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A focus on quality that goes above and beyond what rivals are willing to do has served the company well. Blizzard has

been singularly successful with games like StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and many others

over the years. But behind the scenes, the company has canceled at least 10 major games. Most recently, in 2013 it

scuttled Titan, a massively multiplayer online game that was supposed to be the next step up from World of Warcraft.

But Blizzard changed with the times and reassigned its Titan team to the next-generation team shooter game,

Overwatch. And it has scored huge hits in modern game genres with its Heroes of the Storm multiplayer online battle

arena game and card-battler Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. All of these games have been designed to work well with

the growing trend of esports, or competitive gaming between professional players in matches that are broadcast to

spectators.

“Blizzard is perhaps the most amazing game studio ever,” said Mike Vorhaus. He has followed the game business for a

couple of decades, and he’s president of Magid Advisors, a game industry advisory service and market researcher.

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Above: Blizzard founders (left to right) Frank Pearce, Mike Morhaime, and Allen Adham.

Image Credit: Zimbio

Above: Mike Morhaime, cofounder of Chaos, which later became Blizzard.

Image Credit: Blizzard

Above: The early Blizzard team (then known as Silicon & Synapse), with Allen Adham in the striped shirt and Mike Morhaime on the far right.

Image Credit: Blizzard

The common thread in many of these games is that they generate rabid fans who lose themselves in the “immersive”

virtual worlds for months or years. Those fans hound and beg hound the company to come out with new material to

satiate their desire to further explore these worlds.

But as companies like Nintendo have learned, Blizzard publishes games only after years of crafting and testing. That’s

because the company has learned that you only get one shot at getting a game right. Even as it scaled up its teams to

hundreds of people and revenues soared into the billions, Blizzard didn’t change its development process, where its

developers have played, tested, and tweaked games repeatedly, even up to the point of launch.

“For its size, Blizzard has proven incredibly limber over the years,” said Joost van Dreunen, analyst at market research

�rm SuperData Research. “Even today it manages to outmaneuver younger and arguably more agile competitors. Its

Hearthstone has earned almost $500 million since launch, and continues to add new innovations to its game play. As the

company doubles down on esports and feature �lms, its next iteration may very well prove it to be among the top media

�rms in the market today, a far cry from its origins as a game maker.”

Our story is a walk through the history on how Blizzard became Blizzard.

In the beginning The company started as Silicon & Synapse

on February 8, 1991. Allen Adham, its main

instigator, learned coding by working as an

independent contractor. He made good

money from those summer jobs during his

high school and college years.

“Those were the good-old days, when one

or two people could design a game

themselves,” Adham said in an interview with me back in 1994. “Back then it was easy. You just had to have the desire. It

was like taking an idea and writing a book. Now it’s more like making a movie, requiring seven to eight people with

di�erent skills.”

When Adham was a freshman in high school, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Defender were the hot arcade games. He

would go the arcades and play like a fanatic.

“Then my brother and I talked my dad into buying us [a computer] so we could use it for school,” he said. “We used it to

play games. I liked playing the games so much that I started writing them.”

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Above: A Warcraft statue at Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, California. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

On graduating from UCLA in December 1990 with a computer science degree, Adham received $10,000 from his parents

to go to Europe. But he loved video games, and he wanted to make a living making them. He used the money instead to

start a video game company, Silicon & Synapse–the predecessor of Chaos. His buddy from UCLA, Mike Morhaime, also

had some money from his parents. But Morhaime had a job at disk drive maker Western Digital, and Adham had to

convince his friend to quit.

“Allen is a great sales guy,” Morhaime said of Adham. “I was working at Western Digital designing a little part of a chip,

and he did this sales job on me for a year to recruit me.”

Adham said, “My attitude was — and this is how I talked Mike and Frank into it — we’re young, we don’t have mortgages

or families. All we really have to lose is time. We could try it for a year. If takes o�, great. If it doesn’t, chalk it up to

experience. … I still believe to this day that attitude is everything.”

Adham was also friends with Frank Pearce, another recent grad who had a nice job at aerospace �rm Rockwell. Pearce and

Morhaime didn’t know each other. But their mutual friend convinced them they could make a company together. Adham

had the connections to other companies, and he got them work to do.

“I attribute everything that we have and that we built to Allen,” said Pearce, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Pearce did a lot of the coding, but

he also spent time serving as

receptionist, answering the door

and the phones in the 650 square-

foot o�ce. But he eventually grew

into one of Blizzard’s most senior

employees, guiding the

development of some huge

projects.

