Winter is Coming: The Early Days of Blizzard

platform than for making games. Blizzard would swoop in to redefine the genre of massively multiplayer online role playing games, taking the torch away from pioneers like ever Quest and Ultimate Online and becoming the dominant presence with the truly enormous hit of World of Warcraft. And it would also court some major controversies and criticisms in twenty nineteen, would involve politics and globalization. But where did the company come from and how has it evolved over time? How has

its acquisition by Activision changed things. In the next two episodes, we're going to explore the story of Blizzard Entertainment. Now, I should point out that way back in the day, Chris Palette and I did an episode about Blizzard that episode published all the way back on December nineteen, two thousand eleven. Not only has a lot happened since then, text Stuff itself is a very different show from what it was like back in those early years, So I

figured this one merits a full revisit. The history of Blizzard Entertainment can be traced back to the computer lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Now, one day, in this computer lab, there was an electrical engineering student named Mike Moreheim and there was a computer science student named Alan Adam, and they were sitting next to each other. They didn't really know each other, they just happened to both be sitting in the computer lab. Now, Alan Adam

sent a job to a printer. But here's the crazy thing. The printer was on a different floor from the computer lab they were in, so he was going to have to leave his computer, walked to a different floor of the building, and go retrieve his print out. So he locks his computer terminal like a good responsible computer user, and heads off to retrieve the print out in question. Now, Moreheim said that after about ten minutes of him being gone,

Adam's computer unlocked automatically. So Moreheim relocked it, and to do that he had to put in a brand new password. He chose the word Joe j O E all lower case. He figured it was both responsible for him to do this, because otherwise Adam's terminal would remain locked or unlocked while he was gone and anyone could use it. But he also could do this as a prank, right, he could lock this with a brand new password, a very simple one, and when Adam would return, he would himself unable to

get back into his computer session. Ha ha ha prank. So Adam finally returns with his print out, He sits down at his computer and he types in his password and he's right back into the computer session. So Moreheim is shocked he had changed the password. So how did Adam know what he changed the password to? Or was it possible that Allan Adam had had some other tricks, some sort of administrative level password, some uber password, a

skeleton key. So Moreheim asks Adam, how did you do that? Well, Allan Adam e's he's confused, says, I don't know, I don't know what you mean. So then Moreheim says, well, what was your password? And Adam says, well, I'm not I'm not going to tell you my password. That's I mean, that's against the whole point of having a password. So

Moreheim says it was Joe, wasn't it. Well, I'd surprise Adam, and Moreheim came clean with his intended prank, saying no, no, I tried to change your password to Joe, and the two laughed about how they both just coincidentally picked Joe as a quick password, and then they continued to have a conversation and it was the beginning of a close friendship. Now. During summer breaks when he was in school, Alan Adam had taken up temp jobs working for various video game

development studios. He provided code for different video games and he loved games. He loved playing them, he loved working on them. He had already set a goal for himself to work on video games professionally after he graduated college, and he was ambitious. He didn't want to just work for some other studio and grind out code based on their wants and needs. He wanted to make games of his very own. So he graduated u c l A about six months ahead of Moreheim, and when Moreheim graduated,

he took on a job at a company called Western Digital. Now, his main job at the time was to build test software for network cards, which I'm sure was just as exciting as it sounds. But Allan Adam kept in touch with Moreheim and invited him to help form a brand new video game devel element company. Now, this took some convincing, but Moreheim eventually agreed after talking to one of his cousins. His cousin essentially said, hey, you're young. If it all

goes pear shaped, you can get another job. So he said, all right, I'm on board now. Meanwhile, Alan Adam also tapped his buddy Frank Pierce, whom he had also met back in You See l A. So he was another college friend of his. When it comes to the founders, Frank Pierce tends to be the one that people talk about the least. Uh. He just is one of those people who tends to be kind of quiet and in the background for a lot of these sorts of things.

