Game development often lasts for years. And in that stretch of time, studios have their fair share of ups and downs. From humorous game bugs to stress-relieving antics, Game Informer peers behind the curtain of game development. In this Tidbits column, BioWare shares the stories behind the development of Dragon Age: Origins.

Dragon Age had ‘developer achievements’ for all kinds of things, such as successfully crashing the game.

12,212 of those Achievements were awarded to developers during production of the game.

Dragon Age contains 742,000 words of dialogue, and 202,000 words of non-conversational text that were translated into eight languages besides English – Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Four of those other languages have their own voiceover, whereas the other four subtitle the English VO.

QA analyst Bruce Venne played 1,957.55 hours of Dragon Age PC in 5,352 games.

At the end of each month, an Achievement called ‘The Bruce’ would be awarded to people who played more hours than Bruce Venne that month. It was awarded only once.

BioWare president Ray Muzyka got 134 developer Achievements across 385 hours of play PC and console builds of Dragon Age: Origins before release. He crashed 35 times and filed 311 bugs.

Ray Muzyka likes to play mages. Mike Laidlaw prefers dual-wielding rogues.

The in-game animation department used the same stunt actors that were used in the movie 300 for motion capture. In-game animators ‘larped’ with wooden sticks for video reference.

Words of dialogue in Dragon Age: Origins: 790,856 (The average novel has 80,000 – 100,000 words.)

Lines of character dialogue: 68,260 (The average movie has 3,000 lines of dialogue.)

Lelianna's Song was composed and recorded within 24 hours.

The Ogre was once affectionately known as Fluffy.

The Dragon Age team goes through 1,400 cups of espresso-sized coffees in a single week!

The orchestrated pieces in Dragon Age: Origins were performed by the Seattle North West Sinfonia.

The 44-piece orchestra was recorded twice and melded together to form, in essence, an 88-piece orchestra.

Chris Bleth was the woodwind soloist who has played on numerous Hollywood blockbusters like Up, Star Trek, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Fast and the Furious.

The grey warden used in all of the promo trailers was created by the senior product manager and bears a striking resemblance to him.

A full-scale dwarven tavern and an 8-foot-tall dragon were created for rabid trade show enthusiasts.

144 voice actors contributed to the English version of Dragon Age: Origins.

1,015,977 PC games played in the last 2.5 years of development totaling 8,145 days of runtime.

4,212 different crashes captured and fixed in the last year of development.

QA Analyst Mark Ramsden filed the most bugs (2,699) for a single user.

459 people at Bioware/EA played the game on 582 different computers in the last year before release.

234 different area layouts were used for or during the production of the game.

Number of unique icons created: approximately 1,400.

Number of mini-maps (including expansions): 182.

The first creatures in the Dragon Age engine were the Ogre and the Human Male with Medium Armor.

There are over 1,600 inventory items in the Dragon Age universe so far.

There are over 3,200 creature/NPC appearances in the Dragon Age universe so far.

There are almost 1,600 faces in the Dragon Age universe so far.

There are over 20,000 models in the Dragon Age universe so far.

There are over 5,500 animations in the Dragon Age universe so far.

There are about 3,000 cutscenes in the Dragon Age universe so far.

Storm of the century was a result of maverick VFX lead breaking content lock permission.

There were nearly 3,000 individual props made for the game.

The lighting data for the game took our render farm two weeks to calculate.

54.1 hours of audio when played back-to-back.

Number of actors in game: 1,535 (Head morphs)

Number of items: 1,463 .

Number of playable areas: 221.

Number of unique creatures: 209.

Complete pass on the game took over 90 hours by an experienced QA lead.

Record QA speed playthough was over 12 hours using cheats on skipping all dialogue.

One of our development staff creates chain mail from scratch.

For other Tidbits entries, click the desired game name: Mass Effect 2, Shadow Complex, Borderlands, DJ Hero, Scribblenauts, LEGO Indiana Jones 2, Prototype, Fallout 3, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Ghostbusters, Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, Overlord II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Red Faction: Guerrilla