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Before they were an RPG powerhouse, Bioware was a tiny video game studio founded by three
doctors in Alberta, Canada. Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk , and Augustine Yip enjoyed much success
in the medical field which provided them with the capital to make their first game, Shattered
Steel, which oddly enough, was a mech simulator.
Its modest success encouraged BioWare to plan a sequel, but those plans were scrapped when
the studio instead decided to work on an RPG titled Battleground: Infinity. Their publisher,
Interplay, found that it was a good fit for the Dungeons & Dragons license they had just
acquired and had BioWare implement the D&D ruleset, resulting in Baldur's Gate.
Yip decided to continue with his medical practice but Mew-see-kah and Zes-chuck left all that
doctor stuff behind to pursue development on Baldur's Gate full-time, which upon its
release in 1998, sold two million copies. Baldur's Gate's success led to Planescape:
Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate 2, all games that used the Infinity engine. After
a brief detour with MDK 2, BioWare went to work on resurrecting Neverwinter Nights, but
during it's development, Interplay went bankrupt, forcing the studio and the project into the
hands of Infogrames.
After Neverwinter Nights' release, BioWare went on to make Knights of the Old Republic,
Jade Empire, then after merging with EA, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, and if
you can believe it, a Sonic RPG.
Finally, after 16 years and nearly as many games, Muzyka and Zeschuk retired in 2012,
but the legacy they left behind still lives on in BioWare and all those characters we
fall in love with to an unhealthy degree.