In December of 1997, Interplay Entertainment released Descent to Undermountain, the latest licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer game. It’s remembered today, to whatever extent it’s remembered at all, as one of the more infamous turkeys of an era with more than its share of over-hyped and half-baked creations, a fiasco almost on par with Battlecruiser […]
In December of 1997, Interplay Entertainment released Descent to Undermountain, the latest licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer game. It’s remembered today, to whatever extent it’s remembered at all, as one of the more infamous turkeys of an era with more than its share of over-hyped and half-baked creations, a fiasco almost on par with Battlecruiser 3000AD or Daikatana. The game was predicated on the dodgy premise that Dungeons & Dragons would make a good fit with the engine from Descent, Interplay’s last world-beating hit — and also a hit that was, rather distressingly for Brian Fargo and his colleagues, more than two years in the past by this point.
Simply put, Undermountain was a mess, the kind of career-killing disaster that no self-respecting game developer wants on his CV. The graphics, which had been crudely up-scaled from the absurdly low resolution of 320 X 240 to a slightly more respectable 640 X 480 at the last minute, still didn’t look notably better than those of the five-year-old Ultima Underworld. The physics were weirdly floaty and disembodied, perhaps because the engine had been designed without any innate notion of gravity; rats could occasionally fly, while the corpses of bats continued to hover in midair long after shaking off their mortal coil. In design terms as well, Undermountain was trite and rote, just another dungeon crawl in the decade-old tradition of Dungeon Master, albeit not executed nearly so well as that venerable classic.
Computer Gaming World, hot on the heels of giving a demo of Undermountain a splashy, breathless write-up (“This game looks like a winner…”), couldn’t even muster up the heart to print a proper review of the underwhelming finished product. The six-sentence blurb the magazine did deign to publish said little more than that “the search for a good Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game continues, because Descent to Undermountain is certainly not it.” The website GameSpot was less inclined to pull its punches: after running through a damning litany of the game’s problems, it told its readers bluntly that “if you buy Descent to Undermountain after reading this, you get what you deserve.” The critical consensus has not changed over the decades since. On the clearinghouse site MobyGames, Undermountain ranks today as the thirteenth worst digital RPG ever released, out of 9085 candidates in all. Back in 1997, reviewers and gamers alike marveled that Interplay, the same company that had released the groundbreaking and aesthetically striking Fallout just weeks earlier, could follow it up so quickly with something so awful.
In its way, then, Descent to Undermountain‘s name was accidentally appropriate. For it represented the absolute nadir of Dungeons & Dragons on computers, the depth of ignominy to which all of the cookie-cutter products from SSI and others had been inexorably descending over the last five years.
Then again, as a wise person once said, there does come a point where there’s nowhere left to go but up. Less than one year after Undermountain was so roundly scorned wherever it wasn’t ignored, another Dungeons & Dragons CRPG was released amidst an atmosphere of excitement and expectation that put even the reception of Pool of Radiance to shame. Almost as surprisingly, it too bore on its box the name of Interplay, a publisher whose highs and lows in the CRPG genre were equally without parallel. So, our goal for today is to understand how Interplay went from Descent to Undermountain to Baldur’s Gate. It’s an unlikely tale in the extreme, not least in the place and manner in which it begins.
Edmonton, Alberta, is no one’s idea of a high-tech incubator. “The Gateway to the North,” as the city styles itself, was built on oil and farming. These two things have remained core to its identity, alongside its beloved Edmonton Oilers hockey team and its somewhat less beloved but stoically tolerated sub-zero winter temperatures. The frontier ethic has never entirely left Edmonton; it has more in common with Billings, Montana, than it does with coastal Canadian cities like Montreal and Vancouver.
Into this milieu, insert three young men who were neither roughnecks nor farmers. Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip didn’t know one another when they were growing up in different quarters of Edmonton in the 1980s, but they were already possessed of some noteworthy similarities. Although all three had computers in their homes and enjoyed experimenting with the machines and the games they could play from an early age — Muzyka has recorded his first two games ever as Pirate Adventure and Wizardry on the Apple II — they directed their main energies toward getting into medical school and becoming doctors. “We never conceived of the possibility that you could have a career in videogames,” says Zeschuk. “You know, we’re from Edmonton, Canada. There were no companies that did that. There were some in Vancouver, but they were just starting out, like the Distinctive Software guys who would join Electronic Arts.”
