The History of Blizzard

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This article is taken from the latest issue of PC Zone magazine. You can buy your copy online and have it delivered to your door.

Three years after Blizzard was founded, Shane Dabiri - now the lead producer on the next Blizzard MMO - stood at a 10ft by 10ft booth on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Twiddling his thumbs, he smiled and demonstrated the first Warcraft game to a group of around 30 people.

"Back then I was one of our first beta testers for Warcraft. I did more supporting of the business than anything related to the games." Dabiri's humble beginnings as an IT guy, beta tester and general computer handyman failed to tell of both him, and his company's, future successes.

Seven years later, Blizzard announced World of Warcraft to huge fanfare, and a big departure from their roots. "Up to that point we had been, for the most part, creators of games with multiplayer components to them. We always focused on not just the single-player component, but how we could get three people together to play an RTS, or a game like Diablo." He admits, though, that the inspiration wasn't totally from within. "Back then, Ultima Online and EverQuest started to become very popular."

"The MMO market was small, but a few of the guys in the office started playing. We saw the possibilities and we thought 'You know, in the future we have to do something like this.' I mean, with all of the stuff we were doing with Battle.Net, it made total sense to go in that direction - that, and a lot of us had been playing EverQuest."

Stealing players
In fact, their interest in EverQuest led Blizzard to poach several key players from the communities, including Fires of Heaven's Alex 'Furor' Afrasiabi and Jeff 'Tigole' Kaplan, who both went on to work on a great many of the quests in World of Warcraft. Kaplan now also works on the new Blizzard MMO with Dabiri, and was hired by Rob Pardo (Blizzard's Executive VP of Game Design), his EverQuest guild leader at the time.

"I think it was opportunistic. I mean, back then the MMO genre was still relatively small. There weren't many developers, and to find the best and brightest out there, you had to consider the gaming community. We didn't necessarily go out of our way to make the whole team that way, there were just a few opportunistic hires we had along the way."

Dabiri, regardless of WOW's far-reaching success, claims that it doesn't spell the end of the Warcraft series. "The Warcraft series is really near and dear to our hearts. There are always things that we're looking at, possibilities for it, ideas that we have. Other than the RTS series and our MMO, we're looking for opportunities down the road.

"And I know in the past we've made announcements that we are going to do an adventure game. Though that got cancelled, that doesn't mean we won't do anything else with the series. We love the Warcraft universe."

Last year, however, Blizzard changed as a company after a merger, becoming Activision Blizzard. Dabiri, however, insists nothing has altered. "If anything, it's just given us a wider audience to work with. From the Activision side, you have a lot of players and their games - the Guitar Heroes and the Call of Duties. People worry that when you get bought by another company they'll change the way you work. It's happened to Blizzard before, and every time the business people on the other end have known better - you don't touch something that's working."

While Blizzard and WOW's success screams careful planning and strategy, Dabiri claims otherwise. "Back before WOW came out, there were a lot of companies questioning whether MMOs were going to be lucrative or not. I remember at GDC 2002 some developers saying 'Oh, this'll never work - this'll never happen,' in reaction to EverQuest and Ultima Online.

"Several companies tried but gave up on the industry - but when WOW came out, all you saw were developers trying to make MMOs. I think there's a market for them and we've kind of grown that base and I do think that there is a future for them."

Well, Blizzard must have done something different, as five years and two expansions in, World of Warcraft has passed the 11 million subscription mark. "You know, back in 2004 we didn't plan to say by 2009 we'll have 11 million subscribers. There was no way in a million years that we would have thought that we would be as successful as we are today. We just decided to - like in all of our games - make something epic and fun.

"We've shown that you can do something amazing given the right talent, and the right time, and the right type of design. The timing was right, too: you see a lot of people going online now, more so than they did back in 2001, or even 2004. People communicate more online, they tweet, they Facebook - they're more social. Players are more connected and games like World of Warcraft actually cater themselves to these people."

Ever Onwards
As far as World of Warcraft's success, though, Dabiri couldn't tell you how long it's going to last. "There are a lot of things that we did to make it this far. But I don't think we did them because we thought they would get 11 million customers. We did them because we thought those of things that make it fun for us. And at the end of the day we are probably our first customers.

"Everything that we thought about MMOs has been kind of broken by World of Warcraft. We don't have anything to look at as a basis for a game that lasted this long. Even if you look at some of those older ones like the EQs and UOs - these games still out there 10 years later. All we're going to do is continue to add value to our customers and make sure that the game is the best that it can be for as long as we can."

PC Zone Staff