He remembers people, what they have said to him, what he learned from them, the mistakes, the regrets and the joy. He remembers much about his time at BioWare, the fabled role-playing game developer that has been twisted and turned this way and that over the years. The introduction sounds more like informing the audience an old friend has arrived for dinner, rather than an explanation for why they should listen to him speak.Īnd Laidlaw is a stickler for detail. Laidlaw's introduction is by a man who sounds very much like a friend, or at least someone he has known for a while. He is a confident speaker - I had expected that after studying his performance during his GDC talk on team and project management to a packed audience of video game storytellers - and, clearly, he is well-known within the video game writers circle. I get why they do not, why developers are hesitant to say too much, because when they do, the fans sometimes come calling - as they have at Mike Laidlaw at points during his career. He is willing to talk about things, which might sound like an odd thing to mention, but in this business, it is a rare joy indeed to speak to people who are willing to talk about things.
Laidlaw is instantly affable, entertaining and interesting. We're upstairs at Zero Zero, a pizza and pasta place just a 10-minute walk from the begging mothers and the babies they cradle who sit on the sidewalks that connect the buildings that host GDC, the world's largest gathering of video game developers, a place thousands come to share, to learn, to network, and, occasionally - although I sense through gritted teeth - talk to press people such as me. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived me because - yay! - I got out." Mike Laidlaw, ex-creative director of the Dragon Age franchise at BioWare. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario.
He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago.
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