Shortly after David Gaider was born, his parents bought a set of 1971 encyclopaedias to freeze-frame the world as it was when he entered it. He still remembers the maps they contained: his first atlas. But there are two moments in Gaider’s life when a gift of maps leads to adventure. In the second, he’s older, and already working at the job we know him best for. He was a lead writer at BioWare.
At the time, BioWare was embarking on a new adventure, creating two brand new games and the universes around them. One was to be science fiction and would become Mass Effect. One was fantasy and would become Dragon Age. That’s the game Gaider was working on – or rather, it was the world he would dream up.
Ideas had been swirling about what Dragon Age would be for a few months. The team knew it would be like D&D but would not be actual D&D, because BioWare was sick of licensed games at the time. They knew they were going for Tolkien rather than Conan or Diablo. “We definitely had at least some idea of the kind of RPG this was going to be,” Gaider tells me when in a video call. But BioWare didn’t have a world, and that’s where the second collection of maps comes in. One day, Gaider was handed a historical atlas of Europe and tasked with going away and coming up with a fantasy world for players to explore.
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