Based in
Alberta in
Canada, BioWare are a rather good computer games
development company.
The company was founded by three Med School students,
Ray Muzyka,
Greg
Zeschuck
and
Aug Yip. Although training to be doctors, the three spent most of their time
reading
comics,
roleplaying or messing around on
computers. Combining their
computing and medical expertise, the three wrote a few pieces of commercial
medical
simulation software, and all graduated. While Aug Yip then resumed his work with
medicine, Greg and Ray felt that they were in the wrong field. Hooking up with a
bunch of
artists and programmers, they turned BioWare into a games company. A
fantastic games company.
Setting up a publishing deal through
Interplay/Black Isle, the first BioWare
title was the mech combat simulator
Shattered Steel, which was reasonably well
recieved but suffered by comparison to the
Mechwarrior series. BioWare then
followed this up with the
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons RPG
Baldur's Gate, and the rest is pretty
much history.
Released in
1998, BG was a huge, huge success, and won just about every industry award avaliable.
An expansion pack,
Tales of the Sword Coast, soon followed, with the high
quality of the original being mostly maintained. A sequel,
Baldur's Gate 2:
Shadows of Amn, was released in late 2000, surpassing the original in every way
possible, and generally being a game you
must own.
Baldur's Gate was powered by the
Infinity Engine, which Bioware licenced
to
Black Isle Studios for the creation of
Planescape: Torment and
Icewind
Dale. These titles were not actually developed by BioWare.
BioWare also took over the reins of the
MDK series, original developed by
Shiny Entertainment.
MDK2 picked up good reviews, and gave BioWare experience
working with the
Playstation 2 and
Dreamcast.
As of writing, BioWare are working on two potentially vast
projects.
Bioware are still a fairly small company, and have maintained a friendly,
non-corporate image. A great deal of the changes between BG1 and BG2 were due to
fan suggestion, and the development team ran a "suggestions" messageboard for a
long time before development on the game even began. The gam is even stuffed with in-jokes for
veterans of the BG messageboards. In addition, their site is
very informal, and they'll happily link to any webcomics that are having a laugh
at their expense (
Megatokyo seems to be a firm favourite). Lastly, they're
fairly
Mac friendly, with most titles seeing a Mac port after only a short
delay.