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October 9 - October 24, 2024
Later, Pat Wyatt wound up talking to two artists who had worked on that impressive demo of Dominion back at E3 1996—one of the catalysts for StarCraft’s reboot—and could only laugh when he heard the truth. The “demo” that had made Blizzard’s staff feel inadequate was actually pre-rendered footage of the game designed so the team could pretend they were playing it. Behind the scenes, the game wasn’t functioning at all.
At the end of 1997, South Korea had just one hundred PC bangs; by 2000, there were 15,000.
StarCraft essentially became the national sport of South Korea, where it sold 4.5 million copies—in a country with less than 50 million people.
On April 15, 1998, just two weeks after the release of StarCraft, a company called Cendant announced that it was restating its earnings for the previous year due to what its president called “potential accounting irregularities.” Cendant’s stock plummeted 46 percent, wiping away roughly $14 billion in shareholder value.
“He said, ‘Bob, you need to get off that board. There’s something going on,’” recalled Davidson. “So we left.” Later in 1997, CUC agreed to merge with a hotel company called Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS) to form a new conglomerate called Cendant. The merger came with all sorts of weird quirks, like an arrangement for HFS boss Henry Silverman and CUC boss Walter Forbes to swap places as CEO after two years. Most alarmingly, Forbes kept his company’s financials opaque,
By 2003, rumors were floating around that a struggling Vivendi was looking to sell its video game division. In January, press reported that Microsoft, which had just entered the gaming industry with its Xbox console, was close to buying Blizzard and the rest of Vivendi’s game studios. The rumors were false—although Microsoft had considered an acquisition, nothing was imminent—but they still shocked Blizzard North’s bosses, who were upset to hear the news at the same time as the public.
On Monday, June 30, Blizzard North employees filed into work and noticed something bizarre: a contingent of executives from Blizzard South, including Adham and Morhaime, was in their office and meeting with the four bosses in one of the conference rooms. Brevik then gathered the staff and explained what had happened: Vivendi had accepted their resignations, effective immediately. David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, and Bill Roper were all gone.
In 2003
Most of the characters and units in Warcraft and StarCraft were men, and when women did show up in Blizzard games, they were frequently sexualized, like Diablo’s bare-breasted succubi. “You get the fans you go after,” said Mary Kenney, author of the book Gamer Girls: 25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry
In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 1995, that percentage had plunged to nearly 25 percent. An NPR report found that this decline corresponded with the rise of personal computers, which were marketed largely to boys,
Bauserman, who considered herself to be a casual gamer, said she wouldn’t have wanted to work for a company like Blizzard, but even if she’d had the desire, it might not have been an option. Since the beginning, Blizzard’s ethos had been to hire only hardcore gamers, and its interview process reflected that, probing prospective developers on everything from their favorite Street Fighter character to which creatures inhabited the darkness in Zork. The goal was to ensure that all of Blizzard’s employees played video games,
So that's why their games played do well! Now imagine the Blizzard full of people why don't play games, even the ones they make.
Metzen, one of the company’s biggest partiers, helped drive much of the chaos and testosterone. He was loud, charismatic, and easy to talk to, which made him popular among Blizzard’s staff. People loved soaking in his comic book stories and were impressed by his work envisioning iconic characters like Sarah Kerrigan and Grom Hellscream. But his partying could also lead to office mishaps. During an office party the night that Blizzard finished StarCraft, he and artist Scott Abeyta were drinking heavily and began to push one another. “We started fucking around like people do,” Abeyta said.
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Blizzard became my circle,” said Josh Kurtz, a designer. “It became my support structure, my family. I did everything with them.” It became clear—especially in later years, as the company expanded—that the best way to succeed at Blizzard was to befriend the top employees. Cigarette breaks with executives. Barbecues at the founders’ houses. And, as the money began rolling in, trips to Vegas strip clubs with the boys.
“You’d hear the stories: ‘Oh, so and so is in trouble because he maxed out all his credit cards at the strip club.’ It was absolutely that kind of culture.”
Melissa Edwards, who worked in business development, said she never felt uncomfortable working at the company. “Yes, it was a bro culture,” she said, “but I had a great time in that culture.” Edwards enjoyed the work—testing games, facilitating logistics, bringing in family and friends on New Year’s Day to stuff envelopes full of StarCraft beta discs—and she loved her colleagues. Edwards also dated several Blizzard coworkers—a trend that was growing common thanks to the demanding workload.
People who tried to play EverQuest on their own didn’t typically have a great time. GameSpot reviewer Greg Kasavin wrote that “the combat may be a little boring, the manual may be horrible, the quest system half-baked, and the game not without its small share of miscellaneous bugs.” But, he added, find another player and “all of a sudden EverQuest stands to become one of the most memorable gaming experiences you’ve ever had.”
Greg Kasavin later went on to work with Supergiant on Bastion.
