur's Gate II used static painted portraits and voice-over to breathe life into adventurers. Many of the portraits were painted by then director of productions art Mike sass. "Interestingly, all of these faces were either modeled on BioWare employees or their spouses," Ray Muzyka says.
***
[ WHAT'S IN THE BOX? ]
BioWare came into being during the height of the PC big-box era, when games shipped with two-hundred-page manuals, quick reference cards, and all manner of priceless ephemera.
Baldur's Gate IPs Collector's Edition shipped on four special-edition gold CD-ROMs with a bonus disc containing the soundtrack, along with trading cards, a cloth map, and a pad of paper for notes, while Neverwinter Nights' Collector's Edition included a T-shirt.
BioWare's love of big-box PC releases persists in the era of downloadable content with massive physical releases of Star Wars: The Old Republic in 2011, including an art book and Darth Malgus statue, and Dragon Age: Inquisition's Inquisitor's Edition, which included a cloth map of Thedas and sculpted map markers.
***
[ REAL TALES OF DEVELOPMENT: BECOMING THE MACHINE ]
Baldur's Gate II had approximately 1.2 million words. A huge chunk of these words were written by Luke Kristjanson, who also wrote much of the original Baldur's Gate, and a new writer named David Gaider, who had just started at BioWare. David has a hard time remembering how much of the game he ended up writing, but somewhere along the way, writing and design director James Ohlen started calling him "the Machine":
When I came on, James set me to work on a place in the game called the Copper Coronet, which was the first bar you go to in Athkatla. It's a hub for various quests. And he gave that to me and wanted me to write this quest for, I think it was the bartender?* He had some sort of fighting ring, so James was just like: "Make a quest for that and give him some character." And I sat down and went blah blah blah. And the next day I was done. I guess he assumed it would take me a week and he was like: "Oh!" So then he kept giving me other stuff. And I was so new. I wrote so quickly. James started referring to me as "the Machine "...It surely did not last. I am sure not the Machine today. But at the time I wrote like the wind.
***
[ SHORT SWORDS MAKE TERRIBLE GIFTS ]
It's customary for studios to give gifts to developers to celebrate the release of a game. For Baldur's Gate II, BioWare gifted each dev with a commemorative pewter short sword.
"They weren't forged; they were cast," recalls former general manager Aaryn Flynn, a programmer on BGII. "And they were very heavy and completely unbalanced."
Still, some developers tried to fight each other with them. Not that that lasted very long.
"It was inevitable," Aaryn says, "but I think what people realized very quickly was that they were not real swords. They were not sharp... You could drop them and they would shatter."
Now BioWare developers are given framed game discs when they ship a new title.
***
[ THE MAKING OF NEVERWINTER NIGHTS — BIOWARE'S THIRD ADDITION TO FORGOTTEN REALMS ]
 "I learned the hard way about applying a visual effect in an infinite loop during Neverwinter. I was scripting a spell impact. The spell impact was basically just: apply a blood when hit. It was one of the minor spells. So I had scripted it and then I tested it on a were-rat, but I accidentally put the visual effect in an infinite loop. So it looked like the entire screen was exploding with blood. And then the frame rate just went er-er-er. It turned into a slideshow of blood."
—Preston Watamaniuk, who worked as a Systems Designer on Neverwinter Nights before becoming lead designer on the Mass Effect series
KEY FACTS:
Game: NEVERWINTER NIGHTS
Release Date: June 18, 2002
Genre: RPG
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
Expansion Content: Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark, Kingmaker
Developed in Edmonton
Published by Atari (division of Infogrames)
The vision for Neverwinter Nights was more than a game—it was a narrative toolbox.
BioWare's third release using the Dungeons & Dragons license allowed players to tell their own stories and build their own campaigns using the digital equivalent of the legendary pen-and-paper games it was based upon—specifically the new-back-then third edition.
Because Neverwinter Nights was conceived first and foremost as a multiplayer game, there was a heavy emphasis on user-generated content a novel idea at the time championed by its core designers, like Rob Bartel and Trent Oster.
The game's appeal revolved around its playerfacing tool set, usually reserved for the developers who would use it to create content. Core designer Trent Oster says the decision was made early on for Neverwinter's tool set to be player facing. "We're going to have to build a tool set anyway, let's build a tool set that end users can use," Trent argued.
[ OGRES AND GOBLINS AND TROLLS — AND BUGBEARS AND ORCS AND... ]
Development of Neverwinter Nights lasted five years, roughly from the launch of Shattered Steel to well after Baldur's Gate II was out the door. Much of that time was spent perfecting the tool set, which was seen as the game's core feature.
