Game Designer to Player Advocate: Trent Oster of Beamdog

so we were working on Baldur's Gate one enhanced Edition and I had a 750 000 line of credit with the bank that I was personally backing wow and uh we're 700 000 into it and I'm like hey guys uh I need some more money like how much more money do you need I was like I need another 250. take me up to a million there were a lot of conversations back and forth about the risk and how it was so we we bumped it up with the bank to a million dollars we rounded up to nine hundred and seventy thousand dollars wow and then we shipped alderscape enhanced Edition and inside a month we were we were in the in the black welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2

and plants versus zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and player data for the world's most ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders [Music] today's episode is with Trent Oster one of the original founders of BioWare the storied Studio that built some of the most beloved franchises and games ever made like Dragon Age Mass Effect Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Knights

Trent is unique in that he started another Studio after BioWare called beam dog they have a beautiful game in Early Access called myth force that has received a lot of positive reception this story is one that was largely unknown to me and is great for all game Founders and those that are interested in BioWare and beam dog Trent has a wealth of technical game design and production experience and we retraced his journey starting multiple Studios we hope you enjoy this interview and now on to our conversation with Trent foreign how's it going thanks for thinking hello thanks for being here always always happy to talk about game stuff all right well why don't we start with uh your early story like how did you where'd you grow up what's your kind of background oh God all the way back I grew up in a town called Lloydminster which is on the border between two provinces in in Canada so it's between

Alberta and Saskatchewan so half the town is on one side and half the towns on the other so I actually grew up slightly into Saskatchewan and uh I like cars and that was going to be my plan from high school I was going to be a car mechanic and uh I was I had done a lot of stuff with computers and my mother early on got a an apple II e right Apple II plus first because she was a bookkeeper so she worked with a an accountant who was pretty early on in computers and so we had an apple two plus at home and then we had the Apple 2E at home and we messed around on it we used to read those books when I say we as me and my older brother we used to read those how to program video game books and you'd literally type in line by line to get a program and and they were all just garbage so they were horrible things but I started playing games and and started making games on the on the Apple

II and we're like hey maybe maybe someday we could we could do something with this and then everybody's like you should get a real job and do those things so we're like okay fine so I went and I became an apprentice mechanic out of high school and I'm like wow this is a job like they're treating me like garbage because you just got ordered around and you just had to keep doing like whatever they had agreed on like I was supposed to be oh I'll work a little while in an oil change booth and then I'll go and I'll do some more mechanic stuff that was an oil change stuff for like six months and I'm like you know what this is not working so forget it I'm just going to go to university I'm going to do some some computer thing and I I picked a a career out of a guidance counselor's book I'm like I will be a systems analyst that'll be awesome still don't know what a systems analyst is I never really cared to be honest so I started doing computer science and uh I finished my third year of computer

science and over the summer we started a a company doing computer Consulting by day and doing video game stuff in our spare time in the evenings so it was myself my older brother Brent and a childhood friend Marcel zestchak so we started working on video game stuff what year was that by the way that was 1994. okay yeah so we're working away and we get at the end of the summer we kind of made a deal with each other it's like if we can do it if over the summer we can make a video game we're gonna go for it we're gonna become professional video game developers like capital P we actually get paid to do this so end of the summer rolls around and we had made a game called blastroids 3D it was a 2d bitmap scaler so basically it made the asteroids look bigger by scaling them so they got closer to you yeah it's pretty horrible and we built all the art I did most of the artwork in

uh Corel photo paint three because that's the wow that's the package that we had and uh we did it over the over the summer we made a video game and did you guys distribute that at all like how did that we did um we sold it out shareware and it made it exactly zero dollars and then we cut a deal with a a company to bundle it into uh D elica CD box set and uh they never paid us oh my gosh so blastoid 3D and its entire life made zero dollars and so were you all working on the side like how how did you all stay like have food for like have money for rent and food and things like that so initially when we were just working over the summer we were doing the the computer Consulting by Day video game stuff by night and uh we weren't making a ton of money but we had a couple contracts that were big enough that it brought in enough money for Ichiban noodles and most of us were living at home or I was actually mooching off my girlfriend nice I'm like hey you're feeding me and you got me a

place to live so this is great so I knew right off the get-go she's she's not after my money because I got none and uh so we started on the game that later became shattered steel and as we were starting to work on shattered steel uh Marcel's cousin Greg zest check who I'd known since I was about 12 came down and he had graduated as a doctor just a year before and he was working in a nearby Town doing a they call it a Locum where you you essentially spell out a doctor who's taking holidays so he would come in he worked in in Vermillion and then he would drive down and he would hang out with us and he'd be like oh man I also want to get into this I want to make video games too so he brought two other doctors down with him and the six of us together formed a company together called BioWare which it literally took us like oh it was like two months to come up with a name they're like hey we should call it Osiris software and then you start looking at like Egyptian

mythology didn't somebody like cut him into little pieces and isn't that kind of bad what's how did you guys land on BioWare it just seemed like a nice simple thing so the idea was it was like biological software it's like humans making software and is it because yeah three doctors Moonlighting with you well the the doctors figured hey maybe there's an angle we can work on the side here where we can do some some software gigs we can build some medical software and maybe make some additional money so we'll be like a game company slash we'll do some some extra stuff and it turns out that yeah there's not a ton of money in medical software if you don't really love doing it so we were kind of like let's just make games it's more fun so we started working on shattered steel and and started rolling on that and then over time they spooled up a different team working on what became Baldur's Gate and I guess Lubin back how did you