The three men finally met in medical school — more specifically, at the University of Alberta during the late 1980s. Even here, though, they didn’t become fast friends right away. Only gradually did they come to realize that they had a set of shared interests that were anything but commonplace among their classmates: all three continued to play computer games avidly whenever the pressure of their studies allowed it. Witnessing the rapid evolution of personal computers, each began to ask himself whether he might be able to combine medicine with the technology in some satisfying and potentially profitable way. Then they began to have these conversations with each other. It seemed to them that there were huge opportunities in software for educating doctors. Already in 1990, a couple of years before they graduated from medical school, they started looking for technology projects as moonlighting gigs.
They kept at it after they graduated and became family practitioners. The projects got more complex, and they hired contractors to help them out. Their two most ambitious software creations were an “Acid-Base Simulator,” which they finished in 1994, and a “Gastroenterology Patient Simulator,” which they finished the following year. As their titles will attest, these products were a long, long way from a mainstream computer game, but the good doctors would cover the intervening distance with astonishing speed.
Wanting to set themselves on a firmer professional footing in software, Muzyka, Zeschuk, and Yip founded a proper corporation on February 1, 1995. They called it BioWare, a name that reflected a certain amount of bets-hedging. On the one hand, “BioWare” sounded fine as a name for a maker of medical software like the gastroenterology simulator they were still finishing up. On the other, they thought it was just catchy and all-purpose enough to let them branch out into other sorts of products, if doing so should prove feasible. In particular, they had become very interested in testing the waters of mainstream game development. “I liked medicine a lot,” says Muzyka. “I really liked it. I’m glad I was able to help people’s lives for the years that I did practice. I did a lot of emergency medicine in under-served areas in rural Alberta. It was really hard work, but really fun, really engaging, really exciting. [But] I love videogames.”
Their medical degrees were a safety net of a sort that most first-time entrepreneurs could only wish they had; they knew they could always go back to doctoring full-time if BioWare didn’t work out. “We maxed out our debt and our credit cards,” Muzyka says. “We just kind of went for it. It was like, whatever it took, this is what we’re doing. It never occurred to us [that] there would be risk in that. For me, it was a fun hobby at that point.”
Yet some differences soon became apparent between Muzyka and Zeschuk and their third partner Augustine Yip. Although the first two were willing and able to practice medicine only on the side while they devoted more and more time and energy to BioWare, the last had moved into another stage of life. He already had children to support, and didn’t feel he could scale back his medical career to the same degree for this other, far chancier venture. Muzyka and Zeschuk would wind up buying out his share of BioWare in mid-1996.
Well before this event, in the spring of 1995, Activision’s MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat hit the gaming world with all the force of the giant killer robot on its box. Thanks not least to Activision’s work in creating bespoke versions of MechWarrior 2 for the many incompatible 3D-accelerator cards that appeared that year, it became by many metrics the game of 1995. Suddenly every publisher wanted a giant-mech game of their own. Muzyka and Zeschuk saw the craze as their most surefire on-ramp to the industry as a new, unproven studio without even an office to their name. They paid a few contractors to help them make a demo, sent it to ten publishers, and started cold-calling them one after another. Their secret weapon, says Muzyka, was “sheer stubbornness and persistence. We just kept calling.” Amazingly, they were eventually offered a development deal by nine out of the ten publishers; suffice to say that mechs were very much in favor that year. Interplay came with the most favorable terms, so the partners signed with them. Just like that, BioWare was a real games studio. Now they had to deliver a real game.
They found themselves some cut-price office space not far from the University of Alberta. Ray Muzyka:
There were only four plugs on the wall. We had a power-up sequence for the computers in the office so that we didn’t blow the circuit breaker for the whole building. Everybody would be like, “I’m on. I’m on. I’m on.” We had found by trial and error that if you turned them on in a certain order, it wouldn’t create a power overload. If you turned on the computers in the wrong order, for sure, it would just flip the switch and you had to run downstairs, get the key, and open up the electrical box. It was an interesting space.