But in the end, Frank Pierce would spend twenty eight years with the company spoiler Alert, and he was incredibly important in the development of many of Blizzards big games. He's a more soft spoken founder of the company than the other two, but he would be just as important. Now. I say this because a lot of company histories tend to gravitate more toward Moreheim, who Sir of the sort of the face of the company. He would lead the company, and he was the most forward facing of all of

the three founders. Now, they formed a company that they originally called Silicon and Synaps, and they founded it on February eighth, n in Coasta Mesa, California. Their original office was a thirty six hundred square foot office space, and Frank Pierce would later say that Allan Adam was really

the founder of the company. He was the one with the drive to make games, and he was the one with the powerful personality that would attract Pierce and Moreheim, and they were on board largely because Alan Adam was just so passionate and enthusiastic about making video games. Moreheim said he met Pierce on the first day of the

company's existence. He had not crossed paths with Frank Pierce when they were all in college, and while Moreheim and Pierce were both uncertain about the prospects of the company, Allan Adam maintained that if you just got the right skills and talent. Together, success would surely follow. Alan Adam would take on the job of president of the company, Mooreheim's role was vice president, and Frank Pierce would become

the lead programmer. Now before long they hired on a small staff of programmers to join them and some game designers, and Pierce would later say you could fit the entire company in two or three cars in those early days. The first game that they developed was called RPM Racing for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or SNSs RBM in this case stood for Radical Psycho Machine because the nineties

were totally radical, y'all. Silicon and Synapps landed a deal with a video game publisher called Interplay for that title. This was one of the companies that Adam had actually worked for over his summer breaks while he was attending u c l A, so he knew some of the people over there, and he already had some previous relationships. RPM Racing would be the very first Super Nintendo Entertainment System title from an American video game studio, so that's

two first that the game can claim. It was the first game from what would become Blizzard Entertainment, and the first American S and E S video game cartridge. The title was a racing game, obviously, in which players controlled a vehicle from a third person perspective, looking at the track from an isometric point of view, so isometric being kind of above and sort of an angle to the

playing field, so you weren't inside the vehicle. It wasn't a first person view, and you weren't directly behind the vehicle. It's sort of this weird overview and uh, to me, that always made racing games hard. It was just kind of difficult to judge when you were supposed to turn. I could never quite get the spatial relationships right in those type of games. Now, a couple of other things

set that title apart from many of its contemporaries. For one, it ran in a high resolution mode on the S and E S, or at least higher resolution than the standard sick team bit games of the time. But that mode also limited the number of colors that could be shown on the screen at one time, so it did come at a price. In the game, winning a race would net you a prize purse. You would win money depending upon how you placed in a race. Then you could use that money to upgrade your vehicle or pay

to enter more advanced races which had bigger purses. And finally, the game came with a track editor, which allowed players to create their own race courses, complete with hills, dips, and turns. Now all that being said, the general consensus was that the game wasn't really that good and had no real sense of speed. The cars just seemed to plod along, but did feature some innovative options that helped it stand out, even if the actual gameplay was a

little lackluster. The development for RPM Racer took about five months, with the game coming out in late nineteen. After completing work on the title, the fled dgling company divided its attention on two different strategies. One was to continue developing new games. The next original title from Silicon and Synapse was The Lost Vikings, which I'll talk about more in just a moment. The second strategy was to work with

other studios to port existing games to different platforms. So, in the world of video games, you've got a lot of different challenges you have to consider, and one of the big ones is which platform you're going to develop

for when you start making a new game. Now, you could try and adapt the game idea you have for all existing platforms, but that is going to dramatically increase the amount of time it takes to develop the game and put it through Q and A testing to make sure the experience is roughly the same across all the platforms, or as close as you can make it as possible.

This also requires hiring people with a diverse set of coding skills, since different platforms require knowledge in specific coding languages and structures, and some of the tools that are used to help port code from one platform to another they're not perfect, so it requires a little bit of hands on work to tweak things and make sure it

works properly. Another option is to identify the platform that you feel will net you the most sales for your title, or the platform for which your skill set is best suited, and then you developed for just that platform. So you might say, you know what, we have some code developers who are are great at making games for the PC, but they don't do so well when developing for the MAC. So we're just going to focus on making a game

for the PC. Then after the game is finished, you can either look to port it to other platforms yourself or you can hire some other studio to do that work for you. And that's where Silicon and Synapse got a lot of its early work to act as this studio that would take some other game developers work for