guys were you still doing work for higher work like how are you paying the like six people now how are you all surviving so initially um the three doctors kept working as doctors okay and they actually invested money into the rest to support the rest of us actually making the game right and we we hired our our first employee the fellow named John Winski and uh he was hired as a initially to make sound effects that then we turned him into a game designer it was uh it was kind of hilarious he got hired because his grandmother came by and knew somebody and said you should hire my grandson wow that that was actually a BioWare hiring pipeline in the early days people's parents saying you should hire my boy he's a computer wizard and how long did that first game take you guys uh by the time we finished had our seal we were on it a little over two years two and a half years oh wow yeah so you kept it going and then what what did that look like after you finished out of seal so

shattered steel launched head-to-head against Mech Warrior mercenaries and Mech Warrior mercenaries just killed it because it was like the 800 pound gorilla in the giant robot space ultimately I think that I think shatter steel was a fun game I think it played well I mean it paid its bills like in the end its royalties made it its money back and it got us to deal with interplay that got everything rolling so I classify it as a win but ultimately from a commercial standpoint it it did okay we'd love to dive into the interplay you know that were there other Publishers and suitors as well like how did that deal come about I assumed this was maybe that this was the first publishing deal you did right so how how was that whole experience it was so we we basically put a demo together on floppy disks and we mailed it out to 10 different Publishers and of those ten seven of them actually got back to us with offers wow and uh the the first offer I think

we got back was from a Canadian company surtek and it was like 150 Grand and then in the end we wound up signing with uh interplay I think it was like 275 thousand dollars to make the game to finish it and their big selling point was hey we've got this guy his name's Rob hubner he put multiplayer in descent and if you put multiplayer and shattered steel it's going to sell a lot more it'll be a way better game so we're like yeah that sounds great so like four months later we get a call from interplay they're like yeah Rob hubner just gave us two weeks notice so you guys need to fly down here and you need to get multiplayer in this game in two weeks so we're like okay that'll be fun we flew down and we had done a bunch of prep work getting ready to put multiplayer into the system and we'd been trying to think about it from uh how would we build this game so that it could support multiplayer and luckily enough kind of we got the majority of

the of the hard stuff in there in the two weeks we were down there was this all I'm just trying to remember back to that time point was this all like peer-to-peer dial up like three four players in a session together that's correct so it was peer-to-peer and um we basically had a choice to make it's like when I shoot at an enemy on my computer does it matter more that I'm hitting him on my computer and I can see that I'm hitting him and that means he's being hit or does it matter more that on his computer he sees he's being hit and he knows he's dying and we settled on the ladder so what actually happens is multiplayer game we're connected together all the particles are created on your machine if they're being shot to towards you or at you so in multiplayer if you're being hit on your machine that's the authoritative version of what's Happening and then you tell the others the other peers that you're being damaged as opposed to us doing a period like the damage model on the the person

who's shooting sides so by trying to be fair about it it really kind of enforced some discipline on how that that traffic was organized and how it was dealt with and in the end it made a lot of sense because if you're being shot and and it looks like you're being hit you're fine with it but if if you're being hit and you can't see where it's coming from you you don't think you're being hit it just feels artificial where if I'm shooting somebody and they're soaking a lot I'm just like man that guy's got amazing Shields or something see we're like hey no harm no foul in that case so let's let's do that and shatter steel was a lot of fun because uh so it used a voxel terrain and one of the effects in the game was you could actually shoot a missile we called it a nuke and it would actually deform the terrain and it would make like a big crater and eventually in a multiplayer game you were just destroy the entire environment and it would just be craters everywhere but a shedder still for its time in like 96 97 did some amazing stuff like there was multiplayer there were Cooperative missions there was like

escort missions there was team versus team missions it was just a ton of options for its time it was a pretty amazing game and it's just sad it wasn't marketed better so I guess after that it did well enough for you guys to get another shot or you guys obviously felt like you sticked together give it another shot uh how did was Baldur's Gate the next one after that or how well it wasn't as clean as it sounds what actually ended up happening is uh so there were six of us yeah there was uh myself my older brother Marcel zeschek Greg zest check Ray musica and Augustine Yip and early on my brother decided that Marcel wasn't putting enough work in so he was like Greg you gotta fire your cousin and Greg's like I don't really want to fire my cousin but uh all right so then there was five of us so Marcel was gone and then my brother was like Hey I don't like OG he's not doing enough work and

Greg and Ray were like you know we kind of like oh more than we like you so my brother and I actually broke off and we set up a separate studio called pyrotech game studios and we continued on the development of shattered steel at that point we had the contract with uh interplay so interplay had to deal with BioWare and BioWare had to deal with uh with pyrotech around this game meanwhile the buyer guys had found a couple local programmers and they had hired them with this idea of doing this this RPG thing so they were they they basically took a DirectX demo and they hacked it into it into a a demo of of a game called Battleground infinity and it was it was trash but it was it showed some potential at the time so meanwhile my brother and I are working on shattered steel we've hired a studio of like six other people we're down in in Calgary and bioware's up in Edmonton uh my