Morhaime, who is now CEO and

took over after Adham, left, also

gives great credit to Adham as the

instigator.

“All three of us were programmers,

but Allen was our visionary leader,

lead designer, and lead business

guy,” Morhaime said.

Morhaime, who eventually became Blizzard’s CEO after Adham left, was initially a support programmer, production lead,

and information technology and operations leader.

“If we needed computers, I’d go to Micro Center and order equipment,” he said. “We didn’t have an IT department. It was

just me.”

They worked on ports, or adapting an existing game to another platform. Morhaime recalls working on a port of Interplay

Productions’ The Lord of the Rings PC game to the Amiga platform. Pearce had to draw an image of the One Ring, since

that wasn’t part of the assets that they received from the publisher.

By doing that work, they came into contact with industry pioneer Brian Fargo, whose Interplay (one of gaming’s leading

publishers) was also based nearby in Orange County, California. Doing work for hire is the same way that small

independent developers get into the game business today. But it takes a lot of hustle, and there’s a lot of temptation to cut

corners for the sake of survival.

“Our �rst console game was RPM Racing, and we actually started and released that project in the same year we started

the company,” Morhaime said. “We managed to be on shelves by that holiday. That was also published by Interplay. The

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Above: The plaque on the statue at Blizzard’s headquarters shows the company’s focus on gamers.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

sequel to that, a few years later, was Rock ‘n Roll Racing. That was a much better game.”

RPM Racing made the company $40,000, and it appeared on the Super Nintendo game console.

The quality ethic One of the things that Adham

brought was a focus on quality.

Morhaime recalled that Adham

wouldn’t cave to di�erent

pressures to get a game done so it

could be on a magazine cover or the

company could keep to a schedule.

That ethic was put to the test early

on with The Lost Vikings, a game

that Silicon & Synapse built for

publisher Interplay. The team felt

that the work on the game was

pretty much done, and it had been

sent over to Fargo, Interplay’s

chief.

He made a lot of notes about the

game, including feedback such as

parts when the levels were too hard or the vikings looked too similar.

“My �rst reaction was ‘What? It’s �ne the way it is,'” Morhaime recalled. “Allen had a very di�erent attitude. He said,

‘He’s right. He’s right about all of this stu�. We took the time and addressed the issues.'”

Silicon & Synapse didn’t have the resources to �x the game, but Fargo freed up some money for Silicon & Synapse to go

back to work on the �xes.

“One of the things I fondly remember about Blizzard (Silicon and Synapse at the time) was how they would take a core

concept for the game and push it further than what the initial designs called for,” said Fargo, in an email to GamesBeat.

“Never would they accept the bare minimum as the bar. And they always accepted comments to improve without being

defensive but instead sought out the issues like a scientist would look for more test results.”

Based on Fargo’s feedback, Adham’s team whittled the number of characters in The Lost Vikings in the game from 50 to

three.

“We wound up with a much, much better game,” Morhaime said. “Going through that process, and seeing where the

game was before, and how much better it became with this additional e�ort, was a huge lesson to us. We got additional

feedback from people who weren’t inside the development team, but knew how to make games. That was incredibly

valuable. Addressing that feedback and going through an iterative process, especially toward the end of development,

could really move the meter on quality. We have done that on every game since.”

The company would go on to become Blizzard and release 28 games since the Lost Vikings. But the stakes behind those

games, and the scale of each e�ort, have become exponentially higher. For instance, the team that maintains World of

Warcraft, the biggest premium online game in the industry, has more than 250 developers. Compare that to the handful

that made the original Warcraft real-time strategy game.

That sense of taking pride in the work, meeting the highest quality expectations, and never shipping a game before it was

ready was instilled within Blizzard early on, Morhaime said. And it became part of the glue that held the culture and the

team together for 25 years, Morhaime said.

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Above: Blizzard’s original Warcraft, which debuted in 1994 and helped launch the company to major success.

Image Credit: Blizzard

“There are a bunch of key moments that reinforced how important quality was,” Morhaime said. “There’s always intense

pressure to ship. Early on, Allen was singularly focused on making sure that we �xed the issues with the product and

made as good a product as possible. If we knew there were problems, we had to �x them before it released. It wasn’t about

missing opportunities, because additional opportunities would always come.”