one platform and adapt for a different one. The company landed deals to port games to various platforms, including To Win Does, the Amiga and the Mac, and they included games that are some of my favorites from those years, like Battle Chess, which originally was an Amiga game, and Silicon and Synapse took the Amiga game imported it to Windows and the Commodore sixty four. The Amiga version was

superior by the way. Other games included a Lord of the Rings game, there was a medieval warfare strategy game called Castles, and there was a sports game in the form of micro League Baseball, among others and all the company ported eight titles to other platforms between nineteen two and ninetee. Also in nineteen two, the company released The Lost Vikings, aside scrolling platforming game with a truly odd storyline. So in the game, three Vikings are kidnapped by aliens

led by the evil Tomatour. They must find their way back home and the player could control all three vikings one at a time. You could cycle through them through in a level, and each Viking had his own special abilities. Those abilities were needed to solve different puzzles throughout the levels. That really helps set the title apart. It showed off this innovative thinking at the company. It wasn't just another side scrolling clone of a game like Super Mario Brothers.

The game's art style and sense of humor were much more indicative of the overall company's culture than the earlier RBM Racing or the Ports had been. The game also featured incidental dialogue and cut scenes that would become hallmarks of Blizzard games in the future. It was also the first truly original title, as RBM Racing was built on

top of older code for other racing games. Silicon and Synapse developed the title for several different platforms, including the S and E S, the Amiga, and later the Genesis. Like RPM Racing, Interplay would serve as the publisher for this game. Interplay would also publish the third original title from Silicon and Synapse, which was Rock and Roll Racing. Interplay published that game in This was another isometric point

of view. Racing game for the S and E s and for the Sega Genesis or the Mega Drive if you're not in the United States now. Originally this was supposed to be a direct sequel to RPM Racing, but Interplay stepped in with a major tweak. The company licensed music tracks from various rock bands to be included with the game. The companies decided to name the video game to reflect this big get, the fact that they were

able to land these licenses. The music consisted of many orchestrated covers, so they were all instrumental versions of songs, and they include songs like Born to Be Wild, Bad to the Bone, and the theme from Peter Gunn, which was also made famous in the arcade game World by the video games Spy Hunter. Up to two players can play simultaneously in this game, and each race has four participants, so the non player participants would be controlled by the

games AI. The game also featured vehicle mounted weapons, and destroying your opponents would net you cash bonuses in a race. You would respond in a race, so you wouldn't just get blowed up and then your games over. You would actually be able to rejoin the race after a brief period of being you know, evaporated. Real life race announcer Larry Huffman recorded audio tracks to serve as commentary for

the races. Like RBM Racing, players could dedicate the cash they want in Racist towards upgrading their vehicles or buying new ones as an easter egg. The programmers included ohl Off, the stout from the Lost Vikings as a possible driver, and he has some pretty boss stats to boot. The game got pretty good reviews. Both The Lost Vikings and Rock and Roll Racing were hits for the Young studio, but modest ones. It did set them up pretty nicely for n which was the year where things would really

come together for the company. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take a quick break. So let's close out before we get to the big four. That year, Video Games Magazine would name Silicon and Synaps as the Developer of the Year, but internally, the three founders were reconsidering the company's name. According to Moreheim, the problem was that they were having issues pitching games because no one knew what a synapse was, so they were having real

problems landing business deals with publishers and potential clients. They wanted to get more traction, and they decided that rebranding was the way to go, and originally they renamed themselves

Chaos Studios. There was just one small problem. There already was a company with that name in New York, and the owner of that name was not going to sell the rights to it for less than a hundred thousand bucks a princely some that was a bit too steep, And by too steep, I mean way too expensive for these guys, because at this stage the company was struggling to meet overhead, to meet payroll despite its commercial and

critical success. The three founders had resorted to maxing out their credit cards and asking their parents for loans so that they could meet payroll for each pay period. Clearly something needed to change if the company were to remain solvent. Now, in the brief period when they were known as Chaos Studios, they got a heck of an offer. Actually it was two offers. One offer came from Interplay, the publisher that

had been responsible for actually publishing their games. The second offer came from a software company called Davidson and Associates, and both offers were to acquire Chaos Studios. Now, I'm not sure how much the Interplay offer was for, but

