Things Get Hot for Blizzard

of the game Diablo. So we're going to pick up from there because it turns out there's a whole lot of stuff that's happened to this relatively young company. All right, So we're in a super important time in Blizzard's history in this timeline. So Warcraft gave the company momentum and

set the stage for a sequel, Warcraft Two Tides of Darkness. Meanwhile, the founders of Condor Incorporated reached out to Blizzard, and as I mentioned earlier, the two companies had first come into contact when they were each developing versions of Justice League Task Force. Now, in the time that followed, Condor had reached out to a lot of different publishers with their idea for Diablo, but they got nowhere then out of desperation more than anything else, they turned to Blizzard. Now,

the pitch was incredibly ambitious. Condor would develop a PC based game, which they had never done before, and it would be an RPG style game, role playing game, and it would marry that with a more action oriented style of gameplay. Ultimately, and originally, they were also thinking about modeling all their characters using the claymation process. So claymation, for those not familiar with the term, is a form

of stop motion animation. You build the animated stuff out of some sort of multiple material, such as you know, clay, and you pose them precisely the way you want them to look in a particular sequence. Then you take a photo, then you adjust the model ever slightly, Then you take another photo, and you do that over and over again until the sequence of photos follows the entire range of motion that you wanted to capture. It's similar to hand

drawn animation in that way. So if you want to show a character swinging a sword, for example, you'll have to determine how many frames of animation that will require and how far you need to move the model for each frame. If you move too far between pictures, you get really choppy animation. David Brevic was inspired by an arcade game called Primal Rage that used claymation to model its characters. Primal Rage was a fighting game akin to

something like Mortal Kombat or Teken. The monstrous fighters in the game, of which there were seven, each required around four hundred frames of animation to model all of their movements. The process takes a very long time, and it gets pretty darned expensive. The end effect can be great, but it's an enormous task for even a seasoned video game studio, let alone one that had only been around for less

than two years. Further, dia Blow would require a lot more animation than a fighting game with seven characters, unless the team were to limit the types of monsters you'd encounter in the game. Ultimately, they would choose to ditch the stop motion plan. Blizzard was intrigued by Condor's pitch, though there may have been some skepticism about whether or

not Condor could actually pull it off. Blizzard agreed to publish the game once it was developed, and they set a budget of three hundred thousand dollars for Condor, with a goal of publishing in time for the nineteen nine six holiday season. Now Condor actually had to build the game they had been dreaming of for a couple of years, which is a big change from just thinking about it.

They chose to go with an isometric view, with the world being made up of tiles that characters, monsters, and objects could inhabit, and originally they wanted to make the game turn based. Players would have worked with character limitations that would dictate how far they could move during a turn, or how frequently they could attack, and so forth. This was the game David Brevic wanted to make because it was in a style similar to the games he had

loved playing as a gamer himself. But at some point during the development process, the Blizzard team talked to Brevic and tried to convince him to change from a turn based game to a real time game. Brevick resisted. The decision was ultimately put to a vote inside Condor, and everyone except Brevic voted to go real time, so Brevick agreed, though not before asking for a milestone payment from Blizzard,

which they agreed to. The Oblow would thus transform from a turn based computer RPG into one of the first action role playing games, or a RPG acronyms are fun. Also, technically, Brevick would say that what he really did was he just made the turns last about one a second. So it's still a turn based game. It's just those turns went really fast. One other thing that was almost a

part of Diablo, and I found this really interesting. This was scrapped before the game would launch, was a concept in which players, you know, actual people who would go out and buy the game, could then go out and buy supplemental stuff to add their games, in the form of like a an an expensive c D. You would go and buy a CD add on, not a full expansion set, but maybe a five dollar c D, and and that add on would include things like weapons and

armor packs or skin packs, stuff like that. It hearkened back to the days of trading cards, and it presages, it's a great word, right, the oncoming trend of lootboxes and video games. You know that stuff that everybody loves. It doesn't create legal problems around the world. Well, they

wouldn't find their way into Diablo. That that feature never made it to Diablo, but in future games Blizzard would, um, let's just say, take full advantage of this concept, and they would tweak it for online delivery rather than on

