Alberta Inventors and Inventions - Dr. Ray Muzyka & Dr. Greg Zeschuk

Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk were well on their way to becoming medical doctors when the pair discovered they had similar tastes in both science and recreational activities. Fans of computer games and animation since childhood, the pair got their first taste of game design with educational software created for the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Alberta. While they graduated in 1992 as medical doctors intent on fashioning careers as medical software designers, they invested their medical earnings into BioWare Corp., a company they founded in 1995. The company’s first game, Shattered Steel, released in 1996, sold 170,000 copies. By 2000, Muzyka and Zeschuk pulled themselves out of the hospital for good, and moved to the rumpus room.

BioWare Corp. was founded with Muzyka and Zeschuk sharing the CEO duties as a three-employee shop in 1995. A decade later, more than 230 staff work for the company, developing story-driven games for players around the world, in an industry estimated by PricewaterhouseCoopers to be worth $36 billion USD annually by 2006. BioWare’s cut of that action is $20 million, from a toy box of games already selling in the 12 million unit range.

After the release of Baldur’s Gate and its sequels resulted in sales of 4 million copies, the company’s reputation and stock as a creator of strongly plotted role-playing fantasy games only rose.

"BioWare helped revitalize the entire genre of role-playing games," Gamespot.com executive editor Greg Kasavin told Maclean’s Magazine writers Christopher Shulgan and Melanie Collinson.