30 Years Ago, One Of The Best RPG Studios Ever Was Formed In Someone’s Basement

It takes a rare developer to become a sort of shorthand for an entire genre. Think of how Bethesda is the de facto reference point for first-person RPGs or pre-World of Warcraft Blizzard set the standard for all real-time strategy games. For decades, one developer has defined a certain type of choice-driven, party-based RPGs, but its 30th anniversary also comes at a time when its future is less certain than ever.

BioWare was founded on February 1, 1995, by Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyka, and Augustine Yip, though it didn’t publicly launch until later that year. According to BioWare’s own website, the company began “in a small room in Greg’s basement.” The company’s three founders met in medical school, and in 1994, began programming medical education software together. After two releases, the trio found that software like Gastroenterology Patient Simulator wasn’t quite scratching their creative itches, and formed BioWare to pursue more ambitious projects — its name coming from a combination of biology and software, alluding to both their history as doctors and their ambitions of creating “software for humans,” according to Muzyka.

BioWare went in a wildly different direction for its first release, with a mech combat game called Shattered Steel. While it received middling reviews, Shattered Steel was published by Interplay Entertainment, which ended up being a major boon for BioWare. Interplay owned the license to make video games based on Dungeons & Dragons, and when BioWare made a prototype RPG to submit to the publisher, Interplay suggested turning it into a D&D-based game.

That project became Baldur’s Gate, BioWare’s second game and an undisputed classic of the genre. Baldur’s Gate’s success quickly led to a sequel and another D&D game, Neverwinter Nights, while the Infinity Engine BioWare created to run the game was used in other titles published by Interplay, including Planescape: Torment, which is also considered a classic.

After the launch of Baldur’s Gate 2, BioWare went all-in on its unique brand of RPGs, developing hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. The same year that Mass Effect was released, 2007, EA bought BioWare’s parent company, taking ownership of BioWare as part of the deal. Dragon Age: Origins, the first BioWare game published by EA, found the same degree of success as Mass Effect, and both kicked off series that define BioWare to this day.

But after the release of Mass Effect 3, things changed for BioWare. A vocal group of fans hated the game’s endings and lashed out against it, which quickly grew from players expressing their dissatisfaction with the game’s story into a full-blown harassment campaign including threats against developers. BioWare responded by releasing a new version of the game with altered endings, reportedly after a period of severe crunch that left developers burned out and bled into the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Just after Inquisition was announced, remaining founders Muzyka and Zeschuk left BioWare.

From that point on, BioWare was widely seen as being in freefall. Inquisition released amid a string of cancelled games, and key creative staff including creators of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series left the company, either quitting the games industry altogether or joining new studios. Mass Effect: Andromeda was seen as a disappointment, and it was followed by Anthem, perhaps BioWare’s most ambitious game and its biggest failure of the post-Mass Effect 3 period.

Then, after a ten-year gap, Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched. While it’s an often fun take on the Dragon Age formula, it was met with widespread criticism (including, of course, plenty of bad-faith arguments based on its inclusion of trans characters). In the months since its release, director Corinne Busche left BioWare.

On the studio’s 30th anniversary, the next Mass Effect game is the only project known to be underway, and it’s already been tainted by a grim development. At the end of January, BioWare released a blog post simply titled “BioWare Studio Update.” Though its message is cloaked in passive corporate-speak, its meaning is clear — BioWare has laid off a huge swath of its developers, including veterans who had been with the studio since the original Mass Effect.

As BioWare passes 30 years as one of the most recognizable developers in the games industry, and one of the most beloved for most of its history, its future could hardly look shakier. Plenty of talent remains at BioWare, but it’s not the studio it once was. It’s worth celebrating the developer’s incredible library on its anniversary, even as it serves as a reminder that even the games industry’s giants aren’t safe in one of the most tumultuous points of its history.