Six months before the game launched, the Neverwinter Nights team finally got the tool set to a place where they could reliably make content. In the interim, they also switched publishers from Interplay to Infogrames, specifically their Atari imprint.
There was a lot of pressure.
"The game was so huge. You've got a game plus a tool set plus a single-player campaign, and you could play multiplayer," Trent says.
"We looked at Baldur's Gate II and said: 'This is the volume of content our users expect. If they can't have ogres and goblins and trolls and bugbears and orcs and orc wizards, they'll be pissed.' So we just kept going and building more and more contenL"
The team pushed extremely hard in those last months, and it took its toll on everyone involved. "Some content was still getting finished up and we were finding bugs all over the place," Trent says.
The last two weeks of Neverwinter Nights in particular were the worst crunch he ever experienced. He estimates he worked 212 hours in fourteen days.
"I was getting to work by eight a.m. and leaving at two or three in the morning. And doing it seven days a week."
When the game launched, half the team worked on the first patch, and the other half took a break. Then they switched.
[ NEVERWINTER NIGHTS BECAME A PROVING GROUND FOR NEW TALENT ]
For years after the game's release, writers and designers applying to work at BioWare were required to submit a module created in the Neverwinter Nights tool set.
"Once we had the tool set, and it was out there, that became the de facto job application," Trent says. "Oh, you want a job as a technical designer? Where's your Neverwinter module? Oh, you don't have one? Well, you should have one, and then we'll consider you."
While public facing, the tool set was very similar to one used internally, and it gave writers who hadn't written for games before the opportunity to get a feel for the weird job that is writing for video games.
Writing for games isn't like writing for more traditional media—especially for games like BioWare's that give the player agency over the story by way of choices and character customization. Game writers must always consider the player before themselves: what the player will do and what the player will want to do as they engage with the story. Unique tool sets enable the levels of branching dialogue and customization needed to write compelling narrative for games.
Many writers hired on during the development of early Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles came aboard with the help of Neverwinter Nights.
Writer Sheryl Chee had been a fan of BioWare games since the original Baldur's Gate. She's played through it fourteen or fifteen times, all told.
"My goal was to see every written line of dialogue in this game," Sheryl says.
Then she realized she could open up the files and see the actual scripts used for the game. That's where she was introduced to the branching waterfall structure typical of BioWare scenes.
When Neverwinter Nights came out and she had an honest-to-god tool set, she started modding. When applying to BioWare, Sheryl submitted two of her modules; the first prompted BioWare to fly her in from Singapore for an interview. The second, about a bard who kills his girlfriend and makes her into a lute so he can play her (inspired by a Loreena McKennitt song), landed her the writing job, and Sheryl credits the modules as essential to getting hired.
[ THE LOST MAC SOURCE CODE — BIOWARE HAD ONE MAC AND IT GOT THROWN OUT ]
A great culling occurred not long after the release of Neverwinter Nights and its expansions. Old PCs (including some ancient 286s) were taken into a rarely used corridor in BioWare's Edmonton offices.
Programmer Owen Borstad was working on the Neverwinter Nights live team and was responsible for the Mac version of the game at the time—not that there was much to do on it in 2007. Owen was actually the only person in the studio with a Mac computer: a G4 tower that took up a heck of a lot of space at his workstation.
"Because I wasn't using it at the time, and it was taking up space on my desk, I had put it in with that group of computers because I was told that those were sticking around forever," Owen says.
One day, Owen came into the office to find the pile of computers in the corridor missing. He didn't think much of it, figuring IT had moved them somewhere a little safer. When it came time to release the final patch for Neverwinter Nights, Owen went looking for the Mac, asking IT where they were storing it.
But IT wasn't storing it. That giant pile of computers? The ones Owen had thought were safe? They were actually waiting to die.
"They shredded all the hard drives the day before I went to ask them about it," Owen says. "And it turned out that the Mac that they had just shredded had the only source code for the last couple patches of Neverwinter Nights on it. And the Mac version that we had in source control was five versions old and nobody updated the source control version in there because it was a giant pain in the butt."
So that's why BioWare never patched the final Mac version of Neverwinter Nights.
[ FIDDLESTICKS! — TRACING BIOWARE'S ROOTS IN RAW CODE ]
When Janice thoms took a coding job on Neverwinter Nights, she was shocked by the state of the Aurora engine, a proprietary game development tool BioWare used to build Neverwinter Nights and later Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Aurora's code base was rife with copy-paste errors and all kinds of... creative improvisations.
