Matthew Ford

ENG 100

The origin of Blizzard Entertainment is a strange tale indeed. The company may never have been started if it weren’t for a bit of strange luck, though some might call it fate. Blizzard cofounders Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime were sitting next to each other in a computer class at UCLA. Adham needed to get up to get a printout so he went to the X-Windows terminal, typed LOCK, and entered a password. While Adham was gone, the system timed out, so Morhaime entered a new password and waited for Adham to come back, knowing he would not be able to log on. Adham returned with the printout and proceeded to type in his password, and much to Morhaime’s surprise it worked! Amazed, Morhaime asked Adham how he had done that. Adham simply replied that he had typed in his password. Morhaime, still quite confused, asked Adham what his password was. Obviously Adham was not willing to give up this information, but Morhaime was beginning to realize what must have happened. He asked Adham "It was JOE, wasn't it?" Amazingly, they had both chosen the same password. Adham and Morhaime became good friends after this event. In February 1991 Adham and Morhaime founded a game software company: Silicon & Synapse. Frank Pearce, a friend of Adham’s, joined them and a few months later so did Pat Wyatt, another of Adham’s friends. (GameSpot, screen 3)

Silicon & Synapse programmed several games for many different platforms and companies. The first of these was Interplay’s RPM Racing for the Super Nintendo. They also made The Lost Vikings, Justice League Task Force, and Rock & Roll Racing. In 1993 Videogames Magazine named them developer of the year. They had established themselves as a company, but success was yet to come. They were making little or no profit, and a slight problem arose with the company’s name. According to Morhaime: "No one knew what a synapse was!" They briefly considered changing to Chaos Studios until they found out a New York company owned the name and wouldn’t sell for less than $100,000. They also considered Ogre Studios, but they eventually settled on Blizzard, which Adham picked out of a dictionary. The first game released under their new name was Interplay’s Blackthorne for the PC. Blizzard continued to grow and became more attractive to publishers. In early 1994 Davidson & Associates bought out Blizzard and made them their entertainment division. Being bought out is usually a bad thing for game developers, but Davidson was an educational software company and gave Blizzard complete autonomy.

Blizzard’s first game under Davidson was Warcraft, a real-time strategy game (RTS). For those who don’t know, a real-time (as opposed to turn-based) strategy game is one in which players engage in mock warfare. This involves the collection of resources, construction of military bases, production of combat units, and, of course, fighting. It didn’t have much of a story and was very similar to Westwood Studios’ popular Dune II, but the gameplay was good. Evidence of Warcraft’s lack of story is given by Bill Roper who offered to do the voice-over for a demo: "I showed up expecting to be given a script, but instead they pull up a screen of a castle and say, 'OK, here's the castle and there's this big war between orcs and humans.'" (GameSpot, screen 5) When it was released before Thanksgiving 1994 it quickly became very popular and put Blizzard on the maps. While showing a demo of Warcraft at the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Adham met Condor Entertainment, made up of Max and Erich Schaefer, and Dave Brevik. Condor was a San Francisco based company that had done the Sega Genesis version of Justice League Task Force; Silicon & Synapse did the SNES version.

After Warcraft’s release many developers started seeking Blizzard out. Despite the increasing number of employees seeking employment, Blizzard has held to its strict hiring policy. That is: you must play games to work at Blizzard. Bill Roper who headed the recruiting said, "It's really surprising to see how many people make games but don't play them." At Blizzard they believe it’s important for everyone to know how their work is going to fit into the game. New employees also had to fit in with the "college-chum atmosphere" at Blizzard. Stieg Hedlund, a former Blizzard employee, said, "There have been Christmas parties at other companies where I've worked, and you can't wait to leave because you can't stand each other. It wasn't like that at Blizzard." (GameSpot, screen 6)

Meanwhile, Condor had been making several console games and wanted to do a PC game, since that market was more stable at the time. They came up with the idea of doing turn-based DOS action-RPG (Role-Playing Game) based on an old UNIX ASCII game called Moria. They named it Diablo. This type of games is based on a simple "kill/reward" idea. Players control a character that fights demons and goes on quests. As you progress through the game your character gains experience and becomes more powerful. Unfortunately, a radical idea from a company with no PC experience is a tough thing to sell to publishers. "We were three jokers with a radical idea for a game. People literally laughed at us because we had no PC experience and wanted to do an RPG," said Dave Brevik. After being turned down by ten major publishers, Brevik decided to call his friend Adham at Blizzard to see if they would be interested in publishing their idea. They found they had similar ideas and Blizzard signed Condor to do Diablo for $300, 000. The only disagreement was that Blizzard wanted to move the game into real-time. "We fought that transition for a long time. The amount of time we argued about it was totally ridiculous, considering it only took us about three hours to mock the game up in real time," said Schaefer. After making the transition, Condor agreed that it had been a good idea. The press also started to get more interested in Diablo. (GameSpot, screen 7)

After Warcraft’s success Blizzard decided to do a sequel, while Condor worked on Diablo. Warcraft II continued the original’s story line and added many new features. The game also had a lot of replayability and was very well balanced. As Morhaime says: "Even to this day, people are arguing whether the orcs or humans are better." (GameSpot, screen 8) Blizzard finished Warcraft II in only ten months and released it in December 1995. It faired even better than its predecessor did, becoming Blizzard’s first game to sell a million units, a distinction very few games could claim. Blizzard, however, was just getting started.

