Art work and grease boards, the wall hangings of all developers. But which is the real art? The painted stuff, or the brain dumps on a grease board?
crunch, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, but it doesn’t seem to end for years. GS: How did Stars Wars Knights of the Old Republic come about? Muzyka: I think we were finishing MDK 2 at the time, and we were trying to figure out what to do with the team when we got a cold call from Simon Jeffrey from LucasArts (he was the head of development there at the time). He said, “Would you guys be interested in doing the first Star Wars RPG?” Our jaws hit the floor, and then we said, “Oh yeah, we would be very interested.” The timing was perfect. Later that week, we had a meeting in which we listed three or four new project alternatives, some of which were cool ideas that other publishers pitched us. Then we put “ Star Wars RPG” in there, and everyone in our senior leadership team said, “You’re joking, right?” We said, “No, seriously.” And they’re like, “YEAH! We now know what we want to do!” From an external development perspective, Lucas had been a bit opaque to us in that we didn’t know who to call there. Plus, at that time they weren’t doing a lot of external development. We had actually always wanted to work with them, but we didn’t know how to get a foot in the door! They were different than other publishers who are always looking for external product, so to actually be called and asked was a real honor for us. From our perspective, great games come from the passion for the subject matter, the passion for what you’re creating. I think if you don’t have that as part of the equation you 42 gamesauce • Fall 2010
usually don’t end up with a good product. It’s almost impossible to have that level of devotion, attention, and engagement from people to make something great without passion. The only way to do that is if they love it. This is why it’s so exciting for us and our teams to be working on projects like Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. GS: So, we have to ask: Why did you set up shop in Edmonton? Zeschuk: Yeah, that’s a funny one in that there was no specific plan behind it; Edmonton is our home town and that was about it. I think we get a fair amount of credit for being strategic thinkers and planners and all the rest, but boy, we didn’t do any planning on this location. We didn’t think, “OK, where’s a good place to do this?” We just did it and never looked back. Edmonton obviously isn’t the first destination about which everyone thinks, “Oh, I can’t wait to go there.” Consequently, having Edmonton as our starting location allowed us to select people who love being with BioWare. People who come to us in Edmonton come there for the studio, for the people, for the team, and for the product—and that again factors into the passion. Muzyka: Edmonton is a very interesting city: It’s a good family city with a reasonable cost of living; there’s great education and health care options; it has solid infrastructure, plus it’s surprisingly cosmopolitan. And it’s interesting for us because now we’ve got multiple studios in the BioWare Group.