At the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994, tucked away in a small room off the main floor, a little company showed Computer Gaming World’s editors its one and only computer game. Its president, Allen Adham, gave the demonstration himself, and the magazine was hooked. The game was Warcraft, and the company, by then called Blizzard, had spent its first three years converting other people’s games and making cartridges for the Super Nintendo. Five years later Computer Gaming World counted three million-selling games in a row. Blizzard’s habit was not to invent a genre but to take one that already existed, the real-time strategy of Dune II or the dungeon crawl, and make it faster, friendlier and playable against other people. That approach carried it from Warcraft to Diablo, StarCraft and World of Warcraft, through half a dozen changes of owner, into Microsoft.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1991, as Silicon & Synapse, by three UCLA graduates: Allen Adham, Michael Morhaime and Frank Pearce.
- Based: Irvine, California. Blizzard North, formerly Condor, was in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Renamed: Chaos Studios, then Blizzard Entertainment, by 1994.
- Owners: Davidson & Associates from 1994; CUC International, which became Cendant, from 1996; Havas and Vivendi from 1998–99; Activision Blizzard from 2008; Microsoft from 2023.
- Best-known games: The Lost Vikings (1993), Warcraft (1994), Warcraft II (1995), Diablo (1996), StarCraft (1998), Diablo II (2000), Warcraft III (2002), World of Warcraft (2004).
Silicon & Synapse
Allen Adham and Michael Morhaime had studied at UCLA; Patrick Wyatt, who knew Morhaime from an engineering fraternity there, began at Silicon & Synapse in February 1991 on a contract to convert Interplay’s Battle Chess to Windows 3. Frank Pearce, the third founder, remembered the console years as small: “When we were making SNES titles the dev team consisted of maybe one-and-a-half programmers and three or four artists.” For Interplay the studio made The Lost Vikings (1993), a puzzle game for three stubborn Norsemen, and Rock n’ Roll Racing. It also made games for Sunsoft based on DC Comics’ superheroes; while it wrote the Super Nintendo Justice League Task Force, a small Bay Area studio called Condor was writing the Mega Drive version, which is how the two teams met.
The games were well reviewed but did not bring in the money Adham wanted for an independent studio, and in February 1994 Davidson & Associates, a publisher of educational software, bought the company, for a price later reported as $6.75 million. Adham first renamed it Chaos Studios, found that another company already had the name, and settled on Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans came out that November.
Warcraft
Warcraft was Blizzard’s version of Westwood’s Dune II, moved to a fantasy war between humans and orcs, and its makers have said as much: the team was hooked on Dune 2 and argued about its tactics almost daily. What Blizzard added was the chance for two people to fight each other by modem or network. Computer Gaming World called it “a perfect bit of creative larceny” and then, a few months later, “the best real-time strategy game since Dune II”. At Westwood, Adam Isgreen recalled, the similarities were “pretty… blatant”, and relations between the two studios were not always easy in the early years. The Warcraft and real-time strategy entries tell that story.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) was received, Edge wrote later, on a scale “monstrously larger than anyone had predicted”. By early 1997 Computer Gaming World reckoned that it and Command & Conquer had sold “somewhere near two million units” between them.
Diablo and Battle.net
Condor, the Bay Area studio, had been founded in 1993 by David Brevik and the brothers Max and Erich Schaefer, and Brevik had been thinking about a dungeon game since school, inspired by the Unix games Moria and Angband. Blizzard signed it to make Diablo. The design started out turn-based, “you would take a step and then the monsters would”, as Erich Schaefer remembered it, and it was Blizzard that suggested switching to real time. Brevik rewrote the code in a week: “The moment I put the change in, clicked on a skeleton and my character walked over and smacked it to pieces, the clouds parted.” Condor was running out of money months before release, “the taxman was literally at the door”, and Blizzard bought it. It became Blizzard North.
Diablo shipped at the turn of 1997 together with Blizzard’s own online service, Battle.net. Computer Gaming World explained the idea before launch: all a player needed was an internet provider and the game, and one click in the main menu led to other players, at no extra charge. By early 2000 PC Player counted more than 2.5 million registered players and over 50,000 on it every evening. Condor’s founders admitted to Edge that they had not expected the cheating: “It was foreign to us to have a hit game, to have a million people playing.”
StarCraft and the Havas years
StarCraft was delayed for two years after a lukewarm first showing and reworked; when it came out in 1998, with three races that played quite differently, Computer Gaming World called it “the most satisfying real-time strategy game to date”, and it became a spectator sport in South Korea (see esports).
By then Blizzard had changed hands twice more. In 1996 CUC International, a membership-services company, agreed to buy both Davidson and Sierra On-Line, and CUC merged into Cendant the following year. After accounting problems halved Cendant’s share price, it agreed at the end of 1998 to sell its software business, Sierra and Blizzard included, to the French group Havas, itself a division of Vivendi. Computer Gaming World, writing in February 1999, no longer counted Blizzard as an independent (“our friends in Irvine are part of the CUC behemoth”) and saw the strain in the talent that had left and in the cancelled adventure game Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans.
Diablo II followed in 2000 and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002, whose players’ custom maps included Defense of the Ancients, the start of the MOBA genre.
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft (2004) took Azeroth online as a subscription role-playing game (see MMORPGs). When Edge visited Irvine in 2004, four years into its development, it had a core team of 65 developers, besides the 25-strong film department that made Blizzard’s cinematics. By 2010, Edge reported, it had 12 million subscribers and brought in nearly 40 per cent of the revenue of the world’s largest games publisher. Adham, burnt out, stepped back from running the company in 2004 and left Morhaime in charge.
