A little Bio-History

Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins comes out next week, and I am slowly falling into its marketing traps, seeking out all available information about what the company has termed the “spiritual successor” to one of my favorite game series of all time, Baldur’s Gate. Perhaps for my own interest – and no one else’s – I decided to set down the major Bioware releases and where they fell during my life.

• Baldur’s Gate, December 1998. Published by Interplay. Wikipedia suggests it released in November but I have vivid memories of the developers announcing the game went gold in December. At the time, I was living and working in NYC, and traveling to Maine every other weekend to stay with my girlfriend (now my wife ). She had hoped to buy the game for me for Christmas, but it didn’t arrive in Portland until a few days after that.
• Baldur’s Gate 2, Fall 2000. Published by Interplay. Melissa and I had gotten married in May and moved to Washington DC. We were renting a one bedroom and occasionally talking about having children. I don’t remember any troubles finding the game, but I have such fond memories of it.
• Neverwinter Nights, June 2002. Published by Atari. Our first child had been born the previous fall, and we were now renting a house in DC. We’d passed the Virginia bar in February and were working in our law firm’s Virginia office, which meant that I worked close to a mall – and thus close to a games store. I recall the very long line at Electronics Boutique, waiting for the Fed Ex to deliver that evening’s shipment – this was still before the age of mandatory street dates and Tuesday releases.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, November 2003. Published by Lucas Arts. We bought a house the previous May and moved to Virginia from DC; I left the law firm and went in-house with my current company. Our second child was born in the fall.
• Mass Effect, November 2007. Published by Microsoft. It’s funny to see this timeline and realize that four years passed between KotOR and Mass Effect; Bioware did release another game, Jade Empire, during that time, but as I didn’t have the original Xbox, I never played it. Our third child was born the previous year, so this game also breaks the pattern of coming out during the same year as when one of our children was born. (And no, no children arriving with Dragon Age, either.

Kind of neat to chart it out like that. I think of myself having played more Bioware games, but the reality is that I’ve only played four, and played them for many, many hours.