brother decides I'm not doing enough work so he gets he wants to get rid of me I don't like hey dude there's you and there's me and that's it so it went bad and that eventually we had to come to Jesus moment and I was like dude I'm gonna finish this game are you gonna finish this game and he left and he went down to work at origin systems where he worked on the de Jane uh Jane's combat uh he worked on their Apache flight simulator and I took shattered steel and I brought it up to Edmonton and brought it to BioWare where we took one hire that I had from Calgary with me and we set up and we finished shuttered steel up in Edmonton meanwhile they had built this Battleground Infinity demo that they did the same Playbook we sent it out to 10 different publishers and we got rejected pretty much across the board everybody was like RPGs are dead Western RPGs don't aren't a thing

like why are you guys doing this nobody wants to do an RPG but then our producer at interplay who worked on shattered steel with us so this was just before we had shipped shattered steel said hey I heard you guys are doing some RPG thing why don't you send it to me I'll take a look at it so we send it down to Fergus he looks at it and he's like hey this is actually pretty promising you know what we got the DND license what we should do is we should take your Battleground infinity and we should throw out that horrible Story You've Got going and we should put DND in it and make a d d game out of it and it turned out at the time that BioWare had hired a number of complete d d nerds so that they'd actually it was almost like they Aqua hired an entire team from a small town called Grand Prairie which is north of Edmonton and the kind of leader of that group was cam Topher who is my business partner in beam dog so Cam and his group came down to Edmonton and they all they literally hired the entire team and one

of their guys was a fellow named James Olan and James was literally like he was attending High School while he owned a comic book store that he ran a d d campaign out of wow and that d d campaign that they played all these high school kids those were the characters that became the characters in Baldur's Gate the story wow so Cameron Topher my business partner his character was Minsk The Fighter the ranger so minskin Baldur's Gate is Cam's Minsk all of the characters viconia chartel they all came from that that play group in those play sessions so it's one of the reasons there was a lot of depth there was that these characters had been played by people for years and had all sorts of weird traits and weird interesting things about them so it was It was kind of this this case of by playing the sessions and building out these characters they developed this really rich roster of of characters and traits and and interests and attributes that really when applied to a story it

was really appealing because people could just dig in and there was a lot of depth there which historically I mean especially RPGs didn't have a ton of story depth at that point right yeah and then fascinating at the same time with interplay they had some amazing amazing audio people so I think Chris borders was their their vo director and they went nuts on the casting they're like oh yeah we're gonna cast this person that person that person they hired some of the best voice Talent around and they did amazing voice work for all these characters so just at a time when when other games were were going pretty light on stuff we had this amazing vo and and and the visuals weren't great but they were enough to convey the idea of what was going on and then the writing was really strong and interesting so you get these great lines voiced by these great actors over this session that you're playing and it was a lot of fun I'm curious I mean if I'm counting correctly at this point so are you guys like down to four now from

six and and did the new did the new recruits end up becoming kind of the core part of the company as well and this is sort of how you guys turn into multiple RPG hits over the years just love to get a sense for how you guys divided up responsibility yeah so when I went down to Calgary I actually had to resign from BioWare I had to give up my ownership share in BioWare which I'm still butthurt about but when I came back so at that point Augustine Yip was starting to back out he wanted to just from a family perspective I think he had gotten married and he wanted to focus on being a doctor so it was down to essentially Greg and Ray in the ownership pool I rejoined the company at that point they had hired Scott Gregg and they had hired a few more people and the company grew up to about it was about 25 people when I when I or about 20 people when I moved up to Edmonton and we got a new office space which is funny enough the building that I'm in today oh man so

we're actually in the old BioWare offices which is kind of hilarious but there's only so many offices that are the same size in a certain area small world over there huh like just a lot of people know each other well we we really loved the area so uh BioWare was on an area in in Edmonton called White Ave which is kind of like a trendy bar restaurant coffee shop area and I always said if I ever do anything I'm gonna do it on white Ave so when Cam and I established beam dog we set up on white Ave and BioWare had since moved away from there from White Ave so it was uh this is our third space is beam dog but it fits us well and it feels it feels good I guess if founder sort of I'd love to talk about the RPG stuff so but just taking a quick Sidetrack like founder drama is like a big reason a lot of stuff ends up not working like what is your relationship with your your brother and the other folks at at bio were like

today like years later so I mean I was always committed to getting the game done and I never had a real problem with Greg and Ray and with OGG like I'm a pretty accommodating guy and and I like to think that when I commit to doing something I'll see it through come hell or high water so I was going to ship shattered Steel and I didn't mind working with Greg and Ray the fact that my brother had problems with everybody that's a trend that continued throughout his entire life smart guy he can do amazing things when he applies himself but why was he really good at getting people mad at him um so my brother and I we don't get along so great but uh Greg Greg and I I see Greg every couple months he actually set up a brew pub in a restaurant wow so once in a while go over there and have have uh a beer and and have a lunch or a dinner and it's it's always good to see him I mean I was friends with Greg when he was when I was 12. he would come down to

visit his cousin Marcel and he would be our dungeon master and we'd play D D together and uh I met Ray through Greg and Ray and I were both really kind of stubborn people we both think we got the world we have a world view and I think we respect each other but at the same time there's always a friction with us so I like to see Ray when he when I run into him but it's not in the same relaxing casual hangout that Greg is makes sense I'm curious if you guys would do anything or you know maybe advice you give to Founders nowadays um I don't know if you guys for example are all equal co-founders at the time what did you end up doing such that you know the working relationship stays strong and you can actually ship these games did you guys just end up doing very different things and contribute it differently at the company or um yeah I love to get a better sense for that off the start it was equal and and the the work wasn't equal but at the same time Greg and renog brought money to the

