November 20, 2019 • 40 mins
Riding high on some notable successes, Blizzard continued to make big waves in the world of video games. But now and again the company would find itself in a storm of criticism.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and Love all Things Tech. And in
our last episode, I talked about the origins of Blizzard
Entertainment leading up to the acquisition of Condor Incorporated and
(00:27):
the launch of the battle Neet service upon the release
of the game Diablo. So we're going to pick up
from there because it turns out there's a whole lot
of stuff that's happened to this relatively young company. All right,
So we're in a super important time in Blizzard's history
in this timeline. So Warcraft gave the company momentum and
(00:48):
set the stage for a sequel, Warcraft Two Tides of Darkness. Meanwhile,
the founders of Condor Incorporated reached out to Blizzard, and
as I mentioned earlier, the two companies had first come
into contact when they were each developing versions of Justice
League Task Force. Now, in the time that followed, Condor
had reached out to a lot of different publishers with
(01:09):
their idea for Diablo, but they got nowhere then out
of desperation more than anything else, they turned to Blizzard. Now,
the pitch was incredibly ambitious. Condor would develop a PC
based game, which they had never done before, and it
would be an RPG style game, role playing game, and
it would marry that with a more action oriented style
(01:33):
of gameplay. Ultimately, and originally, they were also thinking about
modeling all their characters using the claymation process. So claymation,
for those not familiar with the term, is a form
of stop motion animation. You build the animated stuff out
of some sort of multiple material, such as you know, clay,
and you pose them precisely the way you want them
(01:54):
to look in a particular sequence. Then you take a photo,
then you adjust the model ever slightly, Then you take
another photo, and you do that over and over again
until the sequence of photos follows the entire range of
motion that you wanted to capture. It's similar to hand
drawn animation in that way. So if you want to
show a character swinging a sword, for example, you'll have
(02:16):
to determine how many frames of animation that will require
and how far you need to move the model for
each frame. If you move too far between pictures, you
get really choppy animation. David Brevic was inspired by an
arcade game called Primal Rage that used claymation to model
its characters. Primal Rage was a fighting game akin to
something like Mortal Kombat or Teken. The monstrous fighters in
(02:39):
the game, of which there were seven, each required around
four hundred frames of animation to model all of their movements.
The process takes a very long time, and it gets
pretty darned expensive. The end effect can be great, but
it's an enormous task for even a seasoned video game studio,
let alone one that had only been around for less
than two years. Further, dia Blow would require a lot
(03:03):
more animation than a fighting game with seven characters, unless
the team were to limit the types of monsters you'd
encounter in the game. Ultimately, they would choose to ditch
the stop motion plan. Blizzard was intrigued by Condor's pitch,
though there may have been some skepticism about whether or
not Condor could actually pull it off. Blizzard agreed to
(03:23):
publish the game once it was developed, and they set
a budget of three hundred thousand dollars for Condor, with
a goal of publishing in time for the nineteen nine
six holiday season. Now Condor actually had to build the
game they had been dreaming of for a couple of years,
which is a big change from just thinking about it.
They chose to go with an isometric view, with the
(03:44):
world being made up of tiles that characters, monsters, and
objects could inhabit, and originally they wanted to make the
game turn based. Players would have worked with character limitations
that would dictate how far they could move during a turn,
or how frequently they could attack, and so forth. This
was the game David Brevic wanted to make because it
(04:04):
was in a style similar to the games he had
loved playing as a gamer himself. But at some point
during the development process, the Blizzard team talked to Brevic
and tried to convince him to change from a turn
based game to a real time game. Brevick resisted. The
decision was ultimately put to a vote inside Condor, and
(04:25):
everyone except Brevic voted to go real time, so Brevick agreed,
though not before asking for a milestone payment from Blizzard,
which they agreed to. The Oblow would thus transform from
a turn based computer RPG into one of the first
action role playing games, or a RPG acronyms are fun. Also, technically,
(04:49):
Brevick would say that what he really did was he
just made the turns last about one a second. So
it's still a turn based game. It's just those turns
went really fast. One other thing that was almost a
part of Diablo, and I found this really interesting. This
was scrapped before the game would launch, was a concept
in which players, you know, actual people who would go
(05:09):
out and buy the game, could then go out and
buy supplemental stuff to add their games, in the form
of like a an an expensive c D. You would
go and buy a CD add on, not a full
expansion set, but maybe a five dollar c D, and
and that add on would include things like weapons and
armor packs or skin packs, stuff like that. It hearkened
(05:30):
back to the days of trading cards, and it presages,
it's a great word, right, the oncoming trend of lootboxes
and video games. You know that stuff that everybody loves.