optical discs. Now In Dublow, you play a hero originally one of three character classes, although expansion sets would expand that you know, thus the name, and you would be out to defeat a demonic antagonist named Surprise Surprise Diablo, who was attempting to gain control of the surface world. The game involved lots of clicking with the mouse, like lots and lots of clicking like get a new mouse

every three months. That much clicking. It was a hacken slash style game, and advancement in the game is largely tied to finding better loot to make your character more powerful and more resilient to damage. The maps for the levels of the game are created by random generations, so that the layout is never the same for different playthroughs, which made it really interesting. The game featured elaborate at

least for the time cinematics. Blizzard had already established a reputation for inserting a lot of story into their games, but now it was as if you were having a short c g I film connecting elements of gameplay, and it would become another hallmark for Blizzard, which then got a reputation for increasingly elaborate, highly produced cinematic segments, and while it was a bit muted compared to other Blizzard games,

the sense of humor was still there too. If you do encounter Diablo, for example, he would say something in an incomprehensible demonic language, unless you were recorded and play it backward, in which case the demonic one would actually say, and I'm not making this up, eat your vegetables and brush after every meal. Evil right. As Condor continued development on Diablo, things changed for Blizzard. In February, a marketing company called c U C International announced it was acquiring

Davidson and Associates. Now, if you remember from the last episode, that was the parent company that owned Blizzard, and it was also in the process of acquiring another software company, c Era Online game company that I've covered in past episodes. The change in ownership wouldn't stop there for Blizzard, but

we'll get to all that. Several months before the scheduled launch of Diablo, Blizzard Entertainment, as part of this larger conglomerate, made an offer to acquire Condor outright, which Condor accepted, and it would mean that Condor would change its name and it would become Blizzard North because it was located in northern California, while as you know, the original Blizzard

they were in southern California. While Condor was now officially part of Blizzard itself, the division would still enjoy much of the same freedom, at least at first, that Blizzard South had experienced when it was bought by Davidson and associates. Now this would mean that when Diablo launched, it would officially be a Blizzard title, though not developed by the

original Blizzard team. Blizzard would help out a little bit in the development process, particularly when it came to implementing a multiplayer feature that wasn't in the original design concept for Diablo. The changes to Diablo would mean that ultimately it would miss its original deadline for the holiday season in ninet. Instead, it would publish in January, and despite the inopportune launch date, the game would prove to be a smashing success. That smashing was in mouse buttons. I

might be getting hung up on that. I just remember really punishing my mouse playing that game. Diablo's success would be linked with the rise of a service from Blizzard, and that was of course Battle Neet. So, as I mentioned, the last episode. Warcraft and Warcraft two were both designed so that players could go head to head against each other on a local area area network, or they could direct dial if they happen to know the other IP address.

But you could also use a third party client called Collie to trick computers into believing they were part of a local area network when in reality they were connecting over the Internet. Now that wasn't ideal, as it limited the people who had the knowledge and the drive to actually make those connections or download the Colleague client, but Blizzard employees noted that some companies were starting to come up with alternatives. One of those was another project out

of Westwood Studios. You'll remember that's the company that had created dune To that kind of launched the real time strategy genre, and it was called, appropriately enough, Westwood Chat. It was an Internet based chat client that allowed users to not just chat, but also play games with one another online. Blizzard wanted to make something similar to that. The result was Battlenet, a server based system in which players could log into a remote server and get matched

up with other players in games like Diablo. In fact, Diablo was essentially a launch title for the service. You could play Diablo as a single player experience on your own computer, and you could you could just avoid going online entirely, and in fact, that's how people like me tended to play the game. But if you wanted to play with other folks in a cooperative style game, you could use battle Neet to facilitate the connection and that would allow that co op game of up to four players.

And best of all, it was a free service and started off as a very modest endeavor. In fact, originally battle Net was a service that existed on a single server one PC, a machine that was tucked away under a person's desk at Blizzards headquarters, and it was acting as a sort of administrator. So in those days, battle

net was actually a peer to peer networking service. One player's computer would become the host machine and the other players connecting to that gaming session would be the clients, and the battle Neet server just sort of acted as an operator to make all these connections. But it wasn't actually hosting the game itself. That allowed it to be very lightweight, so the service was very lean and it's why only one PC was needed to act as a server.

