BioWare Blog: The Long Road to BioWare, Part One

Mass Effect 2 senior designer Dave Feltham steps in to tell us how luck, networking, and determination helped him score a job at BioWare.

Someone I had met in college, Jen Julien, got a job offer while in school at Headline Sports (Canadians would now know it as The Score now) and they were looking for a contractor to help them establish their new look. After one interview and some discussions on what the new look could be (and no doubt due to my price, which would be substantially cheaper than going to a larger house), I landed the job and worked with them for several months on the new look. I received several accolades including a feature article in Applied Arts magazine, and this lead to some freelance jobs around Toronto that I wouldn’t have gotten without Headline Sports.

I ended up running my own shop for 2 years. But after an awful job that didn’t even pay in the end and when my best friend said to me that ‘˜He didn’t know how I could look for work every minute of every day) I realized that I just couldn’t do this forever. And to be honest, 3 years of logo assemblies can get a bit mind-numbing. Around that time, Baldur’s Gate kind of changed everything for me. I’ve been a gamer since Adventure on the Compaq and computer games were a part of my life. But here was a game that that proved that games were more than the arcadey twitch-click experience of JumpMan and Duke Nukem. Here was a company making the games I wanted to play; games that would change the face of how games were done. I wanted to be a part of that.