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Blizzard Marks 20-Year Milestone With New Documentary
Blizzard recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and the company has commemorated the milestone with a documentary video that chronicles its history from the Silicon & Synapse days to the present. The production is full of stories from co-founders Mike Morhaime, Allan Adham, and Frank Pearce, who recount meeting at UCLA's computer science department.
It's a long video, but well worth watching. Here are just a few of the highlights:
- The company's SNES game Rock & Roll Racing was the first game on the platform created by western developers, and the team worked on the game using untranslated Japanese technical documentation
- The Lost Vikings' level design system was an early precursor to the map editors that became a critical part of StarCraft and WarCraft years later
- The co-founders had to used credit-card advances from a nearby supermarket to make payroll
- After changing the name from Silicon & Synapse, the company tried names including Chaos Studios and Ogre before settling on Blizzard
- Diablo was originally conceived as a turn-based, claymation RPG
The documentary ends with a look at the company's future. Taking a cue from Disney, Blizzard says that they're optimistic that their best years are still ahead. As they point out, Disney hadn't released its most famous films or built Disneyland in its first 20 years. Congrats on two decades of great games, Blizzard, and here's to hoping that the best is yet to come.
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