At least Initially, the player computers were really the ones that we're doing all the heavy lifting. And while it allowed for easy connectivity, it also opened up some opportunities for some shenanigans, because you know, players could pretty easily use cheats in their local games. I never really understood that myself. I mean, what's the point of playing a fake character who now can do incredible fake things against

other fake characters. But then they would take that same quality, that same capability, and they would pour it over to battle Neet matches, and obviously that led to some pretty uneven matchups among players. It's not much fun to try and match your skills against an opponent only to find that person has used cheats to create a severely unfair advantage. And cheating was so rampant in the early days of battle Neet that it threatened to overshadow the service itself.

While Blizzard South aka Blizzard Prime tried to find ways to mitigate the cheating online, it was also hard at work developing the next new game that was a science fiction RTS that was called StarCraft. Maybe you've heard of it. The path to publishing wasn't exactly flawless at E three before the launch of Diablo and of Battle Neet, Blizzard

revealed StarCraft to a pretty lackluster response. The general consensus was that they had really done nothing more than take Warcraft and then put a science fiction skin on top of it. It was such a bummer of a response that Blizzard gradually reduced the number of displays that were showing early gameplay footage. At that E three they originally had three monitors showing this footage of StarCraft. By the end of the show, they had reduced that to one,

and they dedicated all the others to Diablo instead. Based off that reaction, I'm sure the company was worried that StarCraft would never be more than a footnote in the company's history. Making things more complicated was the fact that the RTS category was becoming a fully fledged genre of its own. So you had games like Warcraft and Command and Conquer leading the way, but lots of other studios

were dipping their toes in the game type. Many were adding new innovations to gameplay, which made it even more imperative that Blizzard south revisit the design and in concept of StarCraft to turn it into something other than a warcraft. To clone to do that, they'd have to go back to the drawing board, which meant ditching all the production that had been done on that game up to that point. StarCraft wouldn't totally die, but it would be stored in carbonite.

Allah Han solo for quite a while. All Right, I've got a lot more to say about Blizzard, but before I get into that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. So Blizzard followed up the release of Diablo with an expansion pack, which was actually developed by a third party called Synergistic Software. Meanwhile, the team behind Diablo was secretly at work on a full blown sequel, which would take much longer to develop. Down at Blizzard South, the developers were hard at work trying to create a

worthy game out of the StarCraft concept. Scrapping all their work leading up to E three ninety six set them back to square one, so they focused on the work and rebuilt the game from scratch, getting it ready for a Spring of release. While it remained a real time strategy game, Blizzard made a big move and that the three factions you could play each had different units, and each of those units had its own abilities that set

it apart from the units of the other factions. You couldn't play the game and assume your opponents had the same capabilities that you had. You needed to plan to defend against their strengths and to try and exploit their weaknesses. The built in variety meant that strategy would be incredibly important, and eager players dove into the game to learn the best approach to any given scenario. Battle Net allowed players

to test their skills against each other. At the same time, competitive gaming was starting to gain traction, and StarCraft became a banner title for the new sport. It was such a hit that sales in South Korea alone were more than what Blizzard had seen globally for Warcraft two and for Diablo, and ten years later, on twenty years later, it's still a very popular game in competitive play in South Korea. While Warcraft two was the studio's first breakout hit,

StarCraft would leave it in the dust. It propelled Blizzard into the position of a world leader in video game development. Now. Like Diablo and Warcraft two, Blizzard would tap a third party studio to develop expansion packs to StarCraft, but neither of the expansion packs produced by those third parties enjoyed the same success as the base game did, and they were criticized for not living up to the standards of

the original StarCraft game. So Blizzard went and made their own expansion set called brood War, which gamers preferred and they viewed it as a worthy expansion of the base campaign of StarCraft. Once again, Blizzard got the message that going outside the company to develop for flagship title wasn't necessarily a good you know, use of their resources or their intellectual property. And a couple of other big things

happened in for Blizzard. One was that Alan Adham, the prime founder of Blizzard, who had been acting as the company's president, stepped down from his position. He didn't leave the company, he wanted to take a more direct role in actually designing games. Mike Morheim, another co founder of the company, would then take over the role of president and would remain there for many years. Meanwhile, way above the heads of the Blizzard crew over at Sendence Software.

