Blizzard Entertainment
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| Blizzard Entertainment | |
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| Type | Private (subsidiary of Vivendi Games) |
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| Founded | 1991 |
| Headquarters |  Irvine, CA, U.S. Velizy, Yvelines, France |
| Key people | Michael Morhaime (president and co-founder) Rob Pardo (vice president) Shane Dabiri (producer on World of Warcraft) Jeffrey Kaplan (lead designer on World of Warcraft) |
| Industry | Computer and video game industry |
| Products | The Warcraft series The StarCraft series The Diablo series (full list in article) |
| Employees | More than 1,600[1] |
| Slogan | N/A |
| Website | www.blizzard.com |
Blizzard Entertainment is an American based computer game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994 it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates to ensure the quality of their games.[2] Many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years after their release. All of their computer games since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans have been best-sellers.
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[edit] Titles
- The Lord of the Rings (1991) (Amiga port) - Computer role-playing game
- Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess (1991) (Amiga port) - Xiangqi simulation
- The Lost Vikings (1992) - platform game
- Rock & Roll Racing (1993) - racing game
- Blackthorne (1994) - fantasy platform game
- The Death and Return of Superman (1994) - side-scrolling beat 'em up
- Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- The Lost Vikings II (1995) - platform game
- Justice League Task Force (SNES version) (1995) - fighting game
- Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- Diablo (1996) - action-oriented computer role-playing game
- StarCraft (1998) - science fiction real-time strategy game
- StarCraft: Brood War (1998) - expansion pack
- Diablo II (2000) - action-oriented RPG
- Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003) - expansion pack
- World of Warcraft (2004) - MMORPG set in the Warcraft universe
- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (January 16, 2007) - expansion set for World of Warcraft.
Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations and StarCraft: Ghost, which was indefinitely postponed on March 24, 2006 and whose current status is in question.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they will be producing a Warcraft live-action movie. Blizzard Entertainment - Press Release (2006-05-09). Retrieved on August 31, 2006.
[edit] Standard of Excellence
Blizzard Entertainment has always demanded excellence in their games. Employees are almost always required to have several years of experience in the field they wish to join, and, often times, are also required to have previously worked on one or more launched projects over the last few years prior to being hired.
In accord with Blizzard's requiring excellence in their products, the adventure game Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was cancelled by Blizzard directly before the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Bill Roper, the computer game's producer, was looking at the game just days before its unveiling at that years E3, and realized it wasn't up to par with other adventure games of the time. He called a meeting with five "of us high-level people", and at the meeting they discussed whether or not the game met Blizzard's standard of excellence. By the meeting's end, they decided it didn't and ordered all Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans booths at the Blizzard section of that year's E3 to be removed and replaced with Starcraft booths, another Blizzard game that would go on to be their most famous. [1]
Bill Roper now feels that he did the right thing. He has stated that he felt strongly that Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans would not have matched Blizzard's and Blizzard's fan's expectations. After a year of work, days before E3 and with Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans almost 100% completed, the computer game was cancelled by its own producer for not matching with Blizzard's expected excellence that its known for producing with its games. [2]
[edit] Former employees
Over the years, some former Blizzard employees have moved on and established gaming companies of their own:
- Flagship Studios[3], currently working on Hellgate: London and Mythos.
- ArenaNet[4], creator of Guild Wars.
- Ready At Dawn Studios[5], creator of Daxter.
- Red 5 Studios[6], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
- Castaway Entertainment[7], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
- Hyboreal Games[8], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
- Nethera Studios[9], currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen title.
[edit] Battle.net
Battle.net is an online gaming service used for its games Diablo, Starcraft, Starcraft: Brood War, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Warcraft III, and Warcraft III Expansion Set: The Frozen Throne. It was released in January 1997 coinciding with the release of Diablo. It functions as a way to play over the Internet, featuring cooperative and player-versus-player game playing, a game matchmaking system, and online chat among other features. Battle.net is free, and only requires an Internet connection and account registration in order to use.
A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.
In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.
Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.
This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1, 2005.
[edit] Warden Client
Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client' in order to detect the use of third-party programs used for the purpose of cheating. The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. This determination is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes known to correspond to cheat programs. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game.