During the first year or so, about a dozen employees worked in the office in addition to the founders. Half of these were the folks who had helped to put together the demo that had won BioWare the contract with Interplay. The other half were a group of friends who had until recently hung out together at a comic-book and tabletop-gaming shop in Grande Prairie, Alberta, some 300 miles northwest of Edmonton; one of their number, a fellow named James Ohlen, actually owned the store. This group had vague dreams of making a CRPG; they tinkered around with designs and code there in the basement. Unfortunately, the shop wasn’t doing very well. Even in the heyday of Magic: The Gathering, it was difficult to keep such a niche boutique solvent in a prairie town of just 30,000 people. Having heard about BioWare through a friend of a friend, the basement gang all applied for jobs there, and Muzyka and Zeschuk hired them en masse. So, they all came down to Edmonton, adopting various shared living arrangements in the cheap student-friendly housing that surrounded the university. Although they would have to make the mech game first, they were promised that there was nothing precluding Bioware from making the CRPG of their dreams at some point down the road if this initial project went well.
Shattered Steel, BioWare’s first and most atypical game ever, was published by Interplay in October of 1996. It was not greeted as a sign that any major new talent had entered the industry. It wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t all that good. Damning it with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called it “a decent first effort. But if Interplay wants to provide serious competition for the MechWarrior series, the company needs to provide more freedom and variety.” Sales hovered in the low tens of thousands of units. That wasn’t nothing, but BioWare’s next game would need to do considerably better if they were to stay in business. Luckily, they already had something in the offing that seemed to have a lot of potential.
A BioWare programmer named Scott Greig had been tinkering lately with a third-person, isometric, real-time graphics engine of his own devising. He called it the Infinity Engine. Muzyka and Zeschuk had an idea about what they might use it for.
A low background hum was just beginning to build about the possibilities for a whole new sort of CRPG, where hundreds or thousands of people could play together in a shared persistent world, thanks to the magic of the Internet. 3DO’s Meridian 59, the first of the new breed, was officially open for business already, even as Sierra’s The Realm was in beta and Origin’s Ultima Online, the most ambitious of the shared virtual worlds by far, was gearing up for its first large-scale public test. Muzyka and Zeschuk, who prided themselves on keeping up with the latest trends in gaming, saw an opportunity here. Even before Shattered Steel shipped, it had been fairly clear to them that they had jumped on the MechWarrior train just a little bit too late. Perhaps they could do better with this nascent genre-in-the-offing, which looked likely to be more enduring than a passing fancy for giant robots.
They decided to show the Infinity Engine to their friends at Interplay, accompanied by the suggestion that it might be well-suited for powering an Ultima Online competitor. They booked a meeting with one Feargus Urquhart, who had started at Interplay six years earlier as a humble tester and moved up through the ranks with alacrity to become a producer while still in his mid-twenties. Urquhart was skeptical of these massively-multiplayer schemes, which struck him as a bit too far out in front of the state of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. When he saw the Infinity Engine, he thought it would make a great fit for a more traditional style of CRPG. Further, he knew well that the Dungeons & Dragons brand was currently selling at a discount. Muzyka and Zeschuk, who were looking for any way at all to get their studio established well enough that they could stop taking weekend shifts at local clinics, were happy to let Urquhart pitch the Infinity Engine to his colleagues in this other context.
Said colleagues were for the most part less enthused than Urquhart was; as we’ve learned all too well by now, the single-player CRPG wasn’t exactly thriving circa 1996. Nor was the Dungeons & Dragons name on a computer game any guarantee of better sales than the norm in these latter days of TSR. Yet Urquhart felt strongly that the brand was less worthless than mismanaged. There had been a lot of Dungeons & Dragons computer games in recent years — way too many of them from any intelligent marketer’s point of view — but they had almost all presumed that what their potential buyers wanted was novelty: novel approaches, novel mechanics, novel settings. As they had pursued those goals, they had drifted further and further from the core appeal of the tabletop game.
Despite TSR’s fire hose of strikingly original, sometimes borderline avant-garde boxed settings, the most popular world by far in which to actually play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons remained the Forgotten Realms, an unchallenging mishmash of classic epic-fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Realms was widely and stridently criticized by the leading edge of the hobby for being fantasy-by-the-numbers, and such criticisms were amply justified in the abstract. But those making them failed to reckon with the reality that, for most of the people who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, it wasn’t so much a vehicle for improvisational thespians to explore the farthest realms of the imagination as it was a cozy exercise in dungeon delving and monster bashing among friends; the essence of the game was right there in its name. For better or for worse, most people still preferred good old orcs and kobolds to the mind-bending extra-dimensional inhabitants of a setting like Planescape or the weird Buck Rogers vibe of something like Spelljammer. The Forgotten Realms were gaming comfort food, a heaping dish of tropey, predictable fun. And the people who played there wouldn’t have had it any other way.
