BioWare is dead, and my feelings are a strange cocktail of anger, sadness, and Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise. The legendary RPG studio was bought by a private investment group earlier this year, and history shows that venture capital frequently kills what it touches, extracting whatever value out of it that it can before moving onto the next victim. It’s a hell of a contrast to the beginning of BioWare, which started out as such a pure thing. Two practicing doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, quit medicine to pursue their dream of making computer role-playing games. Sure, the studio was bought and sold a couple of times between then and now, and yes, BioWare’s recent results haven’t lived up to its venerable past, but my goodness, what a legacy this studio leaves behind.

Everyone knows Baldur’s Gate now on account of Larian Studios’ Game of the Year-winning, 10 out of 10 Baldur’s Gate 3 from 2023, but what younger gamers might not know is that the first two Baldur’s Gate RPGs were built by BioWare in the late ‘90s. While they weren’t the studio’s first games – that honor goes to the 1996 mech action-sim Shattered Steel – they were the two that put BioWare on the map. Each was an incredibly deep and sprawling RPG based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset that was good for upwards of 200 hours of gameplay. At the time, they reset the bar for what a CRPG could be. Let me put it this way: Baldur’s Gate 1 took home IGN’s Game of the Year award in 1998 … over Half-Life .

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