My Life, As Told By Bioware Games
Bioware spent over three decades making games before EA shuttered it—taking up a significant chunk of my own life in the process.
This week, EA closed Bioware, bringing to an end one of the most influential video game studios of the medium.
That influence has been with me pretty much all of my life up to this point, as I imagine has been the case with a lot of Bioware fans—the studio doesn't really make games that you play once, go "that was neat," and then stop thinking about. You play one thing, and you kind of get a lifetime pass to a series of games that would embed themselves in your brain matter forever. That's the kind of legacy and relationship with an audience that any studio would kill for, and it was just what Bioware did for 30 years.
Until suddenly this week, when they were stopped from doing that. Now, all we've got left of Bioware is the memories—and whatever keeps leaking out of the fifth Mass Effect game that was also killed with its shuttering. But even that too will become memories eventually, and the idea of Bioware as an active cornerstone of video games will pass on.
I've thought about those memories a lot in the past few days, mourning the studio a little bit more every time something slips back to the forefront of my mind. To mark the passing of a studio that has meant so much to me from almost the beginning of my life up to now is a difficult thing to grasp with—so to say goodbye to Bioware, here is the story of my life, through moments with their games that I've been thinking about this week, and probably will be thinking about for a good while yet.