Baldur’s Gate Retrospective Interview

As far as I’m concerned, there can never be too many Baldur’s Gate retrospectives, and as such I advise you to check out this Hollywood Reporter article that celebrates the 21st anniversary since Baldur’s Gate’s release by talking to a number of people involved in the game’s development, including Cameron Tofer, Trent Oster, Mark Meer, and R.A. Salvatore.

A few paragraphs to get you started:

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

With an idea in mind, the developers got to work. But since the team was relatively small and inexperienced, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) was initially reluctant to give the team the freedom to use established characters.

Tofer: The thing that sticks out in my mind was when James and the writing team wanted to obviously include some big name D&D characters, and TSR just not having any trust. Just saying no, you guys can’t use those awesome D&D characters like Drizzt, et cetera. “Can we do this?” “No, you can’t do that.” We’re like, aww. But then over time, I mean, they opened up once they kind of saw the potential of everything. We were able to demonstrate it was a solid game and we kind of knew what we were doing. Initially, I wouldn’t have put a lot of stake in us either.

When [designer] James [Ohlen] found out he couldn’t use any of the fancy new characters, he pulled out his D&D campaign and added all those characters in. I think that was pretty smart move on his part. It’s stuff that we did in high school prior to BioWare. James was the Dungeon Master, and he kept all the character sheets and all that stuff. So when it was time, he said, there you go, here’s all the characters. They’re [Baldur’s Gate’s cast] basically faithful to his campaign. All their attitudes, and how they were written, it was basically how they were. The funny thing is, we’re terrible role players, so they’re just our attitudes anyway.

Oster: It’s one of the things that makes those characters feel real and interesting and gives them depth; the fact that they were played for years, pen and paper, by James and Cameron and all the original gang there.