BioWare is a Canadian video game company located in Edmonton, Alberta. It was started in 1994 by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. They partnered with an American publisher, Interplay Productions, to get money and tools for their first game, Shattered Steel, a mech simulation action game released in 1996. The game had some success, but BioWare’s second game, Baldur's Gate (1998), received very high praise from critics and set the direction for the company’s future. Baldur's Gate is a role-playing video game (RPG) based on Dungeons & Dragons. It sold more than two million copies and was the most successful Dungeons & Dragons game at that time. Two years later, BioWare released a highly praised sequel, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. Along with using BioWare’s game engines in RPGs like Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000), this helped the company become a leader in the computer RPG genre. By the early 2000s, Interplay was having financial problems, so BioWare worked with publisher Infogrames to release their next Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG, Neverwinter Nights (2002).

In the early 2000s, LucasArts, the company that owns Star Wars, asked BioWare to work on a Star Wars game. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released in 2003 for Microsoft’s Xbox console. Although it was not BioWare’s first console game, it helped the company enter the console market. Microsoft Game Studios wanted to partner with BioWare for exclusive console titles, such as Jade Empire (2005) and Mass Effect (2007). In March 2006, BioWare opened a new studio in Austin, Texas, to develop a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). In October 2007, American publisher Electronic Arts (EA) announced it had bought BioWare. Under EA, BioWare created the fantasy RPG series Dragon Age, continued making games in the science fiction RPG series Mass Effect, and opened a new studio in Montreal. They also returned to the Star Wars franchise with Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011), an MMORPG developed by the Austin studio.

In the early 2010s, EA rebranded several of its other studios under the BioWare name, including Mythic Entertainment and Victory Games, which became BioWare Mythic and BioWare Victory. New games from these studios were announced as BioWare projects, but they were later cancelled, and the studios closed. In September 2012, co-founders Muzyka and Zeschuk retired and left BioWare. After the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda in 2017, BioWare Montreal was merged with EA’s Motive Studios.