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'

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' 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.