No way without grandma – thanks to a loan from Michael Morhaime’s grandmother, there is Blizzard, the company behind hits like WoW, Diablo 3, or Overwatch. Without Mike Morhaime’s grandmother, seed capital would have been lacking.
Anyone looking to start a large company needs appropriate seed capital. But where to get it without stealing? This was likely what Michael “Mike” Morhaime, one of the co-founders of Blizzard, thought around 26 years ago. At the company’s start, he and Allen Adham had to put $10,000 each on the table just to get started.
But that’s quite a hefty hurdle for an aspiring developer, and so he did what he could: He asked his grandmother for help. Morhaime borrowed $15,000 from her, as she trusted him. She only wanted the money to be repaid in monthly installments of $100 – without interest.
Morhaime says that “his grandparents always supported him a lot. [My grandmother] wasn’t a gamer herself, she didn’t play our games, but I know she was always very proud of everything I did.”
The small handwritten IOU is today one of the relics found in Blizzard’s “Vault.” This chamber contains numerous small treasures collected over several decades. Not only can you find the aforementioned IOU, but also plenty of old concept art or code for games that would have otherwise been lost long ago.
A chamber full of Blizzard treasures
In fact, the “Vault Team” – a dedicated team at Blizzard that exclusively takes care of these treasures – usually doesn’t allow people into the chamber, which even has special protective measures. The temperature is strictly controlled, and the lighting is dim to prevent damage to the artworks from time as much as possible.
However, for the opening of BlizzCon 2017, they made a tour of the Vault for the first time and presented some particularly historic objects from Blizzard in more detail.
It’s nice to see that even a huge corporation like Blizzard has its beginnings in a typical point: begging for money from the previous generation.
What do we learn from this? For a game studio like Blizzard, an old woman has to knit for quite a long time.
