Interview: BioWare Founder Ray Muzyka

Check out our detailed chat with Mr BioWare to learn about the impressive story of how the unique developer came to be, and why he would never have sold the the "old" EA.

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Kikizo: It seems obvious to me then that a lot of the success of BioWare comes from that original passion for telling stories...

Muzyka: Right, and it's still our passion. Our mission is to deliver the best stories in games in the world, and our vision is really genuine emotion, though those stories and characters and the relationships you have with those characters in the game.

Jade Empire

Kikizo: But at the same time it was still a huge personal risk, getting all the money off of credit cards and so on... it must say a lot about the confidence you had at the time?

Muzyka: It was incredibly risky. But it was more about naivety!

Kikizo: Haha. How old were you?

Muzyka: We'll I'm 39 now, and that was fifteen years ago, so mid twenties I guess. I had just come out of med school, practised for a few years as an emergency medicine doc, and continued to do that for a little bit afterwards, which kind of game me the flexibility of working when and as you wanted which was nice. But we went back and got business degrees later on, and realised that a lot of this stuff we thought we had invented was actually common business knowledge for years, and in some cases hundreds of years. But you know, it was good to approach things from first principles I guess, and we still try to approach things that way really. We don't pretend to understand what we talk about, we always look at things from a clean perspective and try and approach them in a very humble way, knowing that we're not going to know everything about everything, but that's OK, we've got good people and we work on it together and solve it.

Kikizo: I suppose it is key to any business is delegating and allowing the talent to help make things work.

Muzyka: Yes, and trust. A key part of delegation and the success of delegation is really trusting and empowering the people you work with to be successful, and giving them responsibility and autonomy within a defined space so that they own it, and can really be successful with that.

Kikizo: And apart from the creative satisfaction that your people will get when you launch a successful title, how else do you think it is important to reward people who work for you in an organisation like this one?

Muzyka: Well, we've always believed in employee equity, so optioning and so on, so we gave a fair amount of equity out, and the first and second transactions we had for the company were really, really beneficial to the employees, so the private equity transaction with Elevation Partners and the sale to Electronic Arts we just completed this year, and a lot of people at BioWare did really well out of that. So that was a big part of it. Bonusing - making sure they're incented based on the success of their products and the success of their teams and their individual efforts was and still is important for us. That's more the financial side of it, but there is also the satisfaction - I think that's even more important in some ways - the creative satisfaction in making things which you believe in and which you're passionate about and proud of. That you can take your wife or your girlfriend or partner into a store and show them something that you worked on and say, hey, I made that. And we're proud of that. I mean, that is the biggest thrill for me, is actually going into a store and being able to look at a product that BioWare released and hear people say, "that's a really good game" and then see people buying it - that's a really, really fun. And I think that's a creative satisfaction in the final product, but there's also steps along the way that people want that satisfaction so that they can feel that they're actually making a difference - that their individual contributors within a large team and yet they're still making a difference. They're not cogs in an assembly line; they're all creative people that actually are important.

Kikizo: That's good, and it's important to note, that it's not exactly a big secret that there are a lot of companies who aren't aligned to those ideals and those philosophies, particularly in games development, and in fact EA has been accused of that in the past, a few years ago. So it's interesting now that EA owns BioWare...

Muzyka: We wouldn't have joined EA a few years ago. Honestly. I mean one of the reasons why we joined was because we saw change brewing that we liked a lot. We saw the change in leadership occurring, the change in labels...

Kikizo: Just to clarify, when did this acquisition finalise?

Muzyka: January this year. We started in the Fall or the Summer last year...

Kikizo: So this is a John Riccitiello backed thing basically.

Muzyka: Yes, yes. And we know John well. We worked for him for three years, he was our boss at BioWare Pandemic and I got to really know and respect him a lot, so I trust him.

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