With Warcraft II’s success Blizzard went to check on Condor and how Diablo was coming along. Blizzard was so impressed with Condor’s work that they convinced Davidson to buy Condor and make it part of Blizzard. Despite better offers from other companies Condor decided to join Blizzard and became Blizzard North in March 1996. "Acclaim actually offered us more money, but we felt more comfortable with Blizzard," said Brevik.

With Diablo scheduled for a 1996 release, Blizzard decided that they didn’t want to continue with the Warcraft series immediately. According to Roper, "Everyone just wanted to do a sci-fi game." (GameSpot, screen 9) Blizzard started working on Starcraft, an RTS game similar to Warcraft. At E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 1996 Blizzard debuted Starcraft and also announced that Diablo would come with a free Internet gaming service called Battle.net. While Diablo’s popularity was continuing to grow, Starcraft was not well received. Blizzard realized they could not leave Starcraft the way it was if they wanted to continue their policy of releasing only the best games, but they did not want to cancel it. Blizzard decided that they would finish Starcraft, even if it was going to take them a long time.

Meanwhile, Blizzard North finished Diablo and released it just after Christmas in 1996. While missing the Christmas shopping season would be enough to kill the sales on most games, it didn’t seem to affect Diablo at all. Diablo became Blizzard’s second game to sell a million copies, in a row nonetheless. Blizzard has never been known for meeting its release dates. Quite the opposite, in fact, they are known for missing them. "The iterative polish phase sets our games apart and makes them magical. The final 10 percent of polish is truly the difference between a good and a great game," claims Morhaime. This one of the things which is believed to make Blizzard games so great, though how they do it is a mystery to all. According to George Broussard, "Listen, publishers suck. Most games are shipped too early.... This is done because a publisher needs to ship in a certain quarter and the developer can't argue because they need the publisher's money. There have been many games released lately that could have been an order of magnitude better with two months of simple polish." (GameSpot, screen 11) No one has yet to determine exactly how Blizzard manages to avoid their publisher’s pressure.

In 1997 Blizzard North began work on Diablo II. Their publishers wanted it done in 8 months for the Christmas season, but Blizzard said it would take at least two years. Blizzard finally released Starcraft in early 1998. It immediately took the number one spot on sales charts and sold well over a million copies, including a million in South Korea alone. Blizzard was also working on an adventure game called Warcraft Adventures. This game became one of the best examples of Blizzard’s policy to release only the best games when it was cancelled only a few months before it’s rumored release. For a while people were left wondering what Blizzard’s next game was going to be. Blizzard actually had to make an official announcement that they were not working on Starcraft 2. At London’s ECTS (European Computer Trade Show) Blizzard finally announced that it was developing Warcraft III, which they called a role-playing strategy game.

By this time Diablo II had been under development for over two years. Problems also arose with Warcraft III when Blizzard realized some of the role-playing elements they had wanted to include just wouldn’t work well with the game. The eventually decided to remove those elements and make it more of a traditional RTS game, though it still contains many role-playing elements. Diablo II missed its 1999 release date and went a good way into 200 as well. It was finally released in June 2000, but it had been worth the work and the wait. Diablo II sold a million copies in just two weeks, with 184,000 on the first day alone. According to PC Data, during its first week in stores Diablo II earned "a record 39% of the total dollar amount spent on games." (Blizzard) The Director of Mechandising for Babbages, Bob McKenzie, said, "The rate at which Diablo II is selling is unprecedented. In a matter of days, the game has sold more copies than most PC products sell in their entire product cycle. This product is the Harry Potter of computer games." (Blizzard)

Blizzard has now released four great games in a row. Each one debuting at number one and selling over a million copies in just a short period of time. Warcraft II, Diablo, and Starcraft have all sold over two million copies today and have won numerous awards including Game of the Year 1995, 1996, and 1997, respectively. Diablo II has sold over three million copies in the five months since its release. Blizzard has produced expansion sets for both Warcraft II and Starcraft, and is currently working on one for Diablo II. Starcraft’s expansion set, Brood War, is "widely acclaimed as a new standard for add-on disks and was named best expansion of 1998." (Blizzard) Blizzard is still dedicated to releasing nothing less than the best games. As Roper claims, "We don't get rated on the game-developer scale, but we do get rated on the Blizzard scale. We are in some ways victims of our own success." (GameSpot, screen 18)

Thesis Statement: Blizzard Entertainment has created a unique position for itself in the computer software industry by having a flawless record as far as quality of title & monetary success.