That publisher was Activision Blizzard. In December 2007 Activision agreed to merge with Vivendi Games, which owned Blizzard, and the merger closed in July 2008 (see Activision). Blizzard kept its own name and went on with StarCraft II (2010), Diablo III (2012), the card game Hearthstone (2014) and the team shooter Overwatch (2016).
After 2018
Morhaime stepped down as president in October 2018, after 27 years, and left in April 2019; J. Allen Brack, who had run World of Warcraft, succeeded him, and Adham returned to the leadership team. In July 2021 California’s civil rights agency sued Activision Blizzard, alleging a “frat boy” culture mainly at Blizzard; the company denied the claims, Brack stepped down within weeks, and the state case was settled in December 2023 (the Activision entry has the detail).
Microsoft completed its purchase of Activision Blizzard on 13 October 2023. In January 2024 it cut 1,900 jobs across its games business; Blizzard’s president Mike Ybarra left, Adham left the company he had co-founded, and an unannounced survival game was cancelled. Johanna Faries, who had run Call of Duty, became president in February 2024. In April 2024 Blizzard and NetEase agreed to bring World of Warcraft and its other games back to China, after their partnership had ended the year before, and later that year the World of Warcraft team voted to form a union. In November 2024, thirty years after the original, Blizzard released Warcraft I: Remastered.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 175, February 1999: feature, “Vote Independent” (Blizzard at CES in 1994, “a small offshoot of edutainment maven Davidson”; the Warcraft demonstration by its president; three million-unit sellers; part of CUC; departures and Warcraft Adventures); news of Cendant’s sale of its software business, with Sierra and Blizzard, to Havas, “a division of Vivendi SA”.
- Edge (Australian edition) issue 2, November 2004, pp. 63–66: “Cold Calling” (founded in 1991 by three UCLA graduates as Silicon & Synapse; Frank Pearce on the Super Nintendo team; Allen Adham as co-founder; Irvine; the StarCraft delay; Blizzard North; the World of Warcraft team; Warcraft Adventures).
- Retro Gamer issue 111, February 2013, pp. 86–89: Graeme Mason, “The Making of Warcraft”, with Patrick Wyatt (UCLA, Battle Chess, Silicon & Synapse’s founders, the Warcraft project).
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, from p. 48: The Lost Vikings (Silicon & Synapse became Blizzard Entertainment in 1994; Interplay; more a puzzle game than planned). GamePro issue 105, June 1997: The Lost Vikings 2 advertisement (“3 burly Norsemen too stubborn to ask for directions”).
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, from p. 69: Diablo feature (Silicon & Synapse founded in 1991; Condor; Blizzard North).
- PC Player (Germany), March 2000, pp. 74–76: “Firmenhistorie: Blizzard Entertainment” (the DC Comics games; Davidson in February 1994; Chaos Studios; Battle.net’s registered players).
- Computer Gaming World issue 126, January 1995, from p. 228: Chris Lombardi, Warcraft review. Issue 134, September 1995, p. 22: “The best real-time strategy game since Dune II”.
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008, p. 74: “Blizzard vs Westwood”, with Adam Isgreen.
- Computer Gaming World issue 151, February 1997: Terry Coleman on sales of Command & Conquer and Warcraft II.
- Edge issue 210, January 2010, pp. 104–107: “The Making Of Diablo”, with David Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer (Condor, Sunsoft and Justice League Task Force, turn-based to real time, the purchase, Battle.net and cheating).
- Computer Gaming World issue 147, October 1996: Diablo preview and Battle.net. Issue 152, March 1997: Diablo review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 141, April 1996: CUC’s purchase of Sierra and intent to acquire Davidson (“distributors of Blizzard Entertainment”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 168, July 1998, p. 172: Robert Coffey, StarCraft review.
- Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010: World of Warcraft’s 12 million subscribers and share of Activision Blizzard’s revenue.
- Wikipedia, “Blizzard Entertainment” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the founding in February 1991; the reasons for the names; the Davidson price of $6.75 million, citing Jason Schreier, Play Nice (2024), chapter 2; Adham’s departure in 2004; the release years of Diablo III, Hearthstone and Overwatch; the NetEase agreement and the union votes of 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment
- “Mike Morhaime Steps Down As Blizzard President, J. Allen Brack Taking His Place”, Game Informer, 3 October 2018 (web, secondary); GameSpot, “Blizzard Co-Founder/President Mike Morhaime Steps Down” (web, secondary): Adham’s return to the leadership team. https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/10/03/mike-morhaime-steps-down-as-blizzard-president-j-allen-brack-taking-his-place and https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-co-founderpresident-mike-morhaime-steps-d/1100-6462259/
- For the 2021 lawsuit and its settlement, and the 2008 merger and 2023 purchase, see the sources of the Activision entry.
- “Microsoft Gaming lays off 1,900 staff as Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra and chief design officer Allen Adham depart”, Gematsu, 25 January 2024 (web, secondary): Phil Spencer’s and Matt Booty’s memos; the survival game. https://www.gematsu.com/2024/01/microsoft-gaming-lays-off-1900-staff-as-blizzard-entertainment-president-mike-ybarra-and-chief-design-officer-allen-adham-depart
- “Blizzard’s New President Is Johanna Faries”, Game Informer, 29 January 2024 (web, secondary). https://gameinformer.com/news/2024/01/29/blizzards-new-president-is-johanna-faries-a-former-call-of-duty-franchise-manager
- “Blizzard, NetEase deal: World of Warcraft and other hit games return to China as dispute ends”, CNN Business, 10 April 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/business/china-netease-blizzard-games-return-intl-hnk