The Warden software has run afoul of controversy among some privacy advocates. Since Warden scans running processes other than the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across e-mail addresses, instant messenger IDs, and personally identifiable information, privacy advocates and others state that Warden behaves similarly to spyware. However, many World of Warcraft players note that only hashed strings are compared, and no personally identifiable information is transmitted back to Blizzard; moreover, all players consent, via the EULA and terms of use, to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running. Supporters of the Warden software claim that, instead of being spyware, Warden behaves more like anti-virus software, except that instead of detecting viruses, Warden detects third-party cheat programs, and thus helps to prevent cheating within the game.
- Technical description of Warden on the forums of the WoW!Sharp third-party software development forums
- World of Warcraft Terms of Use (See section 14.A)
[edit] FreeCraft
On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used.
As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus.
[edit] Trivia
- The phrase "There is no cow level" is a running joke started by the company's game designers stemming from repeated rumors on Battle.net that a "secret cow level" existed in Diablo. The phrase "There is no cow level" was a cheat code in the original StarCraft game. In Diablo II, a cow level was made as a secret level. "There is no cow level" now also appears as a 'tip of the day' on the loading screen of World of Warcraft.
- In Blizzard's real-time strategy games (the StarCraft and Warcraft series), clicking on a character repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with some of the most famous including the Orc Grunt's "Stop poking me!" or the Human Footman's "Are you still touching me?". This has been Blizzard's trademark for many years, and continues in Warcraft III the same units said similar things such as "Why are you poking me again?" and "Poke poke poke, is that all you do?", as well as "Me not that kind of Orc!". Many of the humorous phrases came from movies and comics, like the famous "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "I hate people, but I love gatherings," from Clerks, "This is my boomstick!" from Army of Darkness, or "Spider sense... tingling" from Spider-Man.[citation needed] In some cases, the phrases refer to other Blizzard games, such as the Acolyte in Warcraft III saying "My life for Aiur- er, I mean, Ner'zhul", with Aiur being a planet in StarCraft. Artanis, a unit in StarCraft, exclaims "This is not WarCraft in space! It's much more sophisticated!". In World of Warcraft, clicking on a friendly NPC repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites as well.
- In the Warcraft and StarCraft series, clicking on a "critter" repeatedly will make it explode.
- The StarCraft cheat "operation cwal" was formed after the group Operation CWAL (Can't Wait Any Longer), who looked forward to StarCraft and did many things to show how much they longed for its release. Blizzard, noticing this group, named this cheat that rapidly increases the rate of unit and structure production after them. Primarily the group wrote fan fiction about special operatives raiding the Blizzard headquarters in order to free the game.
- The three founders of the company are UCLA graduates. This is likely the reason why typing in "UCLA" as a cheat code in Warcraft II causes the words "Go Bruins!" to be displayed on the screen.
- In World of Warcraft, there are references to Blizzard's game The Lost Vikings in which you may locate "Olaf's All Purpose Shield". Olaf the Stout is one of the three vikings used in The Lost Vikings in which by using his shield, you were able to glide between two areas that you were not able to jump to previously. In World of Warcraft, "Olaf's All Purpose Shield" is used to slow your fall, allowing characters to explore areas which would normally kill the player upon falling without injury. Also, two in-game items' names form, when read backwards, the name of the game Lost Vikings ("The Shaft of Tsol", "The Amulet of Gni'kiv"). Both items are found in the Uldaman instance, and three NPC dwarves resembling the Lost Vikings stand near the shaft.
- If the disk for Beyond the Dark Portal (the Warcraft II expansion) is inserted into a CD player, the orchestrated music from the game can be played. In addition, there is a bonus 13th track with a song called "I'm a Medieval Man" which features remixed sound bites and instruments from the game. "Medieval Man" is also a code in StarCraft that immediately gains all upgrades for free.
[edit] April Fool's
Every Year on the 1st of April, Blizzard posts creative humorous news on their website as an April Fool's joke.
Blizzard's 2007 jokes are currently available at the World of Warcraft site. They include the "Tinfoil Hat," an absurdly long and difficult attunement process for their next dungeon, The Black Temple, and the announcement of a new RTS: "Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth." The Tinfoil Hat is explained to be an equippable hat to prevent people from seeing items, statistics, or the character in general. The screenshot featuring the hat is a reference to Psychonauts, which had a tinfoil hat wearing character named Dogen. The attunement process for The Black Temple is absurdly long, with a few incredibly difficult to achieve requirements at the end. For example, it requires that fifteen bosses from the hardest level of dungeons be killed within ten minutes of each other. The RTS is simply Warcraft III with some changes made to the advertisement text. Also, the four "boxes" available in the picture were obviously taken from Warcraft III with the game name edited on (and horribly so).
