It takes a rare developer to become a sort of shorthand for an entire genre. Think of how Bethesda is the de facto reference point for first-person RPGs or pre-World of Warcraft Blizzard set the standard for all real-time strategy games. For decades, one developer has defined a certain type of choice-driven, party-based RPGs, but its 30th anniversary also comes at a time when its future is less certain than ever.
BioWare was founded on February 1, 1995, by Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyka, and Augustine Yip, though it didn’t publicly launch until later that year. According to BioWare’s own website, the company began “in a small room in Greg’s basement.” The company’s three founders met in medical school, and in 1994, began programming medical education software together. After two releases, the trio found that software like Gastroenterology Patient Simulator wasn’t quite scratching their creative itches, and formed BioWare to pursue more ambitious projects — its name coming from a combination of biology and software, alluding to both their history as doctors and their ambitions of creating “software for humans,” according to Muzyka.
