How Dragon Age’s David Gaider joined the old-school role-playing game renaissance

David Gaider is now part of the renaissance.

The acclaimed writer for the blockbuster Dragon Age role-playing game series left EA-owned studio BioWare in January. It didn’t take long for him to return to his roots — the Infinity Engine, a development tool that helped create some of the greatest RPGs in gaming’s history, which include Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. These fantasy titles became so renowned that they established a genre of their own: isometric RPGs (named after their pseudo-top/down viewpoint). In February Gaider joined Beamdog, the Canadian studio that put out enhanced versions of the Baldur’s Gate games he worked on years ago, as its creative director.