Introduction

Bloomberg is reporting today that BioWare is being shut down amid a flurry of layoffs at EA. To honor of the studio's impressive contributions to the video game industry, we're making public our expansive oral history on the studio that previously appeared exclusively in Issue 284 , The Mass Effect: Andromeda issue.

This feature from former managing editor, Matt Bertz, covers the full history of BioWare up until the feature's publication in December, 2016.

Twenty years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was considered by many to be a Satanic game played by mentally imbalanced adolescents, and role-playing games were a fringe genre in video games. That was the reality when two doctors decided to start up a game development studio on the side of their medical practice back in the mid ’90s.…