the founders ultimately turned that one down. It wasn't that the money wasn't right, but rather they were worried that by join Interplay their company would just become one small part of a larger computer game enterprise and they would lose their creative freedom as a result, so they would have to take orders from Interplay. Davidson and associates specialized in educational software, not video games, so that actually seemed

like a safer bet. It was an acquisition offer that was worth around ten million dollars or six point seven five million dollars. It really depends upon which source you're citing. I've seen all ranges in between those two. Either way, it would give them the stability they needed to keep the company going and to develop more games with a minimum amount of interference from upper level management. Husband and wife team Bob and Jan Davidson, had founded this educational

software company back in the early nineteen eighties. Jan Davidson, a teacher, felt that computers could create unique educational opportunities because using a computer is by its very nature interactive, so by making lessons and interactive experience, Davidson felt students would grasp concepts and develop skills much more easily than if they were to sit in a classroom and passively

experience a lecture. Their company was generating revenues of around forty million dollars and they wanted to expand into other types of software. So the idea was that Chaos Studios would become the entertainment division for the software company. They promised Adam Mooreheiman Pierce, and that, you know, they and their team of developers would retain autonomy they could develop

the types of games they wanted to make. So Chaos Studios decided to take that deal, but the name was going to have to go, so it was back to the drawing board. They toyed with the idea of renaming the company Ogre Studios, but that was an early case where their new owners weren't that crazy about that idea.

So ultimately, after a quick scan of the dictionary, in which the three would debate between seven different words that were picked more or less at random, they hit upon what would become the company name from that point forward, Blizzard Entertainment. Now, during this whole process, the company was still creating games, so Chaos Studios slash. Blizzard Entertainment developed a game called Blackthorn for the S and E S and for the PC, later porting it to other platforms.

This was another side scrolling platform er with cinematics throughout to tell the story of the game, which featured protagonist Kyle Blackthorne Vlaros returning to his home planet after having been sent to Earth for safe keeping, a story pretty reminiscent of the Superman story. Blackthorn has to overthrow an evil ruler named Sarlac, guessing they were Star Wars fans. The game received positive reviews, both for its gameplay and for its dark tone, which was kind of new to

video games. To get the animation for Blackthorn, the team actually shot video of Frank Pierce moving around, and then they animated on top of this footage in a process called rhodoscoping, which is frequently used in animation. The company released the game in December. Around that same time that they were developing Blackthorn, they were also working on the Death and Return of Superman for sun Soft Games, based off a storyline in d C from back in the

early nineties. This was a beat him up game in which players would at certain points in The game storyline control Superman and the various characters who appeared after the villain Doomsday killed Superman in a comic book storyline that included characters like Cyborg Superman, or a more hard edged anti hero version of Superman called the Eradicateur, and a self made man of Steel named uh Steel. This game

is one of many largely forgotten superhero video games. It received mediocre reviews, which is still a lot better than a lot of superhero games managed, at least until more recent titles like the Arkham series. This game came out in June. One other game the company worked on around this time was Justice League task Force, which was another DC superheroes fighting game, sort of like techn or Mortal Kombat d C characters. So this was not a Blizzard

lead project. Rather, the company Sunsoft produced the game and Acclaim would act as publisher. Blizzard was credited as a code developer on the project and worked specifically on the S and E S version of the game. Now, there was another party involved in Justice League Task Force, and

that was a company called Condor. Condor was a Bay area video game company, so in the San Francisco area, and it was responsible for this Sega Genesis version of the video game Condor will become an important part of the Blizzard story later, So I thought it'd s been just a little time giving a bit of background on what Condor was now. The founders of Condor Incorporated included Max and Eric Schaeffer and David Brevic. The name came from a secret project and a digital clip art company

that Brevick had worked for. Now that company went belly up, and Brevic and the Schaefer brothers decided to form a video game development company, with the goal being to make role playing games for computer systems. They took the name Condor from that secret project. Their goal was to produce the game called Diablo. They were naming it after Mount Diablo in California. But they were encountering a lot of resistance from publishers when they were pitching their idea for

this video game. So to make ends meet, they worked on co developing games with other studios. That's how they got the gig of designing the Genesis version of the Justice League Task Force. Now, the story goes that neither the Blizzard team nor the Condor team knew about the other company working on this video game. They found out when both companies attended ce S, the Consumer Electronics Show.

