In a light-hearted chat, former Blizzard employees from Germany spoke about their time at the developer of World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo and the nice and less nice things they experienced. One anecdote might not please every player.
Who shared the anecdotes? In the seventh episode of the podcast “Tobis Gaming Café,” host Tobias Jahn had three former colleagues from his time at Blizzard as guests, namely Bernd Gottsmann, Benedikt Oehmen, and Marc Olbertz.
The discussion focused on their start at Blizzard, memorable events, the negative influence of Activision on the “Blizzard family,” as well as the waves of layoffs and the closure of the Versailles location, which some of the podcast participants were directly affected by.
The entire episode can be found on the Tobis Gaming Café website.
What about the fake account? Starting at 01:09:03, Bernd Gottsmann (who held various roles in his 14 years at Blizzard, such as quality assurance and localization) remembered that he had an anonymous account for the WoW forum for a year and a half. This allowed him to address German players safely who had annoyed him for whatever reason.
Instead of constructive contributions, the fake account received – you probably guessed it – hefty insults like “You’re such trash!” It was apparently known in the discussion group that Bernd communicated with customers in this way. A comment from host Tobi: “Whenever I read something like that, I always knew it was Bernd.”
A dance competition for the history
Bernd had another anecdote ready about the memorable dance competition during an esports qualification tournament that was broadcast live. During the musical performance, two particularly ambitious dancers supposedly took to the stage, who apparently wanted to win the collector’s edition of some Blizzard game that was offered as the grand prize.
According to Bernd, one of the dancers began to sway his hips to Gangnam Style while unbuttoning his pants. This already caused shock among the Blizzard employees present. The camera was, of course, focused on him, and Twitch witnessed how the pants fell to the ground.
The good news: long boxers. It couldn’t possibly get worse, could it? Well … next, the dancer removed his arm prosthesis, tucked it between his legs, and … intensified his Gangnam dance. Bernd continued: “The crowd went wild like Schmidt’s cat. […] He of course won the collector’s edition.”
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the corresponding clip from the dance competition anywhere. If you want to learn more about the development of Blizzard, we recommend our article It’s not Activision that has the “good old Blizzard” on its conscience, but the success of WoW.