equation and they paid the bills for a while yeah so at this at the same time there was this recognition that there's value there advice I would give is just keep it simple and always have an understanding that there's going to be problems you're going to have to sort stuff out and if you try to come up with the optimal Fair allocation of everything it's never gonna work all you got to do is understand that hey we're trying to do something bigger than us and I don't have to win if we all win I I get enough that's good enough for me and and ultimately that's what it comes down to like getting a company off the ground and surviving your first couple years you're gonna have to sacrifice so many things right Deeds don't worry about your business partners just lock your stuff down and say okay this is how it is and if if one of us has to back out or life forces us to move on let's just figure out a fair way to deal with it and and ultimately I mean everybody wanted it to succeed so everybody just kind of whenever it came down to an issue we

just talk it out negotiate it out that's good yeah I think yeah contentment being a big part of uh things not always being optimal or perfect it's never optimal yeah there's always if if things were perfect you'd you'd have an unlimited budget an unlimited timeline to make the thing and then you'd never make it so everything has to live under constraints so the the key thing is just let's commit to doing something great together because together we're going to accomplish something so much bigger than we can each individually accomplish and let's just try to be Equitable about it let's not spend a ton of effort fighting about it and trying to rebalance it all the time let's just understand sometimes some people are going to have a massive contribution and other times they're going to Coast right and it's just how it goes like I look at my role at the company right now it's like I can go weeks in my mind adding zero value to my company like I'm doing things and I'm doing things that I think are important but realistically I'm adding zero value

but then in an hour I can have a call that's that's millions of dollars in value to the company so what's important is that I try to understand when I get those million dollar 10 million dollar opportunities and how to maximize those and in the rest of the time that I'm just not breaking things do you have any uh I guess like systems that you've used maybe for how to prioritize like what's valuable or what might be you know what might be the best use of your time ultimately like so my business partner beam dog Cameron is now retired so it's just me now okay but my previous way of doing it was to argue with Cam so if I argued with Cam and if we were screaming at each other about something it was probably important so I should probably worry about that if we talked about it and he didn't seem to care maybe it wasn't that important but realistically now I look at it and I'm like What's the impact of what I'm what I'm considering right now is this

impacting us for the next couple days is this impacting us for the next week next month next year is this impacting us three years out how many people is it touching because the more people it touches and the longer out the impact is probably the more concerned I should be about it and at some point I mean there's there's a level of trust you just have to have with people you're like we're going to agree on something and then I'm going to walk away and I'm going to leave you to running it like one of our our big principles here is agency through accountability you prove you can take ownership on things you get all the agency in the world to run with it but if you screw that up you're accountable for it and because of that like when things go wrong people are directly responsible for it they're like yeah this is on me I got it I will fix this and it works really well and and I mean early in my career I was I was hard like I would micromanage I would ride things I would obsess about little details and it was

inconsistent I find just as I get older and a little less in the trenches and on top of everybody I'm allowing people a lot more ownership backing off a lot more but at the same time I think my role has changed more from I'm less a direct video game director and now I think I'm a lot more almost like a game player Advocate I'm thinking about the player and the player experience and how they're perceiving the game because the the Big Challenge in video games is it's really easy to make the perfect game for you right and then you hope that there's a market that represents you or a big enough chunk of the market that's similar to your tastes and the truth is that's probably not accurate you're probably into some pretty weird little Voodoo that doesn't make sense to anybody else and when they when they run into it it's either going to be really weird and unappealing to them or it'll be the most awesome thing ever and most of the time it's just kind of weird so I think it's really important to just

understand that you aren't necessarily the people who will be playing your games and you need to have a couple different perspectives that you can look at your games from and and understand what those users are going to feel when they're playing it and what kind of experiences you want them to have you've been in the games industry for quite a while so you've seen probably lots of cultural shifts in in terms of like how games get made you kind of mentioned a little bit about how you used to be maybe much more intense or maybe there's a micromanaging aspect of things versus agency which is the core kind of value of your company now what are your thoughts on sort of like the the crunch culture that was at one point you know and still is to some extent pretty prevalent versus like you know it's so hard because games are this creative industry you can always do one you can always make it better how do you balance team building crunch like some of these things in terms of culturally how those have shifted yeah it's I've been in the industry for for a

really long time and I got to see a lot a lot of the wrong way of doing things like early days of BioWare we were underdogs and we knew it we're like we're a bunch of young punk kids in Edmonton Alberta trying to make video games and we know that video games are made in Japan or maybe there's some video games that get made somewhere in California but nobody in Alberta Canada makes video games right so we had pretty big imposter syndrome but at the same time we were determined to make up for it by working super hard it's just like what was our what was our master plan we're going to outwork everybody from Japan and everybody from LA and everybody from everywhere else that's making video games we're just gonna put in more hours and we just threw ourselves at it and and we were early in the in the industry and we're like what's the best way for me to become an expert at what I do well I'll just throw hours because the more hours I throw at it the more confidence I'll Build The Better skills I'll build and

