Developer Origin Stories

Crispy Gamer has published a new “Developer Origin Stories” feature, in which several popular developers talk about how they wound up getting involved with the video game industry. Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor, BioWare’s Ray Muzyka & Greg Zeschuk, and 2K Boston’s Ken Levine are all among those profiled:

Ray: It’s fair to say that we didn’t really know much of anything about the business of games (or business, for that matter) when we started BioWare back in 1992-93 (incorporating formally in 1995). Rather, we were and are passionate fans of videogames, so we set out — rather naively in retrospect — to make a great games company. We succeeded in this goal entirely thanks to the great people who joined us all those years ago and since. As it turns out, working as medical doctors was probably less work than starting and running BioWare.

We started in Greg’s basement, and decided to move to a real office once I (a fairly tall fellow) knocked myself out on the low ceiling one too many times (once is enough when it comes to concussions, I like to say).

Greg: We also did some designing, programming, animating and writing on those early games before 1998. Of course, we weren’t nearly as talented as the people we subsequently hired, but back that long ago you could potentially learn an area afresh and produce actual content. An interesting comparison is that the new iPhone and Flash development experiences aren’t significantly different than how things were when we started.