One of BioWare’s famous doctor-founders, Greg Zeschuk, has finally spoken about the studio’s closure last week, saying it’s “kind of sad” and that EA’s leveraged buyout by a Saudi-involved consortium “was the final nail in the coffin”.
Speaking to 80 Level, Zeschuk – who founded BioWare in 1995 with fellow medical students Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip – said he was fishing when news of the studio’s closure broke. “I got like 10 texts,” Zeschuk said. “I came off the river and got to my little room and opened my phone, and it’s like, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about BioWare.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh shit.'”
By the time he flew home later, he’d already apparently digested the news and missed most of the discourse around it. “I wasn’t there to share in the moment,” he said, “which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it.
“I’ve kind of gone through all the emotions long, long ago” -Greg Zeschuk
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“I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t suck,” he added. “And I think it’s kind of sad. It’s actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we’re from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that.”
Zeschuk and Muzyka retired from BioWare in 2012, the year Mass Effect 3 was released, so they’ve been away from the business for a considerable amount of time. They’ve moved on. “I’ve kind of gone through all the emotions long, long ago,” Zeschuk explained.
BioWare did change thereafter, he seemed to accept, but as a result of a gradual change propelled naturally by people leaving and other people coming in. “I’m not going to have so much hubris to say Ray and I were the lynchpin in the chain, our departure ruined everything,” he said. “It wasn’t that at all. It’s a slow and insidious kind of thing and again, it’s the people. The people are the key.”
When he heard the private acquisition of EA had gone through, that’s when he feared things might be headed to a bad place. “I think it was the final nail in the coffin,” he said. “I think that was the crux of it in a sense. BioWare makes these kinds of unusual games that take a long time and they’re complicated and so it’s easier just to pump out sports games every year, and that’s a better business model in some ways.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Zeschuk talked a little about the origins of BioWare selling to EA in 2008 – “We had options actually” – and about personally sliding away from story-driven games towards more action-centred games like the Nioh series and Elden Ring.
Since 2017, Zeschuk has been building a beer-brewing company called Blind Enthusiasm, which apparently now employs a dozen people and ships tens of thousands of bottles of beer a year. This interview is the only one Zeschuk has given. Muzyka has so far declined to be interviewed. The third BioWare co-founder, Augustine Yip, left the company long ago, back in 1998.