and ultimately the better I should be able to perform at my role and we also got really lucky in terms of Technology transitions so shattered steel came along right when uh windows or sorry dos went from 16-bit to 32-bit extended dos so Doom had just come out it was a totally different tool set in a way a different way of making games that you had to jump into and learn so all these experience companies that knew the right way to make video games well their Right Way had just changed so we were able to jump in and catch up fairly quickly because we were learning new tech at the same time they had to learn the new tech and then Baldur's Gate was Windows 95. Baldur's Gate was actually one of the first Native Windows 95 application video games so we were able to hire a bunch of Windows 3-1 programmers to come into the company and work on on a Windows app whereas most game developers were coming from a Dos background and that's that's where their expertise was so really we got lucky on on two Tech

transitions we got lucky on Fergus and interplay having the the d d license in Fergus suggesting bringing it in we got lucky that Chris borders was down there and brought the best vo Talent into the game and we worked our butts off and and it was honestly it wasn't a really healthy culture because it was really guilt motivated we were like that guy's working really hard like crazy heart right he actually slept under his desk so if I'm not sleeping over my desk I'm failing him I need to step my game up I need to be sleeping under my desk and it it got into a really it was an unhealthy space and honestly early years of BioWare that was just the culture like up until never winter nights that was kind of how we did things and even past Neverwinter into Star Wars knight steel Republic Jade Empire Mass Effect it started to back off a little bit we were a little more focused with the crunch but there was

still a hard hard crunch like never Wonder nights I put in so I was working on the game for five years before we shipped it year three and four I was working six days a week roughly 12 hours a day year five I was working seven days a week at least 12 hours a day and in the last two weeks I jacked it up to I put 212 hours in in two weeks and we got the game it shipped at like three in the morning I went home and I slept for for two days straight and then I woke up and I came back to the office and we sent half the team home for two weeks kept the other half at work working on a patch for a day one patch then after two weeks we swapped them out everybody else came back the other guys went home finished up patch one and then I took a I took like a it was like a three-month sabbatical because I at that point I hadn't taken holidays for the entire five years of the project and I just didn't even turn on a computer I took apart my race car and rebuilt it in my

garage and I I guess like I totally starting the new studio how are you I mean so much of that I'm sure like contributed to getting the job done and like I guess starting a new studio how are you like what's the competitive Advantage I guess or how is it a different motivation or like how are you guys thinking about how you win without that kind of pattern I guess I I think the answer is you just be smart just work smart because BioWare we just literally threw through hours at it yeah we didn't know the right way to do some something we didn't know the smart way to do something we didn't spend enough time planning and thinking about it we just dove into the work and just started going and going hard and at the same time we didn't have any training or or background and we were just making stuff up so a lot of the time we would take three or four passes at something and be wrong all four all times right before we finally found the right way to do it yeah whereas having

years and years of experience and and now with with engine technology that's standardized like oh you're going to grab on real oh how's the right what's the right way to do this in unreal well there's kind of here's the golden path that all the other games use and then we could do our own no no no we're gonna do the golden path if other people have done it then that code has been tested it's been debugged it's performant we're just going to run the golden path so really when we set up beamdog that was kind of one of our guidelines is we don't just go and engineer things from scratch we roll in and we follow the golden path what the engine does really well lean into it what the engine doesn't do well ask ourselves do we need it does it need to be in the game and in many cases it doesn't so rather than throwing just hours at stuff we really tried to try to spend the time and become competent at it before we started rolling into it and the other

thing is like we don't Outlaw crunch time but we we strongly discourage it it's like look if you if you're if you absolutely believe you can do something amazing by throwing some extra hours at this and you really want to do it you can do it but we're not going to ask you as a manager to come in and throw a ton of overtime at something we've got a couple people who are like that's what they like to do they like to throw some overtime at things and we've got other people who are like I'm not into it at all and we're like that's good because this is a it's a marathon we're gonna make a game and we're not just gonna all be able to collapse and and and rest for months we're gonna have to keep going we're gonna have to do another game after that so this is It's a marathon now yeah so get this game done and have enough of humanity left that you're ready to start working on another one and I I think just by being smarter about it and by being more conservative about what we're trying to make and a little more clear on on alignment and

agreement on what we're making we can avoid those kind of scenarios that resonates a lot with me I mean I this is part of the reason why I want to invest in games right now there's it feels like that golden age where you do have more and more standardized tools and really the game developers can focus on just making the best games and really focusing on the design elements and the narratives Etc without having to build their own you know back-end or or server server software or God forbid build their own game engine which uh which thankfully you know that's that's no longer common these days yeah I I analyzed it a little while ago I've been on five Technologies from scratch in my career and that's like starting over every time okay let's write file open okay let's open a game file okay let's get something rendering to the screen five times and I'm not doing a sixth there's no way there's it's just it doesn't make sense

anymore like how can you compete against think about how many hundreds of millions of dollars of testing and development have gone into the Unreal Engine yeah not only from epic but all the companies that are working with it all the companies that are paying testers to test it find bugs repair repair bugs you can't compete with that yeah yeah no that's that's that's very smart I I like read a a a novel uh recently called tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow which is a it's a novel about game development but it was written as if like the the studio started in the 90s and a lot of it was like if you don't build your own game engine you can't make a great game like you can't you can't get the feel that you want um that's like a a principle in it like uh that that you hear from the the the hardcore kind of makers I mean every game engine is designed to do a specific game and to me what empowers an engine isn't what you do it's what you don't do so like Quake back or Doom back in the