Christine Brownell was one of four women in Blizzard’s QA testing pit when she’d started a year earlier, and she immediately took the opportunity to apply to be a quest designer. She impressed the bosses when, in response to a job listing that asked applicants to write five quests, she instead wrote five entire quest chains, each comprising missions across Azeroth. By February 2004, she was part of the burgeoning quest team,
Morhaime had told Blizzard’s staff that they were hoping to hit half a million World of Warcraft subscribers within the first year, matching the whopping success of EverQuest in one-fifth the time. Adham had been even more optimistic, telling prospective business partners before he left that he thought they could reach one million people in a year. Both had been way off. “Nobody really anticipated how big it was going to be,” said Stuart Massie, a tester. “Or how it was going to change Blizzard.” World of Warcraft sold more than 240,000 copies in a day, breaking every computer game sales
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By March, World of Warcraft had 1.5 million subscribers. Morhaime and Sams told the operations department to stop shipping new boxes to stores because they didn’t have the capacity to support more players. For Blizzard’s leaders, the game’s resounding success proved to be even more stressful than development had been:
As an experiment, they put up an advertisement on the World of Warcraft launcher so players would see it as they logged in to the game. A day later, tickets were sold out. On October 28, 2005, thousands of people gathered at the Anaheim Convention Center to attend the first BlizzCon.
“This is kind of a slap in the face,” Beardslee recalled saying. “‘You could potentially lose a lot of people over this.’ Frank’s response was: ‘You should be happy you work for Blizzard. You should be doing it out of pride, not for money.’
Surprising nobody who understood supply and demand.
That spring, Beardslee and nine other World of Warcraft developers resigned to form Carbine Studios, a new video game company funded by NCSoft. More would follow in the coming months and years, and unlike Fugitive, Carbine had longevity.
They developed Wildstar, released in 2014. The studio and game shut down in 2018.
Alen Lapidis, an artist on World of Warcraft, was called into a meeting with the company’s human resources representatives and told he was being let go. “It was really shocking, considering the success of the game and how it had become such a force,” Lapidis said. Maxx Marshall, who had left Blizzard for Fugitive in 1999 and then returned in 2003 to help finish World of Warcraft, was surprised when he and several other veterans lost their jobs. “There was a feeling about the layoffs that all they were doing was firing people for money,” Marshall said. His hypothesis seemed to be proven true a
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This may be counterintuitive, but makes total sense in the "buy low, sell high" kind of way.
“We were making a lot of money,” said Vivendi Games boss Bruce Hack. “It was a beautiful thing.
Oh Eric!
Robert Huebner and his friends used to call LucasArts, the venerable video game company started by Star Wars creator George Lucas, “Lucas University.” It was a great place to learn how to make games, but the pay was subpar, so most people quit after a couple of years.
Over the next decade, Blizzard would repeat the same stock answer whenever asked about StarCraft: Ghost—that it wasn’t canceled, just postponed—perhaps because they were still holding out hope that it might come back one day. But that would never happen. The unfathomable success of World of Warcraft had transformed the company in irrevocable ways, and it was only getting started.
After a year of negotiations, they struck a deal: Vivendi would buy a controlling stake in Activision. Then, Vivendi would merge its video game division into Activision to create a new publicly traded company called Activision Blizzard. Morhaime gathered Blizzard’s employees to announce the news. When they asked what this merger would mean for them, he responded with a few solemn words. Blizzard was doing well. World of Warcraft was printing more money than the US Treasury. Nobody at Vivendi or Activision wanted to do anything that might stop the golden goose from laying eggs. Nothing was
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Robert A. Kotick liked to go by Bobby, a childlike nickname that belied adult sensibilities. In truth, he came out of the womb ready to generate revenue for shareholders.
“It was made very clear to us: If it did not have an opportunity to be a billion-dollar-plus franchise, don’t consider it,” said Dusty Welch, a top Activision executive. Later, Kotick would be vilified for this approach and criticized by players for running franchises into the ground. One comment to investors, which Kotick later said was meant to be a joke, would hang over him for the rest of his career. “The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged-goods folks into Activision about ten years ago,” he said, “was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
He befriended Hollywood moguls such as Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and would later give an unexpectedly compelling performance as a baseball team owner in the movie Moneyball. “I fundamentally believe it was a core driver of Bobby, wanting to be a player in the Hollywood space,” said Dusty Welch.
Morhaime and his team whittled down the company’s philosophy to eight core values, each represented with a short and catchy phrase: 1. Gameplay First 2. Commit to Quality 3. Play Nice; Play Fair 4. Embrace Your Inner Geek 5. Learn & Grow 6. Every Voice Matters 7. Think Globally 8. Lead Responsibly
There were other complicating factors: Wood had a reputation for being abrasive and a history of being rude to colleagues, and some friends undoubtedly cut ties with him because he left his wife while she was pregnant. But the couple also believed that Wood’s career at Blizzard was derailed because of their relationship choices.
When Morhaime called Kotick to tell him that Blizzard planned to delay the next StarCraft a year, he was shocked when the new boss asked how he planned to make up for the missing revenue.
A Ty co proponujesz? Czy to poważna propozycja?