And yet fewer and fewer Dungeons & Dragons computer games had been set in the Forgotten Realms since the end of the Gold Box line. (Descent to Undermountain would be set there, but it had too many other problems for that to do it much good.) SSI and their successors had also showed less and less fidelity to the actual rules of Dungeons & Dragons over the years. The name had become nothing more than a brand, to be applied willy-nilly to whatever struck a publisher’s fancy: action games, real-time-strategy games, you name it. In no real sense were you playing TSR’s game of Dungeons & Dragons when you played one of these computer games; their designers had made no attempt to implement the actual rules found in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeons Master’s Guide. It wasn’t clear anymore what the brand was even meant to stand for. It had been diluted to the verge of meaninglessness.
But Feargus Urquhart was convinced that it was not yet beyond salvation. In fact, he believed that the market was ready for a neoclassical Dungeons & Dragons CRPG, if you will: a digital game that earnestly strove to implement the rules and to recreate the experience of playing its tabletop inspiration, in the same way that the Gold Box line had done. Naturally, such a game would need to take place in the tried-and-true Forgotten Realms. This was not the time to try to push gamers out of their comfort zone.
At the same time, though, Urquhart recognized that it wouldn’t do to simply re-implement the Gold Box engine and call it a day. Computer gaming had moved on from the late 1980s; people expected a certain level of audiovisual razzle-dazzle, wanted intuitive and transparent interfaces that didn’t require reading a manual to learn how to use, and generally preferred the fast-paced immediacy of real-time to turn-based models. If it was to avoid seeming like a relic from another age, the new CRPG would have to walk a thin line, remaining conservative in spirit but embracing innovation with gusto in all of its granular approaches. The ultimate goal would not be to recreate the Gold Box experience. It must rather be to recreate the same tabletop Dungeons & Dragons experience that the Gold Box games had pursued, but to embrace all of the affordances of late-1990s computers in order to do it even better — more accurately, more enjoyably, with far less friction. Enter the Infinity Engine.
But Urquhart’s gut feeling was about more than just a cool piece of technology. He had served as the producer on Shattered Steel, in which role he had visited BioWare several times and spent a fair amount of time with the people there. Thus he knew there were people in that Edmonton office who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons regularly, who had forged their friendships in the basement of a tabletop-gaming shop. He thought that a traditionalist CRPG like the one he had in mind might be more in their wheelhouse than any giant-robot action game or cutting-edge shared virtual world.
He felt this so strongly that he arranged a meeting with Brian Fargo, the Big Boss himself, whose soft spot for the genre that had put Interplay on the map a decade earlier was well known. When he was shown the Infinity Engine, Fargo’s reaction was everything Urquhart had hoped it would be. What sprang to his mind first was The Faery Tale Adventure, an old Amiga game whose aesthetics he had always admired. “It didn’t look like a bunch of building blocks,” says Fargo today of the engine that Urquhart showed him in 1996. “It looked like somebody had free-hand-drawn every single screen.”
As Urquhart had anticipated would be the case, it wasn’t hard for Fargo to secure a license from the drowning TSR to make yet another computer game with the name of Dungeons & Dragons on it. The bean counters on his staff were not excited at the prospect; they didn’t hesitate to point out that Interplay already had Fallout and Descent to Undermountain in development. Just how many titles did they need in such a moribund genre? They needed at least one more, insisted Fargo.
BioWare’s employees were astonished and overjoyed when they were informed that a chance to work on a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG had fallen into their laps out of the clear blue sky. James Ohlen and his little gang from Grande Prairie could scarcely have imagined a project more congenial to their sensibilities. Ohlen had been running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for his friends since he was barely ten years old. Now he was to be given the chance to invent one on the computer, one that could be enjoyed by the whole world. It was as obvious to Urquhart as it was to everyone at BioWare that the title of Lead Designer must be his. He called his initial design document The Iron Throne. When a cascade of toilet jokes rained down on his head in response, Urquhart suggested the more distinctive name of Baldur’s Gate, after the city in the Forgotten Realms where its plot line would come to a climax.
The staff of BioWare, circa 1997. (Note the Edmonton Oilers jersey at front and center.) “It’s 38 kids I barely recognize, myself included,” says Lukas Kristjanson, who along with James Ohlen wrote most of the text in the game. “I look at that face and think, ‘Man, you did not know what you were doing.'”