"Very unstructured code. Very unstructured process," Janice says. "One of the things that tipped me off that I was in a different industry was the comments in the code were not particularly professional."
It became clear that the team needed to pivot toward something a little more professional when they sent the code outside the walls of the studio for the first time for use in games like The Witcher and in classrooms at the University of Alberta. Before this could happen, BioWare's tools programmers had to spend considerable time getting rid of potentially offensive language, weird inside jokes, and plenty of snark hiding between the lines.
"You could see the roots of the company in the code," Janice says.
Certain four-letter words were replaced with friendlier terms like "fiddlesticks." Plenty of lines were excised altogether.
"It had very much a frat house vibe to it," programmer Owen Borstad says. "Most people were in their early twenties, or midtwenties. And everybody was sort of flying by the seat of their pants. Nobody really knew what we were doing. There were some older people that did know, but most people were fairly young and naive and just eager to put out games—and the culture reflected that."
FACTS:
- The tradition of painted portraits to depict characters continued in Neverwinter Nights. The game also allowed players to create and import their own custom character art by copying five versions of the portrait into a directory in Neverwinter Nights' files.
- BioWare became a legend in the games industry by developing video games set in the pen-and-paper world of Dungeons & Dragons. Later, developers worked with Green Ronin Publishing to create a pen-and-paper game set in BioWare's own video game world of Dragon Age.
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[ BIO-TRIVIA — BANDWIDTH BEHEMOTH ]
There was a time when BioWare consumed more internet bandwidth than anywhere else in the province of Alberta. In the early 2000s. BioWare's Edmonton studio was hosting and supporting multiple websites, downloadable content, and online multiplayer D&D campaigns in Neverwinter Nights, while also sending massive builds for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic back and forth to LucasArts for approval. Some claim there was a point where the studio was uploading and downloading more data than the rest of the province combined, though this is pretty hard to verify.
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[ WIZARDS OF THE PRAIRIES — DUNGEONS & DRAGONS IN BIOWARE'S DNA ]
The long legacy of Dungeons & Dragons goes beyond BioWare's digital adventures in the Forgotten Realms and Neverwinter, influencing everything from character names in Star Wors to design lexicons, off-work activities, and even the criteria through which the studio has hired key staff in the past.
Many early designers and artists were brought into BioWare on the strength of their dungeon mastering skills, including Matt Goldman. Luke Kristjanson, David Gaider, Patrick Weekes, and Mark Darrah.
"My mother actually introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons." design director Preston Watamaniuk says. "She gave me the original-original, blue box set for Dungeons & Dragons and from then on in, I loved RPGs. I played RPGs through all grades right up until starting at BioWare, basically. And at a certain point before then, I started doing my own role-playing games."
Preston spent much of his teenage years inventing scenarios, settings, and weapons, figuring out what kind of tabletop gameplay would best engage players. This developed skills that made the transition into video game design a little easier, both when collaborating on design and even when just discussing ideas.
"D&D brought in a design lexicon. It brought in people who literally memorized the books. You could drop into a conversation things like: 'Okay, I want something like artifact-level power, like Axe of the Dwarvish Lords or the Sword of Kas, here, or the Machine of Lum the Mad,' and everybody kept up and knew exactly what you're talking about," Trent Oster says.
"We'd be in a hallway or going up an elevator and it was partly like being in a cult because you're having this conversation and other people in the elevator are staring at you like you're some kind of freak. 'They're talking about demon summoning! This is bad!"
Tabletop games influenced many of the studio's most memorable early characters. BioWare's first creative director, James Ohlen, was a dungeon master long before he got into video game development. Ohlen's campaigns gave rise to everyone from Minsc in Baldur's Gate to Bastila, Carth, Mission, Malak. and Revan from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Outside of work hours, BioWare has a longstanding tradition of office D&D campaigns. The meeting rooms have nice big tables and plenty of whiteboards. There's never a kitchen too far away. In-room tech allows remote players to call in from other studios and map grids to be projected onto tables.
As BioWare evolves, so too do the reference points. BioWare is now a confederacy of nerds. Some still love tabletop. Others are into live-action role-playing (LARP) or high sci-fi novels or weird bad movies or all manner of other nerdy pursuits.
"I think D&D was very necessary in the early days because we were making something so deeply rooted in a specific culture," Mark Darrah says. "One thing that we have now that I don't feel like we actually really had in our early days is people whose nerd culture is video game-centric, whereas in the early days, it was all other things: comic books and role-playing games."