Possibly that's how the Celestial Steed was born.
The executives commissioned the consulting firm McKinsey to conduct some research, and the recommendation helped solidify their perspective: They should charge a licensing fee for TV broadcasts. It was too late for StarCraft, but they would not allow South Korea to have free rein with StarCraft II
Consulting firm McKinsey.
For the next three years, Blizzard and KeSPA held a series of on-and-off negotiations that grew increasingly contentious, peaking during one meeting where, according to several attendees, a representative for KeSPA looked at Blizzard’s Paul Sams and declared: “We’re FIFA. You guys are just the fucking soccer ball.”
The second controversial decision revolved around trading. For Diablo II, Blizzard North had created an in-game bartering system, but there was no standardized economy, and cheats were rampant. To try to solve these problems, players created third-party marketplaces, but the scams only grew more pervasive, and Blizzard couldn’t control or stop them. Diablo III would offer an official solution: an auction house in which players could buy and sell items on Battle.net, which the company could keep secure. To put it together, Rob Pardo called upon his strategic initiatives department, a group of
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“Real money became a necessary part,” said Coho. The company would take a small fee from each transaction, which “was not meant to be a moneymaker for Blizzard,” Coho said. “It was just meant to solve the problem of trading.”
“You’re going to get really good at making Diablo,” Pardo told him, “right around the time you ship Diablo
Experienced computer programmers often said the hardest part of writing code wasn’t figuring out solutions—it was identifying the problems.
Then, during an all-hands meeting shortly before Reaper of Souls came out, they got news that vacuumed the energy out of the team: Diablo III would not get a second expansion. No matter what happened with Reaper of Souls, they were done. “Getting your next project canceled is scary,” said Yang.
Morhaime and the rest of Blizzard’s C-suite saw Diablo III as a failure—a game that had damaged the brand—and several of the executives didn’t think Reaper of Souls would be good enough to turn it around. Morhaime was also feeling pressure from Bobby Kotick and his lieutenants at Activision, who were concerned that the developers in Irvine were trying to work on too many projects at once. And then there was the demonic elephant in the room: Despite its big sales numbers, Diablo III wasn’t equipped to deliver long-term revenue. People only bought the game once, which made it difficult for
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began conceptualizing the next Diablo game, which was code-named Hades and would diverge from the series in several important ways: The camera would be over-the-shoulder rather than isometric; the combat would be punchier, akin to the Batman: Arkham series; and the game would have permadeath—
Morhaime and other Blizzard executives would later privately admit that canceling Diablo III’s second expansion before Reaper of Souls even came out had been a tactical error. Reaper of Souls was a win for the company, and to leadership, it had helped make up for the original game’s failures, but they lost momentum shortly afterward.
The first thing people always noticed about Ben Brode was his laugh, a resounding guffaw that would spread like a virus to anyone in its vicinity. Brode was tall, with a closet full of plaid shirts
Gonzalez asked Brode if he wanted to join him at Blizzard, which he of course did. But Gonzalez was just a tester with no sway or power, so the two of them devised a scheme: Gonzalez, who worked the night shift, would order pizzas from Brode’s joint late in the evening. Brode would take the deliveries and use them as an excuse to schmooze with the testing crew. “I went over there a couple times,” he said. “When they opened a position, I applied for it. And I’d already met the hiring manager.” In March 2003, Brode started working as a tester at Blizzard Entertainment.
“I was still working night crew, and eventually if you wanted a leadership position you had to move to day crew, but I really loved the crew I was with,” he said. “So I got them to agree to put me on the Brode shift. I was the only person on the Brode shift: 1:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.”
When an entry-level design position opened on the StarCraft II team, Brode immediately applied. They told him that there were only two available positions and that unfortunately, he was the third-best applicant.
By the start of 2009, Blizzard had five development units. There was Team 1, working on StarCraft. Team 2 was in charge of World of Warcraft. Team 3 was on Diablo. Team 4 was developing the unannounced Titan project, and now Team 5 was forming to work on the digital Warcraft card game.
Then came some bad news: In the fall of 2009, right after Blizzard delayed StarCraft II, Pardo called Team 5 for a meeting and told them that Battle.net needed extra help, so most of the team would be moving over there for the immediate future. Again it seemed like Team 5 was doomed, and Brode wondered if their little dream of making a digital Warcraft card game was over—but the Battle.net hiatus turned out to be the best thing that could have possibly happened to the project.
With their team gone, Brode and Dodds spent the next nine months drawing numbers and pictures on paper cards. Every day, they had a group of willing guinea pigs in Schwab and the others who wanted a break from Battle.net drudgery. Brode was a fountain of experimental new ideas, while Dodds was adept at figuring out what was the most fun. “To me that was some of the magic,” said Dodds. “Brode going, ‘What about this?’ and me trying to stop the flood and get us to a place where we were both excited.”
Now reunited, Team 5 began building Hearthstone. One of their goals was to make every action in the game feel tactile, as if the player was actually sliding cards across the screen, while another was to design abilities that would only be possible in a computer game.