day use this concept of bsp trees binary space partitioning trees and it was like is this on the left or the right side right side okay I don't care about the left okay is it front or back okay it's in front and every time you made that that cut it wasn't about the one quarter that was in the cut it was about the three quarters that was out of the cut and every time you do that that's how you make video games you just it's all about what you're not doing that's how you make it perform it you do less and To Me video games are are about that and every video game engine is kind of optimized to do a specific series of things so for us to take well on Mass Effect to take unreal which is the shooter optimized engine and make an RPG out of it we had to build this whole rpg-ish side of okay conversation systems inventory systems all of this depth that wasn't there and it was a it was a lot of work but we didn't have to worry about rendering we didn't have to worry

about ground Collision systems pathfinding systems all of the there's like so much work that was just done that we could just roll ahead from speaking about that you spent a lot of time on sort of RPGs throughout your career what is it about that game genre that that you love I really like the intersection of of story and character with gameplay I really like how those can come together and and how they serve each other because I find if I'm playing just a game with no storyline yeah I kind of stale out and I I get I I just don't I'm not that interested in progress after a while whereas if I'm I'm playing a game that's that's too canned it's the story is too pre-written for me and I feel like I'm just running down a tunnel clicking the button when I'm supposed to and the the hand of the designer is in there messing with me I also find it disconcerting it just feels manufactured to me whereas if I have some agency in a space I'm

being driven forward by a story and I have a certain number of game mechanics to engage with I find that a really compelling combination yeah I love that before we move on to your new studio and you're in your new game what was the favorite game for you at BioWare that you worked on and and sort of why I liked different things about different games so I love shattered steel because it was it was an action it was giant robot slugging it out and the weapons were really up in your face so it felt very visceral and it felt very for 1996 97 it felt pretty amazing and I really liked that action and that involvement with and the fact that we kind of prototyped into like team missions and and escort missions and we we did a lot of amazing things I thought that game was pretty awesome for its time Neverwinter Nights I spent five years working on that I still love the idea of the democratization of game

design the idea of getting users to build their own content because when you build content for a video game you're always kind of sampling it down you're like hey we could make this amazing thing that would appeal to like 10 people or we can make this slightly less amazing and make it appeal to a hundred thousand so rather than going super Niche and super deep we got to go a little broader whereas user created content you can go super deep and if you're like I'm totally into this dark elf role-playing Adventure that's all about you living your role in a society like there's you and 20 other people who think that's amazing and everybody else in the world is like I totally don't want to play that dude and and to me that's the awesome thing about end user created content and and the democratization of game design is you can create that micro game that is the most amazing game for you and your 10 friends and I love that idea you guys remembering Pioneers on all that modding I was gonna say I mean yeah people kept making mods for that

game years and years and years after yeah they're still making mods today yeah we still got uh a number of schools using it and like when when with beam dog we got the rights to it we enhanced editions Neverwinter Nights we've expanded the tool set we've expanded the data we've expanded the capabilities of what it can do people are just continuing to roll forward on it when I look back I'm like man I should have made it a little more open a little more accessible because then I could have broadened it out and I could have made it something even bigger yet ultimately I don't think I'm done with that space there's something I want to do there yet and there's a lot of like uh new sort of DnD like games coming out and how do you feel about the the most recent one DND announcement someone who's kind of built some pretty genre defining stuff in the space I guess it comes down to what you're trying to accomplish and to me like DND one I'm not I don't exactly understand what they're going for there it's it's

feels like they might not know what to do with that either right like Baldur's Gate was a story and a campaign and it was One Singular Adventure Neverwinter Nights was to be an adventure pack with multiple adventures in it and then users could add on to it and create their own Adventures so it comes down to really what you're trying to accomplish and what the goal is and I haven't dug into D D1 enough to to really say exactly what it is and what it isn't and ultimately I mean until it ships nobody else will know just the the internal Dev team on it I'm sure they've got smart people I'm sure they're thinking about about the hard things and and having good discussions about it it'll just be a question of seeing what comes out and if you're building a platform it's kind of like a game engine a game engine has absolutely zero value until you ship a hit game with it if you come out with a an RPG platform until you ship a great RPG story and campaign it's got zero value

yeah so you need to hit that it needs to be that that hook that brings people in that's what that's what people keep telling me Trent on uh speaking to the new studio what was the inspiration for uh for for giving it another another go with beam dog how did that come about like how did you obviously picked a business partner and took it a certain approach so there's a there's a bunch of aspects there um so Cameron and I had been talking for years about doing something together like cam actually left BioWare pretty early on right after Baldur's Gate two um he had been the lead programmer on mdk2 and then he went worked at uh he's worked throughout the industry he did a bunch of time at Namco USA and then he came back to Canada and he was actually running his own Indie studio and he was just in the process of shutting that down when I left BioWare and I was like yo cam remember how we

said we were going to do something someday well today's that day and we're doing it and I mean for me I look back at it and I'm like I had this plan I'm like okay I'm done at BioWare because under under EA I can't succeed I can't do the things I'm really good at I'm trying to lead this new exciting game idea and and I'm getting I'm getting undercut because on a fundamental level Electronic Arts is a monetization company or at least it was in that era they would buy something that was successful and they would they would sequel it and they would do more of it and every time they try to develop a new product they would kill it before it kind of broke through and showed the promise so I was leading a new product and it the writing was on the wall they were going to kill it only actually worse they were going to make it into a Facebook game and I was like dude if you want to make Facebook game I'm not your guy if you want to make some amazing IP and an amazing new game I'm your guy I'm not your Facebook guy

