From the archives: SOFTWARE INVADERS: Edmonton's Bioware is orbiting near the big time

This piece was originally published on Aug. 8, 1996. On Oct. 21, 2026, it was announced BioWare was closing.

It’s Wednesday afternoon and the offices of BioWare Corp. are humming. Greg Zeschuk, a medical doctor and the company’s president, emerges from the warren of offices above Whyte Avenue to greet a visitor.

Zeschuk is dressed for a day at the office. The long-haired, 27-year-old wears a black shirt, black jeans and is barefoot. Zeschuk ushers his visitor into the creative director’s office, where the firm’s other two partners wait, both looking equally casual.

The office itself could be your teenager’s room. Loud posters for rock stars and video games are plastered on the walls. Papers and books are scattered across every available surface. A CD player and a stack of discs sit in one corner.

Welcome to one of Edmonton’s hot new software companies. Unorthodox? Yes. Innovative? Certainly.

In two short years, BioWare has gone from being the vision of three young Edmonton doctors to a rapidly growing firm employing 22 people.

The company’s biggest boast to date is a computer game titled Shattered Steel. The shareware version is already on the Internet, while the finished product licensed by Interplay, the large American game company, will hit store shelves this October.

BioWare received a six-figure advance for Shattered Steel, a full-motion video space adventure of startling realism. The company developed the game with a Calgary subcontractor, Pyrotek Game Studios.

Now, with the action game not even released, BioWare has a contract to produce several more. One, Zeschuk nervously refers to only as an electronic version of ”a fantasy role playing game.” Suffice to say, BioWare artists were busy creating animations based on the game books for Dungeons and Dragons.

The comparison of BioWare to Microsoft is inevitable. Like the Seattle software giant, BioWare prizes youth, energy and creativity. No one in the office seems to be over 30. All the programmers and artists are fuelled on Coca-Cola and pop music. And everyone does what it takes to get the job done.

”For everyone, BioWare is basically a dream job,” says Zeschuk. ”We don’t have set hours; we have tasks. If you have to stay to midnight, you stay to midnight and if you don’t have to come in the next day, you don’t. We’re loose, but we also have very clear goals to accomplish.”

The company is quickly making a name for itself with a combination of medical education software and computer games. It seems like a bizarre mix until you take into account that all three principals of BioWare are practising physicians who also love game-playing.

Augustine Yip, the company’s creative director, notes that he and his two partners — Zeschuk and Raymond Muzyka, director and chief financial officer — all grew up surrounded by comic books, sci-fi movies and Star Trek. ”We were all immersed in the same culture.”

That culture included computer games. Zeschuk says the three partners have all played electronic games since the first Apple computer came onto the market in the 1970s. Muzyka believes they’ve played every game available.

The three partners met while studying for their medical degrees at the University of Alberta. Muzyka, Yip and Zeschuk, all 27, discovered they all enjoyed computing as well as game-playing. The common bonds led them to form BioWare in 1995 with about $100,000 in start-up capital.

However, even before they formalized the company, they had started development on their first piece of software in 1993. While they were still residents in family practice, they put together a computer tutorial for the U of A’s faculty of medicine.

The Windows-based tutorial simulates the levels of acid base in blood serum and its reactions in different situations such as trauma and heart attack. Using the program, students learn how to interpret the acid base levels and then provide appropriate treatment. ”One of the reasons we chose that one to do first is it’s something we had personal difficulty with in medical school,” says Muzyka.

More recently, BioWare completed a gastroenterology case simulator for the University of Alberta. It’s already part of the required course material for second-year medical students.

Now, at the request of the Janssen-Ortho Pharmaceuticals firm, BioWare is updating the software for use by family doctors. As well, the Canadian Association of Gastroenterologists has agreed to distribute the software across Canada.

Not surprisingly, the doctors see some analogies between computing and medicine. ”Preventive medicine isn’t really the best in both fields,” says Muzyka. ”If you keep someone healthy from the start, and do regular maintenance, then they won’t get sick.

”It’s just the same if you organize program development properly at the start, it doesn’t have problems later on.”

Muzyka also points out that BioWare is a showcase for the three doctors to express themselves creatively. ”That’s a good part of why we do this, because in medicine to some extent, you have to stifle that (creative urge) quite a bit.”

It’s precisely that creative spark that led the three doctors, with Pyrotek Game Studios, to develop Blasteroids 3D in 1994. The high-tech shooting match received a favorable review in a British computing game magazine. That led to a deal with American Software Lab and modest sales of some 5,000 copies across North America.

Shattered Steel, however, promises to potentially propel BioWare into the big leagues. The partners are expecting the software to match sales figures typical for games of that sort: 75,000 to 100,000 units. And then there are the spinoffs to different platforms, such as Macintosh or Nintendo.

Does BioWare harbor ambitions of becoming the Microsoft of the North? ”We definitely have goals for growth,” says Muzyka. ”We don’t want uncontrolled growth. What we want is to continue to develop a reasonable number of products per year. The main thing for us is the quality.”

Muzyka says all the partners still rely on their medical practices for their income. ”We haven’t gotten anything personally out of this company yet, and we really don’t plan to for a while. For us, the fun is just doing it. It’s like a hobby that’s come to fruition as a life-long goal.”

Before games are commercially released, companies will often post earlier versions of them on the Internet. Shattered Steel, developed jointly by Edmonton’s BioWare and Calgary’s Pyrotek Game Studios, currently may be played on the Internet.

The object of the game is to protect a far-off planet from an invasion of robotic animals. The game took BioWare artists and programmers a year and a half to develop and is amazingly realistic.

Because the actions of the robotic invaders are programmed to randomly occur, not even the game’s creators can predict what will happen.