BioWare eagerly embraced Urquhart’s philosophy of being traditionalist in spirit but modern in execution. The poster child for the ethic must surely be Baldur’s Gate’s approach to combat. BioWare faithfully implemented almost every detail of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, complete with all of the less intuitive legacies of Gary Gygax, such as the armor-class statistic that goes down rather than up as it gets better. But, knowing that a purely turn-based system would be a very hard sell in the current market, they adopted a method of implementing them that became known as “real-time-with-pause.” Like much in Baldur’s Gate, it was borrowed from another game, a relatively obscure 1992 CRPG called Darklands, which was unique for being set in Medieval Germany rather than a made-up fantasy world.
Real-time-with-pause means that, although the usual tabletop rounds and turns are going on in the background, along with the expected initiative rolls and to-hit rolls and all the rest, it all takes place seamlessly on the computer — that’s to say, without pausing between turns, unless and until the player stops the action manually to issue new orders to her party. James Ohlen:
Ray [Muzyka] was a big fan of turn-based games, the Gold Box games, and my favorite genre was real-time strategy; I played Warcraft and Starcraft more than you can imagine. So, [real-time-with-pause] came from having to have a real-time game that satisfied fans of that genre, but also satisfied turn-based fans. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I was never a fan of Fallout. I liked the story and the world, but the fact it paused and took turns for moving, I never liked that. RPGs are about immersing you in their world, so the closer you get to the feeling of real the better.
The project was still in its earliest stages when Diablo dropped. “I remember when Diablo came out, the whole office shut down for a week,” says James Ohlen. Needless to say, many another games studio could tell the same tale.
The popularity of Blizzard Entertainment’s game was the first really positive sign for the CRPG genre as a whole in several years. In this sense, it was a validation for Baldur’s Gate, but it was also a risk. On a superficial level, the Diablo engine didn’t look that different from the Infinity Engine; both displayed free-scrolling, real-time environments from an isometric point of view. Blizzard’s game, however, was so simplified and streamlined that it prompted endless screaming rows on the Internet over whether it ought to qualify as a “real” CRPG at all. There was certainly no real-time-with-pause compromise in evidence here; Diablo was real-time, full stop. Given its massive success, someone at Interplay or BioWare — or more likely both — must surely have mused about dropping most of the old-school complexity from Baldur’s Gate and adopting Diablo as the new paradigm; the Infinity Engine would have been perfectly capable of bringing that off. But, rather remarkably on the face of it, no serious pressure was ever brought to bear in that direction. Baldur’s Gate would hew faithfully to its heavier, more traditionalist vision of itself, even as the people who were making it were happily blowing off steam in Diablo. The one place where Diablo did clearly influence Baldur’s Gate was a networked multiplayer mode that was added quite late in the development cycle, allowing up to six people to play the game together. Although BioWare deserves some kudos for managing to make that work at all, it remains an awkward fit with such a text- and exposition-heavy game as this one.
As James Ohlen mentions above, the BioWare folks were playing a lot of Blizzard’s Warcraft II as well, and borrowing freely from it whenever it seemed appropriate. Anyone who has played a real-time-strategy game from the era will see many traces of that genre in Baldur’s Gate: the isometric graphics, the icons running around the edges of the main display, your ability to scroll the view independently of the characters you control, even the way that active characters are highlighted with colored circles. The Infinity Engine could probably have powered a fine RTS game as well, if BioWare had chosen to go that route.
Even more so than most games, then, Baldur’s Gate was an amalgamation of influences, borrowing equally from James Ohlen’s long-running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaign and the latest hit computer games, along with older CRPGs ranging from Pool of Radiance to Darklands. I hate to use the critic’s cliché of “more than the sum of its parts,” but in this case it may be unavoidable. “If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons fan, you feel like you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons, but at the same time it felt like a modern game,” says James Ohlen. “It was comparable to Warcraft and Diablo in terms of the smoothness of the interface, the responsiveness.”
