Mike Morhaime was not the primary leader of Blizzard Entertainment when it was formed (as Silicon & Synapse) 27 years ago. The company’s main instigator was Allen Adham, who was a big gamer and badgered his college friend Morhaime for a year to join him in making video games.
Mike Morhaime was not the primary leader of Blizzard Entertainment when it was formed (as Silicon & Synapse) 27 years ago. The company’s main instigator was Allen Adham, who was a big gamer and badgered his college friend Morhaime for a year to join him in making video games.
But Morhaime and cofounder Frank Pearce gave in to their more gregarious friend, and the company that became Blizzard opened its doors on February 8,1991. Adham was a natural leader, while Morhaime was an engineer who enjoyed coding and playing games. Morhaime took over in 2004, after Adham resigned to pursue a different life. And for the past 14 years, until today, Morhaime was president of Blizzard.
Activision Blizzard announced on Wednesday that Morhaime was stepping down as president and was handing over his duties to J. Allen Brack, longtime steward of World of Warcraft and a 12-year veteran of Blizzard, which has some of the most devoted fans in gaming for titles ranging from Overwatch to StarCraft. It’s a big changing of the guard at one of gaming’s most valuable companies, now valued at $63.3 billion. During the past year, Blizzard has seen successes such as the launch of its latest version of World of Warcraft and the debut of the Overwatch League esports competition.
“When Blizzard’s founder Allen Adham first invited me to join him in creating Silicon & Synapse (our original name), nothing could have prepared me for the amazing adventure that we would share for the next 27 years,” Morhaime said in his parting letter. “Our original mission and values consisted of four simple words that formed our foundation: ‘We make great games.’ We crafted that statement before we had even released our first game, but we were committed to living up to it.”
Through its games, Blizzard developed a unique position in the annals of gaming. It killed almost as many games as it published in a relentless focus on making quality games. The company promises to carry on its legacy as Morhaime steps into an advisory role.
“Today has been a swirl of emotions. First, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to Mike. His work on some of our industry’s most iconic games is the reason I came to Blizzard,” said J. Allen Brack, who is taking over as president of Blizzard. “Not only is he an inspiring leader, but he’s also been a wise and patient mentor to me during my time at Blizzard. And he’s been a good friend. Joining the World of Warcraft team and my favorite game company nearly 13 years ago was an unimaginable dream. Now, to be chosen to lead Blizzard into the future is both a huge honor, and a tremendous responsibility.”
Adham instilled that sense of quality early on. In an interview for Blizzard’s 25th anniversary, Morhaime told me that Adham wouldn’t cave to different pressures to get a game done so it could be on a magazine cover or the company could keep to a schedule. That ethic was put to the test early on with The Lost Vikings, a game that Silicon & Synapse built for publisher Interplay. The team felt that the work on the game was pretty much done, and it had been sent over to Brian Fargo, Interplay’s chief.
Fargo made a lot of notes about the game, including feedback such as parts when the levels were too hard or the vikings looked too similar.
“My first reaction was ‘What? It’s fine the way it is,’” Morhaime recalled. “Allen had a very different attitude. He said, ‘He’s right. He’s right about all of this stuff. We took the time and addressed the issues.’”
Silicon & Synapse didn’t have the resources to fix the game, but Fargo freed up some money for Silicon & Synapse to go back to work on the fixes.
“One of the things I fondly remember about Blizzard (Silicon and Synapse at the time) was how they would take a core concept for the game and push it further than what the initial designs called for,” said Fargo, in an email to GamesBeat. “Never would they accept the bare minimum as the bar. And they always accepted comments to improve without being defensive but instead sought out the issues like a scientist would look for more test results.”
“We wound up with a much, much better game,” Morhaime said. “Going through that process, and seeing where the game was before, and how much better it became with this additional effort, was a huge lesson to us. We got additional feedback from people who weren’t inside the development team, but knew how to make games. That was incredibly valuable. Addressing that feedback and going through an iterative process, especially toward the end of development, could really move the meter on quality. We have done that on every game since.”
The company would go on to publish nearly 30 games after that, but the focus on quality in The Lost Vikings was a formative moment for Blizzard and how it would approach the creation of games in the future.
That sense of taking pride in the work, meeting the highest quality expectations, and never shipping a game before it was ready was instilled within Blizzard early on, Morhaime said. And it became part of the glue that held the culture and the team together for so long, Morhaime said.
When I was at the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed Adham and Morhaime when the company was going by the name Chaos Studios. It was based in Costa Mesa, California, and it had just 19 employees at the time. They had done successful games for Interplay, and were ready to move out on their own.
Silicon & Synapse was acquired for what, in hindsight, looks like a tiny amount of money. Davidson & Associates, an educational software company based nearby in Torrance, California, came calling. The company, which Bob and Jan Davidson started, acquired Chaos Studios in early 1994 for $6.75 million.
“Back then, it seemed like a lot,” Morhaime said.
Indeed, Adham was 27 at the time, and Morhaime was 26.
In 1996, CUC International, a mail-order club company, bought Davidson & Associates for $1.6 billion, and it also shelled out $1.5 billion to buy game publisher Sierra On-Line. Then CUC merged with HFS, and the company was renamed Cendant. By 1998, CUC got busted for accounting fraud, which took place years before the merger. Cendant stock lost 80 percent of its value over the next six months.
The game business was sold off in 1998 to French publisher Havas. In 1999, French media company Vivendi acquired Havas. Blizzard became part of the Vivendi Games group. Vivendi also acquired Universal, the movie company, in 2000. By that time, Blizzard had 200 employees.
Morhaime realized what sort of leadership path was the best for him to take, as the company became bigger and bigger. Blizzard stayed put under the same ownership structure until Vivendi Games merged with Activision in July 2008 in an $18.9 billion deal. That led to the creation of Activision Blizzard, with Blizzard Entertainment still operating independently with the larger company.
At that time, Blizzard had 2,600 employees. Since that time, Blizzard has been part of Activision Blizzard.
