BioWare-Brent Year 7 (Fall 2005 – Summer 2006)

This is the seventh of ten posts, one for each year that I worked for BioWare.

BOOM!
Returning to work, sleep deprived but very pleased to have spent so much time with my new son, I was immediately tackled by thirty angry ogres.

Or that is what it seemed like.

What really happened was internal blah-blah-blah that meant the company would save money, I would work more hours for a bit, and a lot of progress that had been made would be unmade. The changes were necessary, in business sense but not to me, in logic-land.

Anyways we worked past that and…

KABOOOM!
BioWare and Pandemic became part of private equity fund Elevation Partners. I figured I was pretty in-the-know in the company but this came as a huge surprise. There were no immediate shakeups so business continued as usual but it was a bit of a wake up call that BioWare maybe wouldn’t always be the cute and cuddly company it had once been. It was growing. And with that growth would come some pain.

I cashed my check and got back to work and started seeing some of the benefits of that growth as new team members joined and I met a huge whack of new, clever, and interesting people.

Later, I think (its weird that I have no notes on this!) several Biowarians moved out to start working on Star Wars: The Old Republic in Austin. James Ohlen was one of those departing and as he was the lead designer on Dragon Age, that left a bit of a void. I was offered the position and accepted, the second time I would lead the design team on a role-playing game for BioWare.

And other than that there’s not much else to say! It took a while for me to transition into my new role and relearn all the skills necessary to grow and encourage a team. I saw a lot of designers pass through Dragon Age, receiving some training and then moving onto other projects.

So that’s that, year 7 in a nutshell.

Next entry I promise to reveal a crazy secret.

Previous: BioWare-Brent Year 6