As a medical student in the 1990s, BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk told his future wife that if he could, he’d make video games for a living. But he knew better than to plan his life around it. “It was a pipe dream,” is how he put it back then.
The story of how the pipe dream became a reality—one that saw BioWare turn out blockbuster games including Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic before being sold to Electronic Arts along with another company for $860 million in 2007—is something of a folk legend in Edmonton, Alberta, where Zeschuk has spent most of his life.
Now Zeschuk, 53, is living another dream: He’s started a brewing company, Blind Enthusiasm, and he runs two microbreweries, the Market and the Monolith, along with a restaurant, Biera, which is considered one of the hottest eateries in his hometown.
Zeschuk always liked beer, and long before it was considered cool to visit craft breweries, he made a point of doing so whenever he was in the United States. However, it wasn’t until he began spending extended amounts of time at BioWare’s Austin, Texas, office in 2007 and 2008 that he developed a genuine passion for brewing as a business.
The craft beer scene in the Texas capital was exploding, and during the rare time Zeschuk wasn’t working on games, he checked out local breweries. A naturally curious person, he soon began interviewing brewers and posting the videos online as “The Beer Diaries.”
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Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features.In 2017, the PBS affiliate in Austin approached him about doing a bigger, international version of “The Beer Diaries.” Zeschuk had been retired from BioWare for five years by then; running a company had run him into the ground, especially the near-constant travel that kept him from his wife and children in Edmonton.
Still, he wasn’t ready to settle down. He was considering saying yes to PBS. Then his wife pointed out the obvious.
“You quit games because you were traveling so much, and now you want to do a show where you travel around the world and interview brewers?” she asked.
