Ep. 28: BioWare Stories Part 2 - The flood and shipping Jade Empire

This is part two of my interview with my colleague Craig Miller about our days at BioWare together. I strongly suggest you listen to Part 1 before listening to Part 2. While this episode still delves into more office shenanigans, if you are interested in the games themselves, tune in for Part 3 next week when I interview ex-designers Georg Zoeller and Emmanuel Lusinchi.

Everyone who worked at BioWare had a part to play in getting the game out. However, people like me were peripheral, most of the time, to what went into the games. For sure, we would all playtest the games back then, and I’m sure bugs and ideas went in because of that. For example, one of the writers, Dan Whiteside, did put some of one part of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I had been involved in.

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When you are involved in such a game studio, no matter who you are, I am sure a small part of you ends up in the game. Next week, for example, you will note that Georg had some part to play in the workings of the Mako, the vehicle in Mass Effect.

I am lucky in that I do have one very small piece of me in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

LucasArts was very careful about what was considered “Star Wars-y” back in 2003. It’s open knowledge that BioWare chose The Old Republic era so that the writers could have more creative freedom. When the game was coming out, the QA team submitted the lists of Random Names that would come up when you created your main character. To see if they could get by the LucasArts censors they submitted a bunch of BioWare employees’ names.

The only name that apparently went by the censors without any changes was “Dups”.

Yes, if you hit the random name generator in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, even now on an iPad, you will eventually get to “Dups” as a first name. I genuinely did not know they had done this. Stanley Woo and Chris Priestly told me this well after the game had come out. So there you go, somewhere, in the randomly generated characters, it is possible that someone played a Star Wars character thinking that “Dups” might be a name from the original “Star Wars” universe.

Kind of crazy.

In-game Easter eggs featuring BioWare employees can be found as far back as Baldur’s Gate 1 when you can read the tombstones of the Nashkel Cemetery. There are inscriptions such as “Ray - Who said, “This damn game will be... the death of me!”“ referring to Dr. Ray Muzyka one of the CEOs and many others referring to those who worked on the game.

Okay, I think it’s now time to finish the interview with Craig. Please note, these stories likely mean more to those who worked at BioWare between 2001 and 2007 than perhaps to many gamers. At the same time, I hope you enjoy the joy of this oral history as we watched the people at BioWare release some of the most acclaimed games in history.

Last week, we were still at our old office on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton from where Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were born. We then moved offices as we were building Jade Empire, Mass Effect and what became Dragon Age.

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In the episode we talk about singing the Infogrammes theme song. Infogrames was the publisher for Neverwinter Nights, later Infogrames rebranded to Atari. At the time that we were being published by Infogrames, they released the cheesiest corporate song of all time. We had a blast making fun of this song internally. I’ve linked to Youtube with the original song.

Seriously, I’m convinced Infogrames had to change their name after they put this out.

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