Because this was before E three became a thing. So at CES that's where video game companies would go to show off demos of their upcoming titles, they were frequently shoehorned way in the back of the showroom floor. Now, according to most histories, this happened when Blizzard was still technically Silicon and Synapse, so it must have been at

least a year out from the publication. Since Justice League Task Force would come out anyway, this would be the first contact between these two companies, but it would not be the last one. Blackthorne, the Superman Game, and Justice League Task Force would all publish after the announced Davidson and Associates acquisition, but none of those would be the

first game released under the Blizzard Entertainment label. They would follow behind a different game, one that would end up being an iconic starting point for Blizzards rise to true superstardom, and the first game to come out post acquisition was one that had been inspired by a different companies games. Now that different company was Westwood Studios. Emphasis on was Westwood Studios because the studio no longer exists it would get folded into a division of Electronic Arts in two

thousand three. But back in this video game company developed a real time strategy game called Dune two. This was based off the film adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune. Now. In this game, players would assume control of one of three houses or factions attempting to gain dominion over a planet called Aracus. Players would manage resources to build out structures, they would produce military units, they would explore the map,

and they would try to defeat enemy forces. It's the basic structure that many other RTS games would follow in the years to come, but it was a pretty new idea back in. A good player learns how to balance rees was gathering production and troop movements without over extending themselves or putting their home base at risk. It's a skill I do not have. Dune Too received a great deal of praise for its innovations in gameplay, and it should come as little surprised that other studios wanted to

emulate those innovations that Westwood Studios had introduced. However, by not a single other game that was following the same game design and mechanics of Done two had yet to emerge. So the crew at Blizzard thought that Doune two was particularly compelling and innovative. They decided they would make a game that followed a similar approach, though with several differentiating features so it wasn't like a direct copy or anything. One of the biggest differentiating factors was that Done Too

had been a single player game. Blizzard wanted to create a game that would allow two human players to compete against each other if they wanted to. They could play as a single player or play competitively against another human. Now keep in mind this was in ninete before most people didn't even know much about the Internet, yet a lot of us were still calling it the Information super Highway, or we were thinking about like it was a series of tubes. If you wanted to play against another human,

you really had two options open to you. One was to create a direct connection between computers in a local area network or land. This wasn't super hard to do, but it was beyond tech novices, and it did mean that you and your opponent had to be pretty much in the same room as each other, so it puts some restrictions on gameplay. The other option was to use a modem to connect directly to another player's computer also

connected to a modem. But that would mean you would need to know the specific I P address for your opponent so that you can make that connection happen. Again, for computer geeks, that wasn't at all order, But for people just learning about the Internet, you know, keep in mind, the World Wide Web itself had just become a thing, this was asking a lot. Still, the fact that Blizzard was able to take a brand new game type and expand it into a multiplayer format was a big deal.

They also decided to embrace a different aesthetic, so instead of using a science fiction setting like Dune two, they decided to embrace the fantasy genre. The Finnish game was called Warcraft ORCS Versus Humans, and Blizzard released it in November, just in time for the holiday season. Now, when we come back, I'll talk more about how Warcraft shaped blizzards future, as well as how it's sequel managed to cement that future.

But first let's take another quick break. So before we went to the break, you know, I talked about all these different games that Blizzard was working on, and the reason I mentioned those other games ahead of Warcraft, even though technically Warcraft published first, was that while they were important in the early history of Blizzard, Warcraft would play a much more pivotal role in the future of the company overall. It was also the first game that Blizzard

Entertainment would publish itself. The company didn't have to depend upon an established video game publisher like Interplay. Instead, it leaned on the reach of its parent company, Davidson and Associates, which over a decade had managed to build up a pretty impressive distribution arm of its own. In Warcraft, players take control of one of two factions, humans or orcs.