In 2006, one of their jokes was related to the upcoming World of Warcraft's expansion: The Burning Crusade. Blizzard had not revealed what the new Alliance race would be, and on March 31st, one day early, they posted a news item on the World of Warcraft main page saying that the new race would be the Wisps. (In Warcraft III, Wisps are resource-gatherers for the Night Elves.) Wisps were given the 'Detonate' racial ability that caused them to permanently explode, requiring a new character to be rolled.[10] (The Alliance race was later officially revealed on May 10 at E³ as the Draenei)
The other news posted at the same time was that Blizzard planned to open a fast food chain named BurgerCraft, where people could order food and drinks named after Blizzard characters and games.[11] This news was actually posted on the main page after a joke thread was made in their General Forums as a complaint lambasting Blizzards' customer service.[12]
Blizzard also posted an absurdly long list of updates to World of Warcraft that would have ruined most characters and gameplay.[13] These fake patch notes included many contradictory changes, one example being "using friendly emotes will now significantly increase the Infernal and Doomguard's chance to remain loyal to the Warlock," with the following entry reading, "Friendly emotes are no longer available to the Warlock." Other April Fool's "give away" updates that were especially comical:
- "Additional grass areas have been added to the enemy faction's zones. This grass is exceptionally green."
- "Edwin Vancleef will occasionally shout 'Hey you guys!' as players fight their way through Deadmines." (A reference to the similarities between this dungeon and the movie The Goonies.[citation needed])
- "New wing added to Scarlet Monastery called the Graveyard! Check it out!" (The Graveyard instance has always existed, however a majority of players do not bother doing it as there are no outstanding benefits of completing it.)
A previous April Fool's joke included a new race, Pandaren, supposedly included in a patch for Warcraft III (the Pandaren Brewmaster later became a hireable Hero Class in the game's expansion, due to positive response to the joke). After that joke, Blizzard customers became very favorable to Pandas.[14]
One interesting April Fool's joke was when a new hero called the Goblin Tinker was announced and would soon be available for hire in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne from neutral taverns.[citation needed] Many fans saw the date and had a good laugh about it, in addition to remarking how realistic the unit graphics looked. Surprisingly, the reason the graphics looked so realistic was that it wasn't a joke at all; the Goblin Tinker was indeed added to the game in the following patch.
Blizzard also once stated that the two-headed ogre would be a playable race in the upcoming World of Warcraft MMORPG, and that it would require cooperation between two players to control the ogre as each player would only control one head. Several Blizzard web team members logged in as an Ogre to pretend like it was a playable class.[citation needed]
[edit] Criticisms
- After the release of World of Warcraft, many players felt that there was a decline in the quality of the work Blizzard Entertainment produced, the customer service being the best example.
- In the maintenance of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has been repeatedly chastised for making unpopular class changes and game design decisions. These changes tend to be criticized by a noisy minority and accepted by a silent majority.
- Some fans believe that since the high success of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has simply forgotten its other, still popular games, like Starcraft and Diablo. Starcraft fans are awaiting a sequel.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Source: (Blizzard's president interview
- ^ GamePro Staff. "GamePro Q&A: Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan on The Burning Crusade", GamePro, 2006-08-29. Retrieved on September 30, 2006.
- ^ About Flagship Studios
- ^ ArenaNet
- ^ About Ready At Dawn Studios
- ^ Red 5 Studios
- ^ About Castaway Entertainment
- ^ About Hyboreal Games
- ^ Nethèra Studios
- ^ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/townhall/wisps.html
- ^ http://www.blizzard.com/press/060401.shtml
- ^ Welcome to World of Burgercraft. Archived from the original on 2005-03-23.
- ^ 1.11.0 Patch Notes. Retrieved on February 11, 2007.
- ^ http://www.battle.net/war3/pandaren/
[edit] External links
[edit] Company & Corporate
[edit] The Bnetd case
- Blizzard's official statement on battle.net emulators
- A rebuttal to Blizzard's official emulation statement
- Yale LawMeme's analysis of the case
- EFF page on case
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Computer and video games developed by Blizzard Entertainment
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Blackthorne • Lost Vikings • Rock N' Roll Racing • Death and Return of Superman |
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Video game publishers | Video game developers | Blizzard Entertainment | Irvine, California | Entertainment companies | United States video game companies | Companies based in Orange County, California | Companies established in 1991