Sentence Software was formed out of the their corporate overlords at CEUC International. There was a massive, massive scandal, had nothing to do with Blizzard, but Sendant, the parent company, was at the heart of it, and they found themselves in need of a lot of cash, so in order to raise it, they sold off their software division, which included Blizzard and Sierra Online. They sold it to a

French company called Havas. Havas was in turn swallowed up by the mass media conglomerate Vivendi, also French, which tells us that Quagon Gen was right. There's always a bigger fish. So now Blizzard, which was still allowed to operate more or less autonomously, had brand new corporate overwords, and this would become a big issue in the near future. So keeping in mind, this ownership question gets really complicated, I

feel a lot of empathy. Look up the history of how stuff works sometime and you'll know what I mean. So the other thing that happened wasn't a great story for Blizzard. In this time period, the company had reached out to a Russian video game developer to create a point and click adventure style game based off the Warcraft intellectual property. Players were to take control of an Orc in his quest to become a war lord, the Lord

of the Clans. However, while the game was in development, LucasArts announced to adventure games of their own, The third in the Monkey Island series. I'm a huge Monkey Island fan and also Grim fan. Dango a true masterpiece of a computer game. They're both phenomenal, and they have interesting stories and they have a great sense of humor. Their

art style is amazing. Meanwhile, the work coming out of Russia wasn't really living up to Blizzards expectations for their adventure game, and language barriers were making it challenging to manage the project from California, so ultimately, Blizzard made the tough decision to scrap the project, even though it was probably just a couple of months away from being finished. The following year, Blizzard would push Diablo Too back from a late release because the game wasn't quite ready yet.

They also announced plans for Warcraft three, which originally was going to have some big changes from the previous titles in the series. It would have more of a role playing element, so you would still have some real time strategy features, but you would control hero units in the game, and the story would unfold as your hero completed quests and encountered other important characters. After announcing the plans, Blizzard got to work, but early demos of their idea didn't

appeal to anyone on the team. It was generally felt that the process just was not working. So in two thousand they announced that Warcraft three was actually going to be a lot more like its predecessors and also worse. This would mean the game would take longer to develop. Blizzard South would then split into two big camps. One was focused on developing Warcraft three. The other group focused on a project called Nomad, which was going to be

a brand new intellectual property for the company. Unfortunately, that one would also get bogged down and Blizzard would exit

before it ever got publicly announced. Now, Blizzard hasn't really ever said a whole lot about what Nomad was going to be like, but they did reveal that they intended it to be a squad based game set in a science fiction genre, and that it was inspired by a tabletop miniature strategy game called Necromunda, which is part of the Warhammer forty k universe, which might be the nerdiest thing I've ever said, and I'm not judging I play

these games, guys. But part of the problem was that the team on Nomad never really agreed exactly where the balance in the game needed to be. Some wanted it to be more of a strategy game, similar in some ways to the RTS genre. Others wanted to have more of an RPG focus, a more role playing and story.

A few folks on the team weren't really crazy about the idea at all, and they just wanted to work on something else, and since it seemed like there wasn't a chance that these visions were going to cohere, the company ultimately decided to cancel it. The Warcraft adventure game

and Nomad weren't the first canceled projects at Blizzard. There had been an attempt to make a science fiction shooter game called Crixia in the mid nineties, and there was a failed collaboration with Change Links Software to make a sequel to the space strategy game packs Imperia. Before StarCraft, some Blizzard developers were working on a different real time strategy game with a post apocalyptic sci fi field called Shattered Nations. And we're gonna talk about some more canceled

games before we finish out this series. Somewhat mitigating player disappointment over the changes to Warcraft three was the fact that Blizzard North was finally ready to release Diabload too. In June two thousand, which, like the first game, was an enormous hit. The graphics for the game only received relatively minor upgrades, which threatened to impact player perception about the title, but there were lots of improvements in other

aspects of the game and had a larger scale. And because the team knew that multiplayer was going to be a component from the very beginning, they built it into the design process, so it was much better incorporated than it was for the first Diablo. This came at a price, however. The development process for Diablo two was famously brutal. Programmers and designers were working long hours for a full year.

