Mark Darrah spent 23 years at BioWare. He helped build Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. He co-directed Dragon Age: Origins, directed Dragon Age 2, and served as executive producer across the entire Dragon Age series. When he finally left in 2021, he could have spent his free time revisiting the classics — the formative texts, the games that shaped the medium.
He has 832 hours in Factorio instead. Three minutes in Riven.
The numbers come from a recent interview for PC Gamer’s Disk Cleanup series, where Darrah pulled up his Steam library and talked through what actually lives on his hard drive. The results are both revealing and, if you know anything about how programmers think, entirely predictable.
Why 832 Hours in a Factory Game Makes Perfect Sense
“If you want to know what kind of programmer someone would be, have them play Factorio for 25 hours and look at what their base looks like,” Darrah says.
He’s been playing Factorio since before Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped — which means at least 12 years of factory-building on and off. The current playthrough is with his son, working through the Space Age expansion. His self-assessment is characteristically honest: he’s a programmer who keeps things functional, but his bases are held together with “binder twine and duct tape.” The kind of codebase you’d recognise from any large studio project — technically operational, architecturally terrifying.
The idea that a game can accurately profile a programmer’s working style is a serious point disguised as a throwaway observation. Factorio demands that you design systems under resource constraints, balance competing priorities, and accept that your early decisions will haunt every expansion you try to build. Sound familiar?
What Else Lives on His PC
After Factorio, Darrah’s most-played titles are two versions of Fantasy Grounds — a virtual tabletop simulator — and Civilization 6. The tabletop tool makes sense for someone who now runs a game design consultancy and teaches development principles through his YouTube channel. Civ 6 fits a pattern of strategy games that reward long-form thinking over reaction time.
Riven, the notoriously demanding puzzle sequel to Myst, has been installed for a while. Darrah has played three minutes of it. He’s aware of the irony — this is a man who shipped games with hundreds of hours of content, who now cannot get past Riven’s opening.
“I have Riven installed. I didn’t play Riven before, and I have only put three minutes into Riven, so I still haven’t played Riven.” — Mark Darrah
The PC That Would Be Rebuilt Around One Game
When asked which game he’d reinstall first on a new PC, the answer is immediate: Factorio. Not Dragon Age: Origins. Not Baldur’s Gate. The game he co-directed isn’t even in the conversation — but the factory-building puzzle game he plays with his son is non-negotiable.
For a veteran who spent over two decades making story-driven RPGs with branching narratives and emotional weight, that preference says something about the difference between what you make professionally and what you reach for personally. The two don’t always overlap, and Darrah’s Steam library is honest about that gap.
His first major gaming memory is Command & Conquer — specifically the realisation that games could deliver genuine cinematic storytelling, including branching storylines. He joined BioWare two years after that game released. The line from “games can tell real stories” to 23 years making some of the most story-rich RPGs in the medium is remarkably direct.
The Dragon Age Champions Edition Darrah once envisioned may never happen, but the series’ creator has found a different kind of legacy — in a factory on an alien planet, built from binder twine and duct tape, one session at a time.