so now they're going to force you to make a web 3 game [Laughter] and uh I I called up Cam and I'm like it's time we're gonna do something and I mean there's there's multiple ways to look at it I mean from a cynical side of it at the point I was like in my 30s and I had a whole bunch of experience making video games and I was completely unqualified to do much of anything else and video game salaries are actually pretty good especially for people who had as much experience as I had so I'm like I'm pretty single faceted so I'm kind of a one-trick pony so I better stick with that one trick right I think the other side of it was I looked at the financials of EA and I'm like man imagine if we could fire all the senior VPS if we could just get rid of those guys and not have to pay their salaries how much money would be flowing to us and that's essentially what we did by starting our own company we just fired

all the Senior Management out of out of the company we're like we're just going to build the content without the without the overhead and ultimately like we walked into a pretty I think a little more business aware than a lot of people do when they first set up a video games to do it we're like okay we need money like we need cash flow how do we get cash flow well we know how to make video games and we've built ourselves a little store we can sell video games directly to Consumers so why don't we get the rights to some old video games that we worked on and they don't work right now and you can't buy them anywhere so let's let's bring them back and let's sell those to to a new audience and so I went in I spent about a year finally putting the deal together for Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 2 icewind Dale planescape torment and then Neverwinter Knights as well who even had the rights to that at that point yeah that was that was a combination of Atari and Wizards of the Coast okay wizard of

the coast was owned by Hasbro at that point okay and then we went a year with Atari and then the rights transferred back to Hasbro and we've just been dealing with Hasbro wizard of the coast since then okay did you raise any Capital then or was it all just through deal with weather the coast we actually never raised Capital it was all self-financed no capital from Wizards of the Coast no capital from any external party it was all all bootstrapping and God bootstrapping is horrible it's just so hard go raise money from Kevin duh there were so many moments where like I so we were working on Baldur's Gate one enhanced Edition and I had a 750 000 line of credit with the bank that I was personally backing wow and uh we're 700 000 into it and I'm like hey guys uh I need some more money yeah like how much

more money do you need I was like I need another 250. take me up to a million there were a lot of conversations back and forth about the risk and how it was so we we bumped it up with the bank to a million dollars we ran it up to nine hundred and seventy thousand dollars wow and then we shipped Baldur's Gate enhanced Edition and inside a month we were we were in the in the black wow that's incredible that was a a high pucker Factor moment you're like I hope this works I really hope this works yeah we definitely tell our Founders not to personally guarantee anything or it's a mortgage remarkage your house but the good thing is I mean I had I had been at BioWare and I got to participate in the sale so I wasn't exactly starving right right and in the bank at that point they liked me a fair amount so they were willing to do that I mean if we had lost lost a million dollars it

wouldn't have been a life ending thing it might have led to a divorce it might have led to me being homeless for a while but uh it wasn't going to end me out right but uh and there were probably two or three moments like that along the along the way with beam dog not to the same exposure extent in terms of personal guarantees but definitely way up there in terms of like stress levels yeah and and like you'd go one week we're like on top of the world everything's great the next week you're like it's going down it's going down hard and it's going to spray bodies for miles and then the next week you're like okay we got a plan we're going to work around that okay we're good again there's just so much up and down it was just exhausting yeah that's the that's the Journey of every every founder to some extent lots of high highs and low lows back and forth yeah I think Mark Anderson said it best is like that's like the craziest highs and the lowest lows and coffee and lack of sleep just accentuate the effects of both totally

did you get started on myth Force before the uh acquisition yes we'd uh we'd been building myth Force quite a while before the acquisition is actually uh one of the points that when we showed the game off people were like oh wow yeah that's interesting yeah well it's it catches eyes yeah it stands out nothing looks like that yeah yeah what's really fun was uh so we were at Pax and we were at um Gamescom in Germany and people my my crew that was working the booth were sending me a video and they they called it the attention line because there was a line when people crossed it their eyes caught the booth and they walked towards the booth and they were just filming and you'd be like dick and people would just hit turn hit turn it was great at catching eyes so what we're really focused on now is we've got all this potential all this interest because the visuals stand out and it it just it looks so different now we've got to build that that long-term compulsion

to keep playing this game yeah what drives me to jump in and have a great experience but why do I come back how far are you guys out um we're looking at probably next year okay we've got a pretty good core interloop the action plays well the game plays well we just need to get all those extra layers and all those extra systems hooked up and supporting each other because right now inner Loop's good and there is no real Outer Loop and I need that outer loop to really support and accentuate the inner loop yeah that makes sense do you mind actually sharing a little bit about the acquisition and kind of what motivated you on that front and you know what was that like obviously very I assume quite different than back in the day was Bower EA or even elevation Partners yeah elevation Partners was a lot of fun because it was really exciting it was like a new thing it was like Hey this private Equity Firm that's got Bono from U2 involved it's gonna say Bono yes they want to buy a

couple video game companies and they want to make this Uber studio and it'll be amazing and it sounded like hey we were we weren't selling out to the man we were doing some amazing new thing and it was exciting it was it was a really big thing to walk into and then two years later when we got sold to Electronic Arts everybody was kind of like okay this has been hard under a private Equity company just because our costs are are increasing year over year our costs are just going up this was a I think it was like Xbox 360 had just come out and it literally doubled our budgets because every bit of content cost twice as much right so suddenly boom we're spending twice as much money to make the same game so then we were like okay Electronic Arts that's going to solve all of our funding issues only electronic cars bought us and they're like whoa whoa whoa we're not going to spend a ton of money on you guys you guys just need to keep doing what you're doing and and make more of the product that you make you need to be more effective and and they had kind of this concept I called it the EA butter knife

