Baldur's Gate Ten Years
By Jay Watamaniuk
Released in November of 1998, Baldur's Gate is one of the undisputable classics for roleplaying fans around the world. The grand daddy of all table top games, Dungeon and Dragons has seen several incarnations in the computer game medium, but none before seemed to incite such a zealous following that persists even a decade later for BioWare's first roleplaying game.
BioWare firmly established itself on the global stage with the release of this massively ambitious title. It was only the first of a series that would astound players with hundreds of hours of unmatched story telling, fully realized characters and meticulous devotion to the complex rules of Dungeons and Dragons.
By 1998, BioWare had grown from a few talented friends in a small basement to an emerging game development company with a staff of only a few dozen. Who knew a decade later that same small company would grow to nearly 500 employees across two studios and become part of one of the biggest publishers of entertainment in the world?
We tracked down some early scratch pad thinking on Baldur's Gate, early GUI mock-ups, and some BioWare veterans who worked on Baldur's Gate, to reminisce about a decade of Baldur's Gate.
"I loved the time when we were trying to come up with a story for the game. We kept submitting stories and having them rejected. So our publisher decided to send us a story instead. While we waited we set up a pool trying to guess what aspects the story would contain. Things like: evil twin, mad wizard, fading magic, etc. It was funny how many concepts we came up with that were in the first draft."
John Winski
Technical Designer
"Ten years ago there was a small group of young, inexperienced game developers trying to build what was then an extremely ambitious PC RPG, into a market that said the PC RPG market was dead. We were too dumb to know better.
3D animation was very new in Canada, so when you had problems, there was no one to ask. We just looked at each other and cried. Characters were 57 pixels high, animations were tiny, really no more than a few key poses. The most daunting thing was taking all the 3D animations and rendering them off in 8 directions. Oh yes, the characters were sprites. That means each cycle was rendered as a sequential strip of frames onto a contact sheet, in all 8 directions. Then we had go into these massive contact sheets and pick each correct action, for each direction, and give it a very specific name. Human error was bountiful, and I aged horribly.
The cinematics were so very crude, but I remember being proud of the volume of work we covered. My favorite is of a body floating in water after the mines flood. It just made me happy that we could even come close to simulating water. Small things make you happy in this business.
I have played through every iteration of the BG series at least 3 times. To this day, despite the visual aging of the work, it still has a sort of magic for me, and it reminds me that a group of people, set on extremely lofty goals, can accomplish amazing things."
Steve Gilmour
Principal Lead Animator
Working on the same codebase for 4 projects has a certain freedom to it. You come to learn the ins and outs of the code so well that it becomes easier to make changes. This may be counter intuitive to most programmers who would expect that such aged code would become inflexible. The reality is that you know it so well that you can work around the limitations with relative ease. It makes iteration on a feature much easier. This is one of the great strengths of working on a sequel.
Of course, you also start to hate the codebase a little bit…
Mark Darrah
Project Director
"The Baldur's Gate games opened a lot of doors for us both in business and creativity. They gave us a reputation and established a brand of gameplay beyond the series itself. You see echoes of what we learned in Baldur's Gate in all BioWare games created since--the party and the interactions with them, the tactical combats, the rules systems, and plot approaches, etc. I will always be proud of those games and look back with great fondness at the period in my career."
Kevin Martens
Principal Lead Designer
"I remember when our publisher realized the scale of what we were making. They took 8x10 sheets of paper out to their parking lot and laid out a map of the game areas. Then they reevaluated the testing plan.
Ten years since release—over twelve since I signed up to help write the thing—and I remember long nights, way too many kinds of pizza, and feeling like I was being allowed to make custom monkey bars for my favorite playground. I wanted to show there was a history to the place, that because of all the detail—and despite it— you could take it new directions and make it your own. The most gratifying thing is the enduring love or hatred for the characters we created. If that sprite/portrait combination can seem genuine or get under your skin, that's a story well played. Swords for everyone!"
Luke Kristjanson
Senior Writer
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