Baldur's Gate - Inside the making of Baldur's Gate

Eurogamer looked back at the making of Baldur's Gate.

Meanwhile, over in the art department, the diversity of Baldur's Gate made every day a challenge. "Sometimes we'd be figuring out how to render in a true isometric perspective - 3D content was just emerging back then - or assembling geo and painting backgrounds," remembers Andersen. "Or we were figuring out advanced water shader techniques, using dithered textures or lighting the scenes for day/night transitions. It really varied quite a bit." But it wasn't just the in-game graphics that defined the look of the RPG; the character portraits and other art, painted by Mike Sass, also helped make Baldur's Gate a beautiful and involving experience. And for Andersen, it gave the chance for his wife to be immortalised forever in the BioWare classic. "She was initially pretty cool with the idea of modelling for the portrait [of Imoen]," he recalls. "And it wasn't until years later when the two of us were at a trade show that a fan recognised her. Then, she understood the importance of it, and how deep nerd-blood runs!"

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What baffles me about Baldur's Gate and many other games is how the original art assets were lost. Nobody on the original project thought it was worth keeping the paintings?

I'm thinking its more complicated than that

Either the originals got sold (there's a good market for comic book illustrations) or caught up in the legal battles between Interplay, Infogrames, Bioware and WotC.

Interplay at the time was holding Neverwinter Nights hostage and stopped paying royalties on BG2. Part of the settlement to relinquish the rights for Atari to publish NWN was that Interplay kept the existing assets for NWN (the original story and some of the tilesets never made it to the game), so I wouldn't be surprised they kept the IE games as well (which they actually owned - Bioware was the contractor).

I remember Interplay had a fire sale where they sold off a lot of assets like IWD and I think Obsidian picked a few of them up.

Originally Posted by screeg
Nobody on the original project thought it was worth keeping the paintings?

3D renders you mean. Even if they saved them i bet they were probably rendered at a relatively low resolution, perhaps max of what the game was capable of.

There should be some things that were not 3D renders? I mean, portraits, concept arts, that kind of stuff.

I was thinking of all the backgrounds. But yes the portraits are hand painted and of course there must be concept art. Odd thing to throw away, agree.. wouldn't surprise me if someone who shouldn't perhaps have it is sitting on it!

It was one of the best RPG's ever made. Why keep going back on that, period. That time has come and gone and there is no words can ever make it come back.

Being best at something has to mean something.