it's like hey we're down a little bit so we're just going to cut heads across the company we're just gonna spread the pain out with a butter knife five percent head count cut across the board and at this point like BioWare had never laid anybody off there had been no layoffs there had been some people who got performanced out but no layoffs and so there's it was just a massive cultural Wars like how do we handle this as a company so it was It was kind of shocking um for this time around I mean we went into it pretty eyes open basically Cameron and I about four years ago we made the decision it's like hey we got a happy little lifestyle business we got like 24 24 staff we're making millions of dollars a year from the Legacy product from enhanced Edition products this is a good lifestyle business this is a profitable company let's grow it and let's let's go aggressive and we'll try to do something big because if we can take a big swing at it chances are we

hit we're gonna get some massive more upside so we started growing the company we grew the studio to like 70 people inside about 18 months and at that point the government the Alberta Government had come in with a tax credit uh 25 tax credit so it really helped us kind of commit and invest and then a year later they killed it which was brutal to us because we had made these plans with it modeled in and uh part of that decision was hey we're going to build it and we're going to sell it so at that point we had kind of made the mental commitment that we just need to find the right partner in the right circumstance and we started rolling down the path and about two years ago Cam and I got together and we're like it's time like the industry's booming right now covid has bumped sales hard there's a lot of acquisition happening we got myth Force looking pretty sexy we can demo it to people it shows the potential we got good Legacy revenue from the Legacy products it's a good time for us and so we we connected

up with Ignacio Capital with Shum and uh we started talking to other companies and we talked to people in the web 3 space we talked to people in China we talked to a lot of people and ultimately we found a really like I had known uh Ted and Michael from Aspire for years and they'd worked on some of the same like enhanced Edition of BioWare stuff with the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic so we had kind of shared trauma there so that was really allowed us to kind of bond over it and I saw in them a culture that was really similar to our culture and then in embracer I saw this kind of concept of we're not here to come in and tell you guys how to do it we actually don't know how to make games that's your job our job is to pull the ship together and open up the opportunities so that all of our Studios can maximize those opportunities and ultimately I that I found that really appealing and so did Cameron from a a future of the company's standpoint and finding the best Landings for all of our

employees and it made a ton of sense for us that's awesome certainly some some great timing in foresight yeah looking looking back now I'm like wow that was one of those moments where I made the richest decision at the right time check one for me it's it's hard to do that especially when things are looking like they're all good like to say now is a good time there's some moments I mean when the deal was looking like it might go sideways and I was like we can do it on our own man we're good we're good midforce is going to be awesome in retrospect I'm like God damn I'm glad that I've been through totally I guess looking back maybe this is a sort of a a closing question because I know we're we're slightly over here um if you could go back to sort of the founding of beamdog or even you know earlier when it was the six of you with BioWare are there is there any kind of Keystone pieces of advice that you'd you'd give other Founders who are

looking to do the same thing I think one of the most important is is it's too easy to to cite passion and to say oh I love it I'm gonna do it you gotta be able to sustain it and it's it's not starting a company isn't a nine to five deal it's a 24 7 deal and it's a 24 7 until until either the day you you completely retire and walk away from the company or you die that's just how big that commitment is so you gotta you gotta you gotta balance things and you got to save some of yourself what I do is I've always had Hobbies I've always had a hobby that I engage with while I'm doing anything the hobby allows me to recharge it allows me to try new ideas and new things and learn things and I've always applied some of my learnings from hobbies to my game development job I bring in knowledge and Concepts and ideas from other places like I use

Knowledge from race cars and from building race cars in making RPGs it's not a direct it doesn't make a ton of sense but there's bits of knowledge that I've accumulated that make sense and that helped me arrive in a certain line of thinking uh the other thing would be always take care of your health because when you're going to the gym every day the world can just fall apart around you and you're kind of like yeah I got this if you're not going to the gym and you're crunching hard and if the world starts to crumble around you you just start to fall apart and if you there's something about just just physical activity that keeps centered keeps you keeps you really centered and complete as a human and without that kind of physical activity it's just so easy to fall apart so that would that would be kind of my my key advice is go into it knowing it's a huge commitment and keep the meat suit happy because the meat suit is is the only one you got

that's wonderful advice yeah yeah and you got your hobby that's almost like the the mental gym it's where you take a break mentally from all the stuff you're working on yeah and I'm I'm a curious fellow I'm like hmm what is that how hard could that possibly be and the answer is usually oh it's really hard but I get into it I start learning about it I was like I want to race sports cars so I race sports cars I want to build a sports car to race I I've worked on building one hey remote control airplanes those are kind of cool oh blacksmithing I want to learn about that so I just go through hobbies and I'm always kind of learning new things and I'm always exploring it just keeps me kind of grounded well Trent I really appreciate uh you walking through the story and giving us this this advice and I learned a lot myself so thank you so much thank you so much I think I think we covered about a tenth of everything I know I just like we're an hour in I'm like I could probably go for another couple hours here absolutely unfortunately yes I could probably go for a couple more hours

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