Baldur’s Gate started to receive significant press coverage well over a year before its eventual release in December of 1998. Right from the first previews, there was a sense that this Dungeons & Dragons computer game was different from all of the others of recent years; there was a sense that this game mattered, that it was an event. The feeling was in keeping with — and to some extent fed off of — the buzz around Wizards of the Coast’s acquisition of TSR, which held out the prospect of a rebirth for a style of play that tabletop gamers may not have fully recognized how much they’d missed. Magic: The Gathering was all well and good, but at some point its zero-sum duels must begin to wear a little thin. A portion of tabletop gamers were feeling the first inklings of a desire to return to shared adventures over a long afternoon or evening, adventures in which everyone got to win or lose together and nobody had to go home feeling angry or disappointed.
A similar sentiment was perhaps taking hold among some digital gamers: a feeling that, for all that Diablo could be hella fun when you didn’t feel like thinking too much, a CRPG with a bit more meat on its bones might not go amiss. Witness the relative success of Fallout in late 1997 and early 1998; it wasn’t a hit on the order of Diablo, no, but it was a solid seller just the same. Even the miserable fiasco that was Descent to Undermountain wasn’t enough to quell the swelling enthusiasm around Baldur’s Gate. Partially to ensure that nothing like Undermountain could happen again, Brian Fargo set up a new division at Interplay to specialize in CRPGs. He placed it in the care of Feargus Urquhart, who named the division and the label Black Isle, after the Black Isle Peninsula in his homeland of Scotland.
Interplay was already running full-page advertisements like this one in the major magazines before 1997 was out. Note the emphasis on “true role-playing on a grand scale” — i.e., not like that other game everyone was playing, the one called Diablo.
The buzz around Baldur’s Gate continued to build through 1998, even as a planned spring release was pushed back to the very end of the year. A game whose initial sales projections had been on the order of 100,000 units at the outside was taking on more and more importance inside the executive suites at Interplay. For the fact was that Interplay as a whole wasn’t doing very well — not doing very well at all. Brian Fargo’s strategy of scatter-bombing the market with wildly diverse products, hoping to hit the zeitgeist in its sweet spot with at least a few of them, was no longer paying off for him. As I mentioned at the opening of this article, Interplay’s last real hit at this stage had been Descent in 1995. Not coincidentally, that had also been their last profitable year. The river of red ink for 1998 would add up to almost $30 million, a figure one-quarter the size of the company’s total annual revenues. In October of 1998, Fargo cut about 10 percent of Interplay’s staff, amounting to some 50 people. (Most of them had been working on Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, a modernized follow-up to the company’s classic Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites adventure games. Its demise is still lamented in some corners of Star Trek and gaming fandom.)
Fargo was increasingly seeing Baldur’s Gate as his Hail Mary. If the game did as well as the buzz said it might, it would not be able to rescue his sinking ship on its own, but it would serve as much-needed evidence that Interplay hadn’t completely lost its mojo as its chief executive pursued his only real hope of getting out of his fix: finding someone willing to buy the company. The parallels with the sinking ship that had so recently been TSR doubtless went unremarked by Fargo, but are nonetheless ironically notable.
BioWare’s future as well was riding on what was destined to be just their second finished game. The studio in the hinterlands had grown from 15 to 50 people over Baldur’s Gate’s two-year development cycle, leaving behind as it did so its electrically-challenged hovel of an office for bigger, modestly more respectable-looking digs. Yet appearances can be deceiving; BioWare was still an unproven, unprofitable studio that needed its second game to be a hit if it was ever to make a third one. It was make-or-break-time for everyone, not least Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. If Baldur’s Gate was a hit, they might never have to take up their stethoscopes again. And if it wasn’t… well, they supposed it would be back to the clinic for them, with nothing to show for their foray into game development beyond a really strange story to tell their grandchildren.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The books Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock, Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, and Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay. Computer Gaming World of December 1996, January 1997, October 1997, January 1998, April 1998, January 1999, and June 1999; Retro Gamer 110 and 188; PC Zone of December 1998.
Online sources include BioWare’s current home page, “How Bioware revolutionised the CRPG” by Graeme Mason at EuroGamer, “IGN Presents the History of BioWare” by Travis Fahs, “The long, strange journey of BioWare’s doctor, developer, beer enthusiast” by Brian Crecente at Polygon, Jeremy Peel’s interview with James Ohlen for Rock Paper Shotgun, and GameSpot’s vintage review of Descent to Undermountain.
I also made use of the Interplay archive donated by Brian Fargo to the Strong Museum of Play.
![Page spread from OUTPUT with Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]](https://nickm.com/post/wp-content/stuff/9780262549813_p2_v4_s1200x1200-1024x1024.jpg)