Sometimes they'd be working more than twenty four hours at a stretch in a row, all in an effort to finish this game. Even when they pushed the game back from to mid two thousand, there really wasn't any room to breathe. Blizzard, both North and South, were not strangers to this kind of cycle. Commonly in the biz we refer to it as crunch. You see it in all forms of production, but it has a seriously negative impact on work life balance, as in there isn't any balance

between work in life. Today, companies are becoming a little more sensitive to going into crunch mode as the optics, as they say, aren't very good. There have been some rather high profile cases of employees putting their personal lives and health at risk just to finish a game. Cases like the Diablo to development process would become much more common,

and not just at Blizzard, as time would go on. Well, if you're a general gamer, you know, the average stereotypical gamer, you're probably either not aware or you don't care about the plight of those actually toiling to create the games that you play. But one thing that the average gamer does tend to be quite vocal about our problems with games. Don't know if you've ever been on the internet, but

they're not shy about saying that kind of thing. Diablo's biggest problem early on was that it was so popular that everyone was trying to go online and it was crashing the battle Neet servers, Which is the best kind of apology you have to give to your public guys, I'm sorry, we're so awesome that you have to play our game and you're destroying our server system. We're so sorry, thank you, But yes, that was one of the big issues.

This also would mark when Blizzard would veer away from that pure networking approach that I talked about earlier that they had created with battle NEETs. So with the old method, it was incredibly easy for cheaters to exploit the system. I mean, they were hosting games on their own computers, so entering into multiplayer games with an unfair advantage was

very easy. You could grief other players as well, because Diablo had friendly fire on so you have an overpowered character who blasts fireballs everywhere and then you're the only one standing. Ha ha ha. Isn't that fun? Well. The way that they decided to address this was by completely

changing the architecture of battle Neet. So they went with a more traditional server clients set up in which Blizzard would run the games on its servers and players would log in to access the games, and that helped out on the abuse that they had seen in the previous Diablo game. It's really only possible because we had seen a greater rollout of broadband technology at that point. The same team that made Diablo two would work on the expansion set called the Lord of Destruction, which added more

features to the base Diablo two game. Blizzard made the decision early on to essue third party studios. They had not had any good real experiences with that anyway, and they said, you know, it just makes more sense for us to do it ourselves if we're going to do this. So they had the same team that made Diablo to make the expansion Set and Low and Behold. People liked it.

Lord of Destruction launched in June two thousand one, just one year after Diablo two had come out, and it was another success for the team up at Blizzard North. They would then turn their sides on developing yet another Diablo game, which would have been Diablo three. But if you can tell from that language, it would not turn out the way the team imagined it would. That will be more uh for part three of this series race,

but we'll get a little bit into it. Meanwhile, the team that had been developing Nomad were hard at work on a brand new project. Their goal was to create a game in which hundreds, maybe thousands of people could explore simultaneously. It would be a persistent online world. Players would control characters they created and explore the world. They would take on quests that would join other players, making factions. They'd work together and coordinated raids on dungeons and opposing

player factions. They wanted to make a massively multiplayer online role playing game or m m O RPG, and when they looked across their collection of i P they decided that the Warcraft universe made the most sense to adapt into that format, and so work began on World of Warcraft. Now, MMOs were not a new thing even in the early two thousand's. Games like Ultima Online and ever Quest originally debuted in the mid to late ease and MMOs were

a really attractive type of game to develop. I'll explain why. See, you design a compelling game. That's step one. It has to be something that people want to play. That means you can then get, if you're lucky, a nice large base of players. Moreover, the general business strategy was to charge a subscription fee every month for each player. So it wasn't just that these players were going out and

