// PC GAMER — GAMING
Mark Darrah, co-director of Dragon Age: Origins, has played Riven for 3 minutes and Factorio for 832 hours: 'If you want to know what kind of programmer someone would be, have them play Factorio'
The BioWare veteran guides us through the games on his PC.
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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"
Mark Darrah isn't much for reminiscing about games he played in his childhood, but he does recall being struck by his first encounter with Command & Conquer in his late teens: "The thing that probably affected me for the longest, the most deeply, was that you could do storytelling for real," Darrah says. "It had cinematic storytelling, at least for the time [and] I think the original Command & Conquer had a branching storyline."
Two years after C&C's release, Darrah joined BioWare as a programmer, a role he'd perform for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. But Darrah is best known as the executive producer of the Dragon Age series, as well as being co-director of Dragon Age: Origins and the director of Dragon Age 2.
In 2021, Darrah departed BioWare after 23 years at the studio. Today, he runs a game design consultancy business and moonlights as a YouTuber, sharing his development memories and lessons on his channel: "I work with someone who now works at a college teaching game development, and they wonder why I give away so much information for free," he says.
Darrah took a break from sharing his wisdom as we delved into the deep roads of his Steam library, where we picked through ancient factories, (briefly) pored over obscure conundrums, and stumbled upon lost civilizations.
I play Factorio with my son. He likes Factorio a lot. That's what I was playing mostly for the summer. [We were playing] the new expansion pack—I guess it's not new anymore. I think it's called Space Age.
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. I'm a programmer who will keep it working, but also there's going to be a lot of binder twine and duct tape holding the thing together, and definitely you can see that in my Factorio bases.
I've played Factorio since before Inquisition shipped, so more than 12 years. It was one of the games that when [my son] got old enough to play games, I showed him and I think he just has an engineering mind, and so that complexity, that problem set, he definitely approaches it in a different way than I do. He sits down, plans it out, figures out how it should be arranged, deconstructs the entire base then reconstructs it … [whereas] my base has always ended up being these amoeba monstrosities.