Bloomberg is reporting today that BioWare is being shut down amid a flurry of layoffs at EA. To honor of the studio's impressive contributions to the video game industry, we're making public our expansive oral history on the studio that previously appeared exclusively in Issue 284, The Mass Effect: Andromeda issue.
This feature from former managing editor, Matt Bertz, covers the full history of BioWare up until the feature's publication in December, 2016.
Twenty years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was considered by many to be a Satanic game played by mentally imbalanced adolescents, and role-playing games were a fringe genre in video games. That was the reality when two doctors decided to start up a game development studio on the side of their medical practice back in the mid ’90s. Fast forward two decades, and BioWare stands as one of the pillars of a genre that has since become a destination for millions of players and infected nearly every other type of video game, from sports games to shooters. With franchises like Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age the studio put storytelling at the forefront of the role-playing experience in a way that changed the genre forever. To commemorate the studio’s long-standing commitment to excellence, Game Informer interviewed several BioWare developers, past and present, along with several other noteworthy industry figures who worked alongside them, to recollect how an unassuming studio in the far-flung Canadian prairies managed to become RPG royalty.
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