buying your game at full price. I mean they were, but they were also paying for the privilege to continue to play the game. In return, you indicate that you're you're going to keep building content and you're going to roll out new stuff for players to experience over time. But really, what it means is that a game becomes an ongoing stream of revenue. Best yet, with most games, you would sigh once it became pretty clear you would

hit your saturation point. Right Like, if you had a traditional game, then eventually you hit the point where sale are gonna start to drop off, it would be pretty obvious you weren't going to see any more dramatic jumps in sales figures. But with MMOs that didn't matter as much because once you had your initial player base, they'd still be paying you that monthly subscription fee, even if

you only sold a relatively small number of copies. Once those initial sales died down, you'd still be sitting on a nice monthly revenue stream. Now, that didn't mean the game immediately launched right away when they announced it. Nope, it would take a few more years before it was ready to rule out to players. But the course have been laid for one of Blizzard's biggest success stories. But before we get to the success, we're gonna have a

little more heartbreak. It's my favorite part. In fact, I'm gonna have to really revel in this. So let's take a quick break. Okay, I alluded to this before the break. We're coming up to one of the big heartbreaks in canceled game history. This is legendary in the world of

computer games when you talk about vapor were so. While Blizzard was hard at work developing Diablo three and Warcraft three and World of Warcraft, as well as starting to lay out plans for a full StarCraft sequel, the company also reached out to another developer to make an entirely different type of game based on Blizzards intellectual property. This game would be a science fiction third person shooter, a console game set in blizzards StarCraft universe, co developed with

a studio called Nihilistic Games. I guess they just didn't believe in anything. Blizzard announced these plans at the two thousand to Tokyo Game Show, and it was going to be called StarCraft Ghost and boy, what a fitting title that turned out to be. Now, the goal was to make this console action shooter because one of the challenges Blizzard was facing was that's real time strategy games were

hard to translate to a console experience. A controller doesn't really offer you the type of speed and precision that a keyboard or mouse would, and those are very important elements of a real time strategy game. But at the same time, Blizzard recognized that console gamers represented a huge market and that's one that the company wasn't really able to take advantage of with most of the games that it was producing, So that helped motivate the team to

to get this project underway. Now. At the announcement, Blizzards stated that they intended for StarCraft Ghost to come out for the quote next generation end quote of video game consoles. So in two thousand two, if you look at what were the state of the art consoles at the time, you had the Nintendo GameCube, the original Xbox, and the

PlayStation two. So the next generation of consoles wouldn't come out for a few years, right, They announced it in two thousand two, But the Xbox three sixty wouldn't come out to two thousand five, and the WE and the p S three wouldn't come out until two thousand six. So this announcement was made well in advance of any game coming out, and sometimes that can come back to bite you on the butt, since a lot can change

over the years. Or maybe they intended to develop for the GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS two and maybe it just didn't work out. Things did not go smoothly on the development front. Now I'm gonna stick with this story for a bit, then I'll get back to the rest of Blizzard. The company was not happy with how things were going with Nihilistic, and then the two companies would part ways in June two thousand four, with the

game still unfinished. Blizzard then signed an agreement with another development studio called Swinging Ape Studios to help finish this game. Not much was said about the game, other than a revelation in two thousand five that Blizzard had decided to cancel a version of it for the game Cube, but the other versions were still active development. In two thousand six, Blizzard published a StarCraft Ghost novel, which to date is really the only published piece of content from StarCraft Ghost

from Blizzard. It became a famous example of vaporware, right up there with Duke Knewcombe Forever, which actually did come out at one point. It was terrible, but it came out. It wouldn't be until two thousand fourteen when Mike Moreheim would finally say publicly that the game had in fact been canceled and it wasn't just in cold storage twelve

years after they announced it. Now, between the announcement of World of Warcraft and the actual launch of the game, Blizzard would publish the third full game in the Warcraft series, Warcraft three. Now. As I mentioned earlier, the version that Blizzard had talked about several years previous was different from

what the company actually produced. In the original concept, heroes in the game would essentially be playable characters, marrying the real time strategy and role playing game genres and giving players a chance to shape a story. In the actual Warcraft three, the hero units were there, but they were more like specialized game pieces that could do things that other units couldn't. They weren't characters, and there wasn't really