In either case, the player is tasked with building out a base and different buildings, assigning tasks to workers who gather resources, or to military units who can scout and engage with enemy forces. The user interface allowed players to select groups of units, issuing orders to multiple entities at the same time, rather than having to set each one individually, but it also meant that the UI was getting a

bit too complicated for the typical video game controller. So for that reason, Lizard made the decision to develop Warcraft as a PC only game when it first started out, with the intended players would rely on the mouse and keyboard commands to control their factions. In that first game, there wasn't that much that differentiated the Orcs from the humans,

apart from some appearance differences between the units. Both factions had units that did pretty much the same thing with the same sort of impact on the game world and on enemy units. So a basic infantry unit for the humans and a basic infantry unit for the Orcs were, for any meaningful definition, identical. They look different, but they had the exact same abilities and stats. That first Warcraft game did pretty well among both critics and the general

game buying public. It didn't break any records or anything, but the sales were encouraging, and it was enough for Blizzard to convince Davidson and associates to allow the team to create a sequel. I'll get back to that in just a second. Well, things were picking up for the company and so they decided they would pick themselves up and they moved. They moved from their original office location in Costa Mesa to a much larger one of fourteen

thousand square foot office in Irvine, California. Now these cities are in southern California, by the way. In the fall of nine, Blizzard launched its website, Blizzard dot com. Sadly, the earliest version of the site I could get a look at was from December of nineteen nine six, so a year after it had launched. I highly recommend you use archive dot org to check out old versions of websites.

You can really appreciate how far the web has come when you take a look at what passed for a cutting edge site back in nineteen five or ninety six. The Blizzard site looked pretty darn primitive back then. It also mentioned stuff that I haven't really gotten to yet, namely the release of Diablo and the launch of Battle Neet.

I'll talk about those more in our next episode. So Warcraft have been a success, though not a breakout hit for Blizzard, and it was enough for them to get the go ahead from their parent company, Davidson and Associates, which would subsequently get acquired by another company called c UC International, which would subsequently change its name to Sendent. And don't worry, we'll go through all this again in the next episode, and we won't be sticking with them

for very long. Turns out Blizzard has had a lot of different corporate bosses anyway. Blizzards Warcraft two would end up being an enormous improvement over its predecessor in many ways. The official title for the game would be Warcraft two Tides of Darkness. Much of what the game offered were refinements to the systems of the first game, but there were some big additions as well, such as air and sea units in addition to the land units that you

could command. There was also a persistent fog of war feature which might require a little bit of explanation. So fog of war describes the area of a map that a player is able to see before you exp laura map, most of that map is going to get blacked out. The only part you can really see is the part immediately surrounding your base and your units, and that means you haven't sent any units out to reveal what else

is out there. Now, as you move units around, you uncover more of the map and it becomes visible to you. Warcraft two took this this step further with persistent fog of war, which meant that while a revealed portion of the map would remain visible to the player, you know once you explored it, you didn't have to explore it again to know what was there. Geographically, you wouldn't be able to see what was currently happening in any given section of the map unless you had units in that area.

So let's say you move a scout through one part of the map and you see it's a very hilly section of the map, and then the scout gradually moves out of that section into a different section. Meanwhile, once your scout has moved away from a certain distance from

the explored territory, it fade slightly. That indicates that you no longer have line of sight in that part of the map, and that means anything could be happening in that area, like an enemy could move into that area and you wouldn't see it because you're not currently there. So if you were to move a scout back and an enemies moving through, then you would see the enemy

and it would become revealed to you. But if you didn't have a unit there, you didn't have a line of sight, you had no way of knowing what was happening. So it may not just exploration important, but also maintaining positions throughout the map. So that added another element of strategy that you needed to keep in mind. Whether you were playing against AI or another human. This feature would become a pretty standard option for RTS games following Warcraft two.

