«Previous post | Next post»

This month marked the end of an era for Blizzard Entertainment as co-founder Frank Pearce left the studio after 28 years at the helm.

Pearce set up Blizzard along with Michael Morhaime and Allen Adham all the way back in 1991, and it has gone on to become one of the world’s most successful entertainment companies.

Yet Morhaime stepped down last year and Pearce’s departure leaves Adham as the last man standing.

“The time has come for me to step away from Blizzard and pass the torch to the next generation of leaders,” said Pearce in a heartfelt blog post.

This changing of the guard offers the perfect opportunity to reflect upon the firm’s remarkable journey from a small studio to a gaming powerhouse with thousands of employees spread across the globe.

Morhaime, Adham and Pearce bonded over a shared love of video games and they founded Silicon & Synapse in 1991, a year after they graduated from UCLA.

Each man stumped up $10,000 to fund the company, with Morhaime’s grandmother kindly giving him an interest-free loan. Their early work involved creating ports for other companies.

Their first game was RPM Racing, while the trio also worked on a Lord of the Rings game, Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess and Shanghai for Windows.

In 1993, the studio released The Lost Vikings and Rock N’ Roll Racing to great acclaim, and VideoGame Magazine awarded it the Best Software Developer of the Year gong at a competitive awards ceremony.

In December 1993, it changed its name to Chaos Studios. By this time, the staff had grown to 15 people and it was on its fourth office as the company continued to expand, while it had completed 11 projects.

“When we were a much younger and smaller company, the bonds that developed between everyone were very strong,” said Pearce.

“It was easy to know everyone well because going out for a beer only meant taking two or three cars to bring the entire company.”

Yet it continued to grow from its humble beginnings, and in April 1994 Davidson & Associates purchased it for $6.75 million. The following month, the company changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment, setting it on a path to world domination.

Blizzard quickly released Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, the RTS title that proved to be its breakthrough hit. It mimicked the top-down strategic view seen in Dune II and brought glorious fantasy trappings to proceedings. It was met with positive reviews, it won awards and it shifted 100,000 copies within a year.

This game catapulted Blizzard into the big leagues and it brought multiplayer gaming to the masses, allowing million of friends to experience online competition over a modem or LAN.

For the first time, Blizzard was profitable and it threw its energies into Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which was released at the tail end of 1995 and swept the awards season in 1996.

Warcraft II was brilliant and the Warcraft series has gone on to become the most influential gaming franchise of all time.

It created a whole new genre, while it paved the way for the multibillion-dollar esports industry to open up and flourish.

If you check out these great tips, you will see Blizzard hits like StarCraft II, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft featured heavily, as they have established themselves as some of the most important titles within the competitive gaming scene, and millions of fans now love to wager on big tournaments featuring the leading players.

In 1996, Blizzard snapped up Condor Games and renamed it Blizzard North, a subsidiary that has looked after the popular Diablo series.

It continued to invest in technology, push boundaries and break new ground for the gaming industry, gaining a reputation as an innovator that never forgot the importance of impressing gamers before accountants.

In 1997, Blizzard launched online service Battle.net, and a year later it had hit 1.5 million users. The following year saw the launch of StarCraft, which has been described as the greatest game of all time.

Starcraft sold 3 million copies within three months of launch, and it was even taken into outer space on the shuttle Discovery during a mission to the International Space Station.

Blizzard changed hands a few times and then became part of the Vivendi empire, but Morhaime, Adham and Pearce just focused on developing games. The megahits kept coming for Blizzard, as Warcraft III and World of Warcraft smashed all sales records.

WoW peaked at 12 million monthly subscriptions in 2010, having established itself as world’s most popular MMORPG by a long distance. The studio built up a cult following by hosting annual BlizzCon events, and continuing to release exciting titles.

In 2007, an $18.8 billion merger saw the formation of Activision Blizzard, with Vivendi owning a controlling 52% stake. By 2014, Vivendi’s stake was down to just 6% and Activision Blizzard now trades as a standalone company under the ticker ATVI on the NASDAQ.

Nowadays it is an economic juggernaut: Activision Blizzard reported a net revenue of $7.5 billion in 2018, up from $7 billion the previous year, and Blizzard titles like Overwatch, Diablo, Warcraft and Hearthstone were major drivers behind that.

Despite that strong performance, the group announced it would be laying off around 800 of its 9,600 employees.

Yet it seems to have bounced back in 2019, as Q1 earnings exceeded outlook, with esports heralded as a major revenue driver. It seems fair that Blizzard is benefiting from the meteoric rise of competitive gaming, considering it did so much for the scene.

“We’re continuing to enhance our leadership position in esports,” said chief executive Bobby Kotick. “The second season of the Overwatch League has seen strong growth in viewership.”

Blizzard owns huge titles like Overwatch, StarCraft and Hearthstone, and it its evolution has been astonishing since Morhaime, Adham and Pearce. Adham left the firm in 2004, but he returned in 2016.

He now stands as the last member of the founding trio, but Pearce is confident that their ethos will live on long into the future:

“We made games that we wanted to play, believing that like-minded people would also want to play those games,” he said.

“Today we characterize it more specifically with the ambitious vision of bringing the world together through epic entertainment.

I am so proud to have had the chance to positively impact the lives of so many people through the experiences we have created.

“My request and hope for all of you is that you continue living the Blizzard values and that you be kind and respectful to one another as you experience what Blizzard creates in the future.

Blizzard is a special place and a special community, and everyone with whom you interact is important to the Blizzard journey as it continues forward.”

So with that said, where do you think Blizzard will go from here?

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section down below!

***In cooperation with unikrn.com***

«Previous post | Next post»

More by Guest Author:

Tags: Blizzard, Diablo, PC games, Retro games, RPG, Starcraft, Video games, Warcraft