In 2023, Blizzard Entertainment is one of the most well-known names in gaming. Franchises like Warcraft, StarCraft, or Diablo are globally recognized – World of Warcraft is one of the most successful games of all time and triggered the MMORPG boom in gaming. But how did Blizzard break through in 1994? That is explained by one of the founders, Allen Adham.
Who is speaking? VentureBeat reports on a panel at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, where Allen Adham also spoke.
- He co-founded the studio “Silicon & Synapse” in February 1991 with his college friends Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce, which later became Blizzard. Adham was the one in 1993 who found the name of the studio too technical. His suggestion “Chaos Studios” did not appeal to investors, and they ultimately settled on “Blizzard”.
- Adham was among other roles the “Executive Producer” at the company and programmed games like “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans”. He is also considered the original lead designer of World of Warcraft.
- That sounds like an enormous workload, and it was: Adham worked 14 to 16 hours, 7 days a week for Blizzard back then. He left the company in 2004 to switch to the finance sector. However, he returned in 2016 and has been working on new Blizzard projects since then.
Blizzard made good games as early as 1992 – but the breakthrough only came in 1995
This was Blizzard’s situation back then:
People know Blizzard today, but if you go back far enough in time, we were just a small indie developer. We weren’t even called Blizzard.
The company was called “Silicon & Synapse” back then, and no one knew how to pronounce it correctly. Adham says the company had always developed great games (Lost Vikings was released back in 1992), but the breakthrough was lacking.
The major success came only when Warcraft (1994) set the stage for Warcraft II (1995).
The problem back then was that you first needed to be discovered by players.
Blizzard put giant heads on the game boxes, and they got bigger and bigger
This is how the company made the breakthrough: Adham says that back then customers still bought games in stores, and there was a gigantic mass of boxes from which one had to somehow stand out:
How do you get someone who scans all these products to take your game off the shelf?
The answer was ultimately: giant heads. They put these as cover art on the game packaging.
As Adham says, each of Blizzard’s early games had ever-growing heads, a technique to capture the attention of customers.
“We didn’t want to spend money on other brands”
These were Blizzard’s ideas: Adham further explains that Blizzard didn’t want to pay money for a big brand, but wanted to develop its own brands by connecting to well-known themes that were already familiar to people, so to speak, to general folklore. This way, players could quickly form emotional connections:
- Warcraft was high fantasy
- StarCraft was high science fiction
- Diablo had a biblical tone
- Overwatch was Blizzard’s answer to superheroes
One of Blizzard’s key design principles was “Gameplay first”: Blizzard prioritized core gameplay above all else, aiming to appeal to as many people as possible.
Chess is a game you can teach an eight-year-old in 5 minutes.
Still, chess can be played for a lifetime and has been popular for centuries. Adham aims to achieve the same for the next projects and franchises from Blizzard:
Ideally, our games will be played for 10, 20 years. […] When we think about the next game franchises, we’re talking about welcoming everyone. That makes the design of the games and game franchises more difficult.
However, some who worked at the company back then say that the Blizzard Adham describes here is no longer the Blizzard of today:
Original developers of Diablo say: Blizzard has totally changed