an RPG factor in the game. It did feature some three D gameplay, which was a new thing for the Warcraft series, and it also featured the most extravagant cut scenes Blizzard had featured in a game up to that point. I mean, seriously, it was right around this time that those of us who were paying attention to Blizzard were saying, you know, they could just package up their cinematics and

release them as a c g I movie. But it's actually a little too early in the timeline for me to talk about Warcraft the movie right now, but don't worry, we'll get to it. So the Blizzard team would then go on to work for an expansion pack for the base Warcraft three game. It was called Frozen Throne, which every time I said it out loud before I recorded it, I said throzen Frone, and I was sure I was

going to do it again. It was actually going through my mind just now, just letting you guys get an insight into how Jonathan works, because I haven't done that podcast yet. Like Rude War and Lord of Destruction, Blizzard actually used the exact same development team that worked on the original game to make the expansion pack, which helped ensure that the quality would remain the same. In two

thousand three, Blizzard North experienced an enormous shake up. Several people in the executive management and lead developer levels had grown disenchanted with Vivendi that's the parent company for the whole shebang. Right there was uncertainty about whether or not Vivendi was going to spin off the game's division, or it might sell it off to yet another owner, and all of that uncertainty was making it very difficult to

plan development cycles for games. After numerous communications issues and worries about the corporate direction of Avendy and whether Blizzard North was even being listened to, a whole slew of Blizzard North folks just up and left. That included the founders of the company, so Max and Eric Schaefer and David Brevic, who all founded Condor Incorporated. They left with some other high level employees and they formed a new

company that they called Flagship Studios. Seems like they were maybe thumbing their nose at Vendy a little bit, saying that they made the flagship game for Blizzard. Another group of influential employees from Blizzard North also left, creating a different game studio called Castaway Games. Also seems like there might be some shade being thrown there anyway. The departures through the development of Diablo three into total disarray. The following year, Blizzard South would also see a very big

name departure. Alan Adham, the founder who was the reason that Blizzard even existed, decided he had endured enough stress and long hours. You're remember he stepped down from president a few years earlier, but he figured now was time to try something new it's time to get into the exciting world of corporate finance. I'm not even making that up. Someone chose to go from video game studio to corporate finance.

So in two thousand four he resigned from Blizzard. He had been the motivating force that convinced the other two founders of the company, Frank Pierce and Mike Moreheim, to join with him to create this crazy, risky venture. And now he was gone from the company, though he wouldn't be gone forever. That right, there's what we call foreshadow and but I won't get back to that until the

next episode, so just be patient. Okay. Moreheim had already been serving as president, so actually the company didn't have too much interruption in its day to day operations. Moreheim oversaw Blizzards acquisition of the aforementioned Swinging Apes Studios, the one that had been working on StarCraft Ghost, and it

would get renamed into Blizzard Console. Now, all the turmoil might have made it seem like the company that had so recently been on top could collapse in on itself, but in the fall of two thousand four, Blizzard published a game that would ensure their longevity. This was, of course, World of Warcraft, the M M O RPG that would set a new standard of success for the genre. To say the game was a hit would be a severe understatement. It would become one of the biggest money makers in

video games history. So in our next episode, I'll talk more about the evolution of World of Warcraft and how Blizzard would periodically inject new life into the game with various expansion packs, world resets, and other strategies. I'll also talk about the final fate of Blizzard North, which spoiler alert is not a happy one, and will take a closer look at some of the controversies that Blizzard has

had to weather more free recently. You know, like what happens when a popular gamer suddenly expresses support for Hong Kong while your company is simultaneously trying to make a whole lot of money in China. But all of that will come in the next episode. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, well I got some suggestions for you, buddy. You can email me addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle for

both of those. For the show is text Stuff H S. W don't forget to visit our website, that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find a link to an archive of every ever love An episode I've ever recorded, all twelve hundred of them. So go take a search before you suggest something, because chances are I've talked about it already. I mean, I'll probably talk about it again. I don't remember what I talked about if I'm being honest. Also, hey, we have a link to our merchandise store. Every purchase

you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.