Making the �rst Warcraft When I was at the Los Angeles Times,

I interviewed Adham and Morhaime

when the company was going by the

name Chaos Studios. It was based in

Costa Mesa, California, and it had

just 19 employees at the time. They

had done successful games for

Interplay, and were ready to move

out on their own.

Adham came o� as a natural

salesman and leader. His team was

hardcore, and they wanted to make

games that they wanted to play

themselves. They weren’t fans of

movie-like titles with very little

interaction. The future of games,

Adham once told me, was “very

interactive, very sweaty-palmed,

action-oriented.”

That was appealing to gamers like Chris Metzen, a senior vice president of story and franchise development, who has

been at Blizzard for about 23 years. His father told him not to take the job, but Metzen rolled the dice on Blizzard, and it

panned out.

He joined it a couple of years after it started, and was employee No. 15. Hired as an animator, he had no formal training in

animation. But he jumped into it and did well. The company had become good at making and shipping games in a short

time. But it wasn’t necessarily that stable. During those early years, Adham did not take a salary or a vacation.

“At one point, the boss was paying us on his credit card,” Metzen remembered. “We were holding on, doing good work.

But the publishers we were looking for were in varying degrees of �nancial health.”

It wasn’t until a game called Dune II came out on the PC that the team really �gured out what it wanted to do. Developed

by Las Vegas rival Westwood Studios and published on the PC by Virgin Interactive, Dune II was the �rst of many games

in the “real-time strategy” genre. In the game, based on the Frank Herbert novel Dune, the opposing forces of House

Atreides and House Harkonnen fought for control of a resource, spice, on the desert planet of Arrakis. The player

controlled the Atreides forces, creating buildings, training troops, collecting spice, and launching attacks, all at the same

time. The computer-controlled enemy also did the same thing at the same time, so that the battles took place in real

time, with each side simultaneously pushing its forces into battle.

It was fast and furious gaming, the kind that Adham liked to call “sweaty palm” gameplay.

“We saw it and thought, ‘Wow, this is really cool!,” Morhaime recalled. “We got really enamored with real-time strategy.

Dune II was just a single-player game. We thought real-time strategy against another person would be really cool and so

much fun. We thought we would set it in a fantasy universe because we all loved fantasy.”

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Above: A plaque near the statue in Blizzard’s headquarters. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Patrick Wyatt, a Silicon & Synapse game designer, recalled how the team played Dune II exhaustively during lunch breaks

or after work. Morhaime remembered that the team really wanted to create multiplayer real-time battles. Work began on

what would later be called Warcraft.

“Development of the game began without any serious e�ort to plan the game design, evaluate the technical

requirements, build the schedule, or budget for the required sta�,” Wyatt wrote many years later. “Not even on a napkin.

Back at Blizzard we called this the ‘business plan du jour,’ which was or standard operating methodology.”

Wyatt was initially the sole developer on the project, and he was later joined by some artists.

“Each day I’d build upon the previous e�orts in organic fashion. Without schedule milestones or an external driver for

the project, I was in the enviable position of choosing which features to build next, which made me incredibly

motivated,” he wrote.

By early 1994, he had made enough progress to warrant additional help. He was joined by Morhaime and number of

others as the Warcraft project grew in importance.

Creative freedom under Davidson Silicon & Synapse was acquired for

what, in hindsight, looks like a tiny

amount of money. Davidson &

Associates, an educational software

company based nearby in Torrance,

California, came calling. The

company, which Bob and Jan

Davidson started, acquired Chaos

Studios in early 1994 for $6.75

million.

“Back then, it seemed like a lot,”

Morhaime said.

Indeed, Adham was 27 at the time,

and Morhaime was 26. The

Davidson deal made them into

millionaires. At the time, that was a

pretty rare thing for game designers. Of course, today, it’s not unusual to �nd

twentysomethings who are billionaires. Davidson & Associates liked them

because they were so young and could target games at their own generation.

“Everyone in our company is really passionate about video games,” said Adham

in an interview I did with him during those days. “We are all fanatic game

players. We are the target market, and that gives us an advantage in knowing

what is going to sell. I watch cartoons Saturday morning … because I like them,

not just for a job.”

They chose to sell to Davidson & Associates because it promised creative

independence.

They set about renaming the new acquired game studio, since there was a rival in the tech business that also used the

Chaos name.

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“Boy, we had such a hard time �nding a name that everyone liked and wasn’t already registered as a trademark,”

Morhaime said. “We went back to the drawing board. Brainstormed. Allen got attached to the name Ogre Studios. But we

were already part of Davidson & Associates. Jan Davidson hated the name Ogre. She really didn’t like the way that would

sound to her shareholders, who thought they were investing in an educational software company.”