It would become one of those hallmarks of the genre. The game included more of Blizzards rather ridiculous sense of humor, which I mostly remember manifesting as the responses that units would have when you selected them. Like if you were playing on the human side and you're selecting some human units, you might get a response like what do you want when you clicked on them. Then you might send them someplace and you might hear one of them say something

like okay. The works were usually a bit more rude about things. The game did support multiplayer, and again you could play by connecting to computers directly together in a local area network or via direct connection with modems, just like with the first Warcraft. But Blizzard noticed something else that was intriguing to them. There were some enterprising programmers who had created a service that they called Collie k

a l I. This tool that you could download. Collie was a bit of a work around, so it would allow players to connect over the Internet to play various multiplayer games by essentially tricking computers emulating a local area network over the Internet. So to the computers. It would seem like all these different machines are in the same general vicinity and are directly connected to one another through a land but in reality, they'd be connecting over the Internet.

So again, it was a workaround to facilitate multiplayer sessions. Blizzard really liked that approach, and they worked to make Warcraft Too compatible with it, which would mean that up to eight players could participate in different types of multiplayer games, ranging from team based competitions to free fur alls. Collie itself was an ip X network emulator. I p X stands for Internetwork Packet Exchange, but the important thing to note is it was this sort of jerry rigged way

for people to play against each other online. Uh. The technical explanation for ip X goes well beyond a discussion about Blizzard. Blizzard Entertainment loved the idea of a system that would allow for this kind of connectivity as a native feature without the need to trick a computer system into believing it was part of a local area network.

So this would become the genesis for battle Neet. That's a service that allows players to connect with each other and play with or against one another in various games. If not for Colie, it might have taken another year or two for Blizzard to jump on developing that project. And this wasn't just because Blizzard wanted to give players more options, so that was definitely a big part of it. One of the side effects of the adoption of Kali is that Warcraft two started to outperform the sales of

its predecessor. It was a legit, blockbuster hit, helped in no small part by this third party tool developed by enthusiasts, which sent a clear message there was a real market to support online play if you could just figure out a way to do it that wouldn't overtax your infrastructure. Another thing that fueled Warcraft Too success was a rivalry with Westwood Studios. That's the company that had made Doune Too.

Westwood developed an awesome RTS game of its own called Command and Conquer Westwood, and there didn't really fire that many shots at each other directly while competing in the RTS space, but they didn't have to because their respective fans took care of all that for them. That's one of those early flame wars where you either loved one or the other, but you couldn't love both of them. The resulting Brewjaha raised the visibility of both titles, which

led to great sales. Warcraft two would eventually cross the threshold of one million copies sold. Now today, that's not necessarily a chartbuster, as popular games can count sales and need tens or maybe even more than a hundred million copies sold. That isn't always a fair fight either, because some of the most popular games land on that list not because the game was must have, but because it had been bundled with a console or a game system that was insanely popular. But a million units sold was

a huge landmark. This was big enough for Blizzard to recognize the opportunity to deliver even more Warcraft goodness two players now. At the same time, they had plans to develop other titles, so they're just weren't enough resources inside the company to create more Warcraft to content using Blizzard resources by itself, or so they thought, so they tapped a development studio called Cyberlore Studios to lead the development

on an expansion pack for Warcraft too. Blizzard began to focus on another project that I'll talk more about in the next episode. But to their dismay. They found the cyber Lore team's work to be below blizzards own standards. The company made the tough decision to cancel the contract with Cyberlore and take over development of the expansion set themselves. This also taught Blizzards founders that in house development might be the best way to go in order to preserve

the company's reputation among gamers. The resulting product had the name Warcraft Too Beyond on the Dark Portal, so if you wanted to run this game, you had to first own the base Warcraft two game. If you didn't have, Tides of Darkness, Beyond the Dark Portal would not work. But it would extend the storyline that had been started by Warcraft Too, and it introduced new campaigns and new

heroes for both sides of the conflict. Not at the time, I wasn't really aware that these games even had storylines. To me, they were just real time strategy games that consisted of matches that had you know, individual objectives, but there was no real overarching narrative. This is because I was not paying attention. This would also set me way back for future Blizzard properties, and to this day I can't really tell you what the story was for these games.

I know that the two sides were designated as the Alliance for the human side and the Horde for the Orcs, and that was something that would carry over and be expanded upon in future Blizzard titles. But we'll chat more about that in the next episode. In the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes for tech Stuff, send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is

text Stuff h s W. Don't forget. You can visit our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find a link to an archive of every episode we've ever published, including the original Blizzard episode. You also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll taught to you again about Blizzard really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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