The year is 2000, and the Millennium Bug panic has just waned. A 13-year-old kid sits in a McDonald’s with a bunch of friends. One of them is wearing a peculiar T-shirt with a logo that, to the kid’s eye, resembles a Native American war bonnet.
He asks the friend about it, and the answer will change the rest of his life: “It’s a game. You don’t know about it?” The game was Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn. The T-shirt, which came with the collector’s edition, sported the game’s logo: two mirrored heads, one in light, one in darkness (the exact meaning of the image has been debated for the past 26 years, with no conclusive answer).
I was the kid, of course. Soon after, I bought the game and, for the first time, immersed myself in the world of the Forgotten Realms, brought to life in digital form by BioWare. Almost three decades later, BioWare is gone.
The sad news made me reflect on how Baldur’s Gate 2 and the other computer RPGs they developed between the 1990s and the early 2000s marked the trajectory of my life. My first meeting with the fantasy genre took the shape of a woman reading The Lord of the Rings at a bus stand. I was way too young to fully understand or appreciate Tolkien, but the amazing cover illustrated by Italian artist Danilo Silva was enough to grab my attention.
Later, I randomly bought some Magic: The Gathering packs from a newsstand, developing a passion for the game that my wallet still struggles with today. Still, none of these happy accidents would have been enough, on their own, to steer me on the path that led to where I am today, making a living writing about Magic tournaments or the Council of Elrond scene in The Lord of the Rings. That’s entirely because of Baldur’s Gate 2.
In 2000, I had just started high school, and that’s a time when a young boy’s mind can be pulled in a lot of different directions. BioWare followed up an excellent game, Baldur’s Gate, with an incredible sequel, making sure that I fell forever in love with fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons, and RPGs. In retrospect, that game might also be responsible for my passion for writing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
