Greg Zeschuk Interview

The Los Angeles Times online edition is offering an interview with Greg Zeschuk, known by most of our readers as one of the two BioWare co-founders, the doctors, who left the company last September.

Here’s a snip:

(Console stuff has become really boring,) he says, adding that it’s indie publishers these days who are doing the (progressive stuff.) (The big guys,) he says, (are doing these really boring same ol’, same ol’ games,) he says, referring, broadly, to action titles and games of the (Call of Duty) ilk.

As far as games he finds (inspiring,) Zeschuk mentions (Spaceteam,) created by former BioWare employee Henry Smith. It’s a mobile game, designed for iOS, and it requires at least two players.

Players must be in the same room, as they’ll need to shout instructions at each other as they try to prolong the inevitable explosion of a ship. It’s fast, simple and not at all similar to the massively complex heavily layered games of BioWare, be it the (Mass Effect) series or its online multiplayer game (Star Wars: The Old Republic.)

Yet when announcing in the fall that he was leaving the company he cofounded in the mid-’90s with Ray Muzyka, Zeschuk wrote that he was losing his passion for games. Zeschuk was in Los Angeles last week to answer some questions. Did his inspiration wane after selling BioWare to Electronic Arts in 2007? Could he have been happy in a more entrepreneurial role with a smaller company?

(I could have simplified,) he says. (Maybe that would have helped. I just felt like I didn’t have any mojo. It’s hard to explain. It had been 20 years, and it had been 20 years of continually striving and struggling. Not in a bad way, but I was tired. I wanted a break.)