Baldur's Gate - Retrospective

Indian Noob is looking back to Baldur's Gate in a retrospective article about the game.

It’s hard to talk about the history of computer role playing games without paying tribute to Baldur’s Gate. I could go on and on about how it revolutionized the facet of rpgs, but where’s the fun in that? So before I begin my weekly rambling, let’s go back and witness the conception of Baldur’s Gate.

Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk once had this brilliant idea while they were having lunch last century. “Why don’t we form a game developing studio?”  And that was pretty much it. Medicine became more of a hobby for them. The now legendary Canadian studio Bioware was thus formed. See guys? All it takes is one random idea…more or less….mostly more. They formed the company in 1995 and had been going a long time. It was pretty much five years of operating Bioware before people who knew they were. They ended up sending out their first game Shattered Steel to ten publishers. Of those publishers, only one is still in business- EA.  Baldur’s Gate was originally called Battleground Infinity; it was going to be an MMO about a pantheon of different mythologies. BG was one of the first games that was a Windows direct application. If memory serves me right, DirectX 3 was like crazy advanced at the time.

Publisher Interplay held the Dungeons and Dragons license, so what they provided was converting the engine to Dungeons and Dragons instead. The top-down camera of BG was inspired by Richard Garriott’s Ultima games. Wasteland was a major influence on Baldur’s Gate, particularly its design philosophy of having more than one possible method to achieve each goal. The development of BG began when role playing games were dead in Norh America. In Dr. Zeschuk’s words; “People would kind of scoff when you said you were making one.” Contrary to popular publisher advice, Bioware was ready to invest time and money developing rpgs. The concept of Bioware’s 4 pillars (combat, exploration, progression, and story) was used first for BG. Among the 60 people on the team, no-one had ever made a videogame before. But they had passion and the love. Interplay’s motto was “by gamers, for gamers“. It was a publishing and distribution company run by a developer. Interplay CEO Brian Fargo helped immensely during the production of BG. Dr Muzyka believes that the game was successful because of the collaboration with Interplay.