“Can you please pick something else?” Jan Davidson asked.

Midnight Studios was another option. Adham went through the dictionary and came up with Blizzard.

“It’s just a cool-sounding name, I don’t know,” Morhaime said. “I’m really happy we landed on that.”

With the distribution power of Davidson & Associates, Blizzard had enough clout to get Warcraft on store shelves. The

game debuted in November, 1994, on the PC in North America as an MS-DOS release. It introduced the fantasy world of

Azeroth, with humans squaring o� against orcs. Like other RTS games, you built a base and an army, and you destroyed

the enemy. It wasn’t played on the Internet. Instead, it was played via direct links via computer modem or via local area

networks. It was a huge hit, and it spurred a series of sequels.

Metzen became the writer on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Blizzard made that game with just eight people, and yet it

was also a breakout hit when it debuted in 1995. It Blizzard’s �rst game to hit No. 1 on the sales charts, and it delivered a

great experience over the Internet. Blizzard followed at a furious pace, coming out with an expansion pack to Warcraft II

in 1996. It got into a �erce war in the RTS market, with rivals such as Westwood, Microsoft, Big Huge Games, and many

others.

As the company hit its stride, Metzen did voice acting and did a lot of the script work for future games. He became a

Blizzard lifer, and he’s committed to o�ering fans a heroic experience in vast, compelling worlds.

“It’s remarkably the same over time,” Metzen said. “It’s in our DNA. Even in games like Hearthstone, it’s still pretty

heroic. It makes you feel exceptional and e�ective.”

Blizzard North and the making of Diablo

Above: Diablo debuted in 1996.

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Image Credit: Blizzard

In 1996, Blizzard made a strategic move. It acquired Condor, a Northern California studio in the Silicon Valley suburb of

San Mateo, California. Condor had worked on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System version of Justice League: Task

Force for Blizzard. And they got along well enough to combine the companies.

Condor was headed by the brothers Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, as well as David Brevik. They were renamed

Blizzard North, and nine months after the deal, they launched what would become one of Blizzard’s enduring franchises,

Diablo.

Diablo was a fantasy role-playing game with hack-and-slash action. At �rst, Diablo was a turn-based RPG.

“Originally, Diablo came out of our desire to bring the RPG genre back to the masses,” said Max Schaefer in an email to

GamesBeat. “At the time, the RPGs were dense, fussy, and cumbersome, weighed down by their own conventions.

Sometimes we just wanted to whack a skeleton and get a cool sword. So we set out with that. The �rst thing we had

onscreen was a guy hitting a skeleton with a sword, and we built from there. We made sure that within a minute of

starting the game, you were in the action. We used randomized levels and endless loot to keep you wanting more. We

actually started development as an independent studio. Once we were bought by Blizzard and became Blizzard North, we

were able to greatly expand the scope of the game and turn it into what it became.”

By this time, Adham had earned the nickname of being “the Velvet Hammer.” He had a gentle, measured, yet forceful

means of persuasion, Schaefer said.

“We had sort of a hybrid turn-base real-time scheme, and Allen used the Velvet Hammer to ‘suggest’ we try going full-

on real time,” Schaefer said. “At the time we thought that messing with your inventory and skills would be cumbersome

in real time, but once we tried it, it was obvious it was the right call.”

Condor also toyed with a di�erent art style at �rst. The Primal Rage game had just come out, and it used physical models

and stop motion animation, also known as Claymation. The Condor team considered using that art style for Diablo. But it

turned out to be the wrong approach. Instead, it went with a 3D isometric art style.

The game took more than the initial expected budget, and it had an impact on delaying other games such as StarCraft. But

when Diablo debuted in 1996, it was a blockbuster.

Blizzard North created Diablo II, but it was eventually shut down in 2005. But its legacy was enduring, and Blizzard went

on to create successful Diablo III game, using a di�erent studio.

“Blizzard was where we learned about professional standards in video game production back in the ’90s, and to this day

they still carry the torch,” said Schaefer, who went on to create the indie studio Runic Games and the successful

Torchlight series of action-RPGs. “It was an amazing, competitive, supportive, and exciting place to work thanks to

dedicated local management, distant and mercifully indi�erent corporate ownership, and a deep, unrelenting

commitment to quality.”

Under new ownership, again and again