When Computer Gaming World previewed Baldur’s Gate in December 1998, the most it would promise was that BioWare’s game was the first AD&D computer game in years with a chance of being any good. A year later it was “last year’s million-selling AD&D smash hit”, and the same magazine was telling readers that, after the massive success of Baldur’s Gate, the role-playing genre was “hotter than ever”. It was made by a studio in Edmonton, Canada, founded by two family doctors whose previous programming had been medical software.
Fast facts
- Developer: BioWare, Edmonton.
- Publisher: Interplay, under its Black Isle Studios role-playing label.
- Released: December 1998 in North America; early 1999 in Britain, at £39.99.
- Format: Windows 95, on five CDs; later on the Macintosh.
- Rules and setting: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition, in the Forgotten Realms, along the Sword Coast.
- Engine: the Infinity Engine, later used for Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate II.
Two doctors and a licence
Computer Gaming World visited BioWare in 2000 and summed up its founders: “a couple of Canadian M.D.s whose only previous programming experience” was medical software such as a “Gastroenterology Patient Simulator”. The two, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, opened the studio in 1995. Its first game, the robot combat game Shattered Steel (1996), was “a decent but not spectacular debut”. Then, the magazine wrote, the company “hit it out of the park” when it partnered with Interplay’s Black Isle Studios on a “gigantic RPG” set in the Forgotten Realms. Black Isle had been set up inside Interplay in 1996, its director Feargus Urquhart said, so that it could make “RPGs and only RPGs”.
The game was hard to make. BioWare’s co-lead designer James Ohlen told the magazine while finishing the sequel: “With BG there were longer hours, a lot more stress, and tempers ran higher.”
The game
The story opens in the citadel of Candlekeep. An iron shortage along the Sword Coast sets off a chain of events that sends the character, an orphan with a mysterious past, out into the world with bounty hunters and assassins in pursuit. The player makes one character with the full range of AD&D races and classes and recruits up to five companions met along the way; among them were the ranger Minsc and his hamster Boo, Jaheira and Imoen, who all returned in the sequel. Candlekeep doubles as a tutorial, with monks handing out tips and a “virtual battle” against harmless illusions to practise commanding a party.
The fights were the argument. AD&D’s rules were written for turn-based play at a table; BioWare ran them in real time and let the player stop the clock. “By hitting the space bar, you can suspend the game at any time,” wrote Computer Gaming World’s veteran role-playing reviewer, Scorpia, and the game could pause itself when a character died, a target fell or a weapon broke. She did not like it: without pausing it was “a real mess to try to direct the detailed actions of six characters”, and with it the action had “a weird, jerky, stop-and-go feel”. As a player of many real AD&D sessions she also doubted the dice: she had never seen so many low rolls, and suspected “the designers have diddled the dice”. She liked the character creation and the multiplayer game, for up to six players over a network, but found that the plot faded and ended in the inevitable “Foozle fight”, her name for the big final battle against the villain.
The British magazine PC Zone saw it differently. Its reviewer, Chris Anderson, defended the 2D graphics against “techie snobs” who wanted everything in 3D, spent his first hour “simply wandering around” looking at the buildings, and preferred the pause: “pausing real-time action to make decisions lends an element of strategy to the proceedings”. Fans of hectic real-time action were warned that they would not “last longer than ten seconds in battle” without it.
Sales and the revival
Baldur’s Gate sold more than a million copies, and Computer Gaming World credited it with bringing “role-playing and Dungeons and Dragons back into the fore of computer gaming”. Interplay’s advertisements for the sequel called it “the Role Playing Game of the Year”. Along with Blizzard’s Diablo and Interplay’s own Fallout, it is one of the three games the Western RPG entry credits with ending the genre’s lean years.
An expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast, followed in 1999. The Infinity Engine carried Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000), and BioWare’s own Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), which put the player back in the same character’s story, imprisoned in a dungeon with Minsc, Jaheira and Imoen. Baldur’s Gate II entered Computer Gaming World’s Hall of Fame.
Later history
BioWare went on to Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and in 2007 Electronic Arts agreed to buy it. The first game was not left behind: Beamdog released Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition in 2012, and console versions followed in 2019. In 2023 the Belgian studio Larian released Baldur’s Gate 3, which won Game of the Year at The Game Awards that year.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998, p. 131, “The Holiday Hot 100”: BioWare for Interplay, five CDs, the Sword Coast and the iron shortage, the party of up to five other characters, and the first AD&D computer game in years with a chance.
- Computer Gaming World issue 177, April 1999, Scorpia, “Baldur’s Great?” review: character creation, Candlekeep and the tutorial, pausing and autopause, the dice, the party’s mages, multiplayer for two to six, the “Foozle fight”, $49.95 and the system requirements.
- PC Zone issue 73, February 1999, pp. 71–73, Chris Anderson’s review: £39.99, the 2D graphics, the pause, up to six party members.
- Computer Gaming World issue 196, November 2000, pp. 90–105, BioWare cover feature: the two doctors and the Gastroenterology Patient Simulator, the founding in 1995, Shattered Steel, more than a million copies sold, Ohlen’s quote, Feargus Urquhart on Black Isle, Baldur’s Gate II’s opening and returning companions.
- Computer Gaming World issue 186, January 2000: “last year’s million-selling AD&D smash hit”. Issue 182, September 1999: the genre “hotter than ever”.
- Edge issue 98, June 2001, p. 51: BioWare’s “MD-founders”, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.
- Edge issue 89, October 2000: Baldur’s Gate sold “more than one million copies worldwide”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 189, April 2000, p. 5: Interplay advertisement for Baldur’s Gate II, “the Role Playing Game of the Year”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, p. 67: Baldur’s Gate II in the Hall of Fame.
- Wikipedia, “Baldur’s Gate (video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates, Tales of the Sword Coast, the Macintosh version and the Enhanced Edition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate_(video_game)
- See the Electronic Arts and Western RPG entries for EA’s purchase of BioWare and Baldur’s Gate 3.