With the closure of RPG standby BioWare, we've been consulting the PC Gamer rolodex and reaching out to developers for their thoughts and reflections on the legendary studio. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 devs who joined this industry because of BioWare games.
I was happy to hear back from Christoffer Bodegård, developer of our current RPG of the year frontrunner, Esoteric Ebb, on what BioWare meant to him.
"Any layoff news hits the gamedev scene like a sucker punch on the ear. But there's something extra awful when an institutional staple of the artform gets torn down like this.
"When I was six years old, my dad brought home a copy of MDK2. We took turns playing that game over a year, and it made for some of my fondest early gaming memories. Then, in high school, Dragon Age: Origins sparked a lifelong obsession with CRPGs. A genre which, if you look at any BEST OF ALL TIME lists, shows you many 'BIOWARE' logos. They were fundamental to the genre. All the talented people who have worked there over the decades (DECADES!) are the reason why I'm creating art today. I owe them a lot."
Whipping out MDK2 was a flex of flexes on Bodegård's part, the pinnacle of niche BioWare esoterica matched only by 1996 mech sim Shattered Steel, the medical imaging equipment the company worked on before pivoting to games, and Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS.
MDK (Murder Death Kill, nice) was a singularly weird, fast-paced, third-person shooter from Shiny Entertainment—Digital Foundry has a great video retrospective focused on that first game by Shiny. BioWare, weirdly enough, headed up MDK's similarly cult and well-liked sequel.
Its development would have been roughly contemporaneous with the original Baldur's Gates, and it feels like a final, vestigial holdover of the pre-BG BioWare that hadn't settled into its RPG-centric identity yet. Both MDKs are available on GOG and Steam, but I'd wait for a sale: $20 a pop after 26+ years is a tough ask for my money.
When I spoke to Bodegård earlier this year after the release of Esoteric Ebb, our conversation mostly focused on Disco Elysium and Planescape: Torment as his major influences. But even these two RPGs are downstream of BioWare: PST borrowed Baldur's Gate's foundational Infinity Engine, while many of Disco's developers cite Baldur's Gate as an inspiration—I was struck by the pride of place BG1 and 2 had in Disco's special edition artbook by iam8bit.
