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My name's Greg Zeschuk.
I used to make video games, as one of the
co-founders of BioWare.
Now I'm the chief beer
enthusiast at the Beer Diaries.
When I was working in Austin on "Star Wars-The Old
Republic," I developed a real passion for craft beer.
I just felt this need to tell their stories.
It was very interesting to meet people, in a way, just as
creative and passionate as we were when we started BioWare,
but they made beer.
There is an occupational hazard because we do shoot the
show with beer.
It's funny, actually now I've done a number of the shows,
and we'll often do two or three shoots in a day.
And so if you're trying all the beers-- we typically will
go to a brewery and try the beers, enjoy them with the
brewmaster, and discuss with him or her what the
characteristics are.
And so you do that three times,
it's a little dangerous.
But I'm a professional.
The beard gives me strength to absorb beer.
So, I'm very careful.
One of the amazing things about working at BioWare for
nearly 20 years, is we made some of the really seminal,
classic role-playing games in the computer game space.
For example, "Baldur's Gate," "Neverwinter Nights," "Mass
Effect," "Star Wars-Knights of the Old Republic," "Jade
Empire," "Dragon Age." There was all these
games that we made.
And it was an incredible experience to make those.
And one of the things that we always tried to emphasize, as
well, was just the importance of story, the importance of
really becoming emotionally attached to the characters.
And we literally developed technology for decades.
And one of the things you have to do on a game is test.
So you're always testing.
And this one game we worked on called "MDK2," just during the
course of it, we started staying up later and later.
So, the whole team had these really weird hours.
Like we would work from noon until like 4:00
or 5:00 in the morning.
One time we were testing the game.
And what we would do is we would all
gather in this big room.
And we would all sit on the couch.
And I'd usually play and everyone would watch
and write down bugs.
And everyone was watching intently on the screen.
It was 4:00 AM, and I'm just kind of bumping at this wall,
and bumping at this wall.
And they're thinking, OK, is he looking for a
crack in the wall?
He's going to fall through the floor.
And they turn over to see me and I'm actually sound asleep,
with the controller in my hand, just kind of bumping
into the wall.
And that was a bit of a wake up call that we had to get
back onto a bit of a straight and narrow.
Gaming is a lifelong passion that I've had the opportunity
to do professionally and still love to do for fun.