Meet The Video Game Developer: BioWare

Having recently graduated from a medical school in Alberta, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip decided to hold off on practicing medicine and engaged in another passion of theirs, video games. Together, they pooled their savings, formed a game company and got started. Their first release was a Mech-Warrior-esque shooter titled Shattered Steel. It had a number of standout points including deformable terrain and zone damage, but it only did moderately well. What the people did notice, however, was the deep and well thought-out back story, something that would come to be BioWare's calling card in the years to come. From a certain standpoint, the boys at BioWare had achieved their goal of making a video game, but two of them weren't done yet.

For whatever reason, Augustine Yip decided to go back to practicing medicine. The other two founders moved on without him. Their next goal was to create a computerized version of a pen-and-paper RPG. Their project was dubbed Battleground: Infinity. As with Shattered Steel, they began showing it to potential publishers, and a good number of them replied. Of those, Interplay were once again the most interested party. Rather than publish the game as Battleground, however, they gave BioWare the rights to turn the title into an official Dungeons and Dragons game. So the folks at BioWare went back and reworked the game to fit the D&D ruleset and emerged soon after with a completed product, Baldur's Gate. Unlike nearly every other D&D computer game at the time, this one was played in real time. The game became an instant hit, both among the D&D players and those who simply liked the setting. And as usual, the story was the centerpiece.  

As if they weren't booked up for the year already, the team at BioWare took on yet another franchise, Shiny's oddball hit, MDK. Fans of the original game were torn between excitement and foreboding. BioWare was beginning to garner a reputation for making quality titles and their story telling prowess was top-notch, but could they really treat the franchise with the same amount of weirdness as its creator? It would have been like hiring Martin Scorsese to do a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The release of MDK 2 put everyone's fears to rest. Many of the die-hard fans even went as far as to say that the new game surpassed the original.

The guys at BioWare were well aware by that point that Baldur's Gate was their key to success. Shattered Steel was only met with mediocre success and MDK2 was more of a cult hit than anything else. If they wanted to stay in the spotlight, the next Baldur's Gate needed to not just be as good but better and bigger than the first. It was. Nearly every aspect of the game either remained equally as polished or got bumped up a few notches. The combat system was drastically improved, and the enemy characters became more of a challenge to fight. The one thing that never changed was the quality of storytelling. Nearly every reviewer who spoke about the game paid particular attention to the incredible depth and quality with which BioWare had crafted the story for Shadows of Amn.