BIONIC MAN

Meet TRENT OSTER, the bloke who launched Neverwinter Nights twice

- Jeremy Peel

Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” co-founder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.”

It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, Pool of Radiance, had come out in the late ’80s and looked like Teletext. By 1995, the studio was instead playing Warcraft, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a Baldur’s Gate party member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall-breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard – a “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” or “Stop touching me!”

Warcraft is also why Baldur’s Gate has real-time combat. After Bioware’s game became a hit, almost all its competitors followed suit, and today Warcraft’s influence on the RPG is so pervasive as to be invisible.

“Warcraft was held up on an altar,” Oster says. “Worshipped for taking the concept of a multiplayer battle game and building the best possible interface you could do.”

Ironically, by the time Bioware had finished Baldur’s Gate, Oster hated its interface. He’d spent months testing the multiplayer component and grown tired of all the thick, thunking buttons. “It was so much grey stone on the screen, and it was so many clicks,” he says. “Unnecessary clicks build a rage in me that you cannot comprehend.”