Greg Zeschuk was standing in the Babine River deep in northern British Columbia, fishing for steelhead when the studio died.

He didn’t find out until later that Wednesday, returning to the lodge, its sporadic cell connection, and a flurry of text messages.

BioWare, a studio he co-founded with Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip in 1995, which arguably went on to redefine the role-playing video game genre, launched some of the most respected games over its three decades, and helped earn Zeschuk and Muzyka the Order of Canada, was shuttered.

EA announced Oct. 21 that it was closing BioWare and ending early development on the next Mass Effect game. The closure cost about 50 jobs at the studio, part of roughly 400 layoffs across EA, and came 78 days after the company’s $55 billion buyout closed.

“I got like ten texts,” he 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 sh*t.’”

He said by the time he flew home that Friday, he had “already shelved it away.” He also spoke with Muzyka, who declined, through Zeschuk, to speak with me for this story. Zeschuk said he turned down other interview requests while he was away; this is his first interview about the closure.

“I didn't have the immediate impact,” Zeschuk said, speaking with me from his home in Edmonton, where BioWare was also based, this week. “I wasn't there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it.”

“I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t suck. 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.”

In a way Zeschuk already grieved the loss of BioWare 14 years ago when he and Muzyka both retired from the gaming industry in the same month.

“I've kind of gone through all the emotions like long, long ago,” he said. Leaving a company in a healthy way, he added, means breaking that emotional attachment. “You have to break from it and kind of go, ‘OK, I've had my emotional moment.’”

The real sadness with this news came from his concern about the people involved who lost their jobs and knowing how tough the games business is, he said. 

“Anyone getting put into the job hunt is a sort of terrifying endeavor and super sad,” he said.

Electronic Arts

Some might believe that the writing was on the wall for BioWare when the founders sold the studio to Electronic Arts in 2007, but that’s not Zeschuk’s take.

In 2013, I chatted with Zeschuk about his decision to leave the company and pursue his love of craft beer. At the time, he talked about surviving EA.

“I think one of the reasons that we survived and succeeded within EA was that our company was mature enough and there was enough good people throughout to handle the EA bear hug – something that is well-meaning but vigorous,” he said at the time. “We needed to be strong to survive that, and I think we did, and you evolve from that as well."

This week, I brought up that bear hug again. Did BioWare ultimately succumb to it, I asked. Zeschuk said EA gave the studio several shots after he left, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard the last.

“They were able to operate within the framework, and they were able to put out products, I think,” he said. “And so that for me seems like it's a success.”

The first three shots happened, he said, “which is, I think, a pretty huge success.” The fourth, the next Mass Effect, never got its chance after the buyout.

He added that he doesn’t regret selling to EA, and he rejected the idea that BioWare sold because it was in trouble. “There was no coercion or pressure,” he said. “We were in good shape.”

“A lot of it had to do with the funding of the Star Wars project in Austin and just the stability of being in a bigger company,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, maybe we were ahead of the game a bit, but like we saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks.

“We had options actually. We thought we chose the best option that was available to us at the time. The company had good possibilities going forward, but at the end of the day we felt, OK, we may be better as part of a bigger thing.”

The People are the Key

Zeschuk, like many founders in the game industry that I’ve interviewed, took a bit of a break from gaming when he first retired from the game industry. But these days, he says he loves playing games.

That said, he hasn’t played everything BioWare created since his departure.

“I played a bit of Anthem, but I didn’t play Andromeda,” he said. “I had a cooling-off period for a couple of years. Then I got back into it, and I’m a pretty avid player now.”

As he’s gotten older, he said, he’s transitioned a bit away from story-driven games and more into what he calls “aggression-based” games. For instance, he said he’s played a ton of Nioh, Nioh 2, and Nioh 3, and enthused about completing the Underworld endgame mode in Nioh 2.

“I think I have over 1,200 hours in that,” he said. “I really like combat games. Maybe that’s where Jade Empire came from.”

He’s also a huge fan of Elden Ring, which he called probably the greatest game ever made. “Though the Zeldas are pretty close.”

I asked him if there’s a moment in time when he can look at BioWare and say that’s when the studio stopped being the thing that he and the other founders created. But he said a change like that at a studio is more of an evolution than a sudden switch.

“The way I look at that kind of stuff is studios are a function of the people, right?” he said. “As the people start leaving, it starts evolving and different people come in. I'm not going to have so much hubris to say Ray and I were the linchpin in the chain, our departure ruined everything. It wasn't that at all. I think we had a strong team with lots of people and there's lots of backup for things we brought and back up to the backup. But just over time, there's an evolution.”

He added that BioWare was always a very entrepreneurial kind of company, but that doesn’t really fit inside a bigger company. 

“So I think it’s a slow and insidious kind of thing and again it’s the people. The people are the key.”

Zeschuk said that when he heard that EA was purchased in a $55 billion leveraged buyout led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in August, he had an inkling things wouldn’t end well for BioWare.

“I think it was the final nail in the coffin,” he said. “I think that was the crux of it in a sense. Once again it's a completely different company now.”

And as a completely different company the new EA has a new set of priorities. While Zeschuk doesn’t have any inside knowledge, his suspicion is that the purchase was mostly about sports titles and “maybe Battlefield.”

“Everything else is kind of extraneous I suspect,” he said. “BioWare makes these kind 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.”

Not My Rodeo

Not everyone who reacted to the closure of BioWare has been as measured. Warren Spector, the now-retired designer behind Deus Ex and System Shock, called the closure “utter bulls**t” in a LinkedIn post, and said the executives involved should lose their jobs instead of the developers.

Zeschuk said he can understand that reaction. “Honestly, it’s not my rodeo,” he said. “I had to break with it emotionally 15 years ago…It’s so much healthier just to really, truly create that emotional break. Or else you’ll forever be second-guessing it and hovering.”

What does bother him is how the industry treats the people who make games. Studios like BioWare depended on teams that spent years refining the same craft, he said, and the executives now making the calls rarely understand that.

“There’s this weird belief that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”

“The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track,” he added. “Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don’t know how it works.”

Not Going Back

Zeschuk knew what I was asking before I finished my question. He knew that people would want to know if he would ever be interested in regaining the studio name and the Mass Effect rights.

“No, no,” he said. “For me it was time to go, and I kind of walked out of the games business without any intention of ever returning. I’m happy being a consumer and playing games. I have my opinions on how to make stuff, but as enticing as it would be, it’s just not [worth] the personal struggle and cost and effort required to make a great game. Having gone through the crucible of game development, I’m not going back in there.”

And it’s not like Zeschuk spends all of his time fishing. Since 2017, he’s built up Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company, which now specializes in spontaneously fermented, lambic-style Belgian beers. It started as a brewery inside his Edmonton restaurant, Biera, and has grown into what he calls “a big boutique,” with a dozen employees making 60,000 to 100,000 750-milliliter bottles a year. They even ship internationally, to the U.S., Europe, Japan, and soon China. 

“I'm just at a point in my life where I've got my own other business,” he said. “My brewing business is going really well. I've got a whole other thing I'm doing, and I'm not sentimental or nostalgic. I'm kind of, like, that chapter's closed.”

Brian Crecente is a Contributing Writer for 80 Level. Check out more of his work and subscribe to his newsletter at his Substack website, GAME.