It doesn't create legal problems around the world. Well, they
wouldn't find their way into Diablo. That that feature never
made it to Diablo, but in future games Blizzard would, um,
(05:52):
let's just say, take full advantage of this concept, and
they would tweak it for online delivery rather than on
optical discs. Now In Dublow, you play a hero originally
one of three character classes, although expansion sets would expand
that you know, thus the name, and you would be
out to defeat a demonic antagonist named Surprise Surprise Diablo,
(06:14):
who was attempting to gain control of the surface world.
The game involved lots of clicking with the mouse, like
lots and lots of clicking like get a new mouse
every three months. That much clicking. It was a hacken
slash style game, and advancement in the game is largely
tied to finding better loot to make your character more
powerful and more resilient to damage. The maps for the
(06:36):
levels of the game are created by random generations, so
that the layout is never the same for different playthroughs,
which made it really interesting. The game featured elaborate at
least for the time cinematics. Blizzard had already established a
reputation for inserting a lot of story into their games,
but now it was as if you were having a
short c g I film connecting elements of gameplay, and
(06:59):
it would become another hallmark for Blizzard, which then got
a reputation for increasingly elaborate, highly produced cinematic segments, and
while it was a bit muted compared to other Blizzard games,
the sense of humor was still there too. If you
do encounter Diablo, for example, he would say something in
an incomprehensible demonic language, unless you were recorded and play
(07:22):
it backward, in which case the demonic one would actually say,
and I'm not making this up, eat your vegetables and
brush after every meal. Evil right. As Condor continued development
on Diablo, things changed for Blizzard. In February, a marketing
company called c U C International announced it was acquiring
(07:45):
Davidson and Associates. Now, if you remember from the last episode,
that was the parent company that owned Blizzard, and it
was also in the process of acquiring another software company,
c Era Online game company that I've covered in past episodes.
The change in ownership wouldn't stop there for Blizzard, but
we'll get to all that. Several months before the scheduled
(08:08):
launch of Diablo, Blizzard Entertainment, as part of this larger conglomerate,
made an offer to acquire Condor outright, which Condor accepted,
and it would mean that Condor would change its name
and it would become Blizzard North because it was located
in northern California, while as you know, the original Blizzard
they were in southern California. While Condor was now officially
(08:31):
part of Blizzard itself, the division would still enjoy much
of the same freedom, at least at first, that Blizzard
South had experienced when it was bought by Davidson and associates.
Now this would mean that when Diablo launched, it would
officially be a Blizzard title, though not developed by the
original Blizzard team. Blizzard would help out a little bit
(08:52):
in the development process, particularly when it came to implementing
a multiplayer feature that wasn't in the original design concept
for Diablo. The changes to Diablo would mean that ultimately
it would miss its original deadline for the holiday season
in ninet. Instead, it would publish in January, and despite
the inopportune launch date, the game would prove to be
(09:14):
a smashing success. That smashing was in mouse buttons. I
might be getting hung up on that. I just remember
really punishing my mouse playing that game. Diablo's success would
be linked with the rise of a service from Blizzard,
and that was of course Battle Neet. So, as I mentioned,
the last episode. Warcraft and Warcraft two were both designed
(09:35):
so that players could go head to head against each
other on a local area area network, or they could
direct dial if they happen to know the other IP address.
But you could also use a third party client called
Collie to trick computers into believing they were part of
a local area network when in reality they were connecting
over the Internet. Now that wasn't ideal, as it limited
(09:58):
the people who had the knowledge and the drive to
actually make those connections or download the Colleague client, but
Blizzard employees noted that some companies were starting to come
up with alternatives. One of those was another project out
of Westwood Studios. You'll remember that's the company that had
created dune To that kind of launched the real time
strategy genre, and it was called, appropriately enough, Westwood Chat.
(10:21):
It was an Internet based chat client that allowed users
to not just chat, but also play games with one
another online. Blizzard wanted to make something similar to that.
The result was Battlenet, a server based system in which
players could log into a remote server and get matched
up with other players in games like Diablo. In fact,
Diablo was essentially a launch title for the service. You
(10:44):
could play Diablo as a single player experience on your
own computer, and you could you could just avoid going
online entirely, and in fact, that's how people like me
tended to play the game. But if you wanted to
play with other folks in a cooperative style game, you
could use battle Neet to facilitate the connection and that
would allow that co op game of up to four players.
And best of all, it was a free service and
(11:05):
started off as a very modest endeavor. In fact, originally
battle Net was a service that existed on a single
server one PC, a machine that was tucked away under
a person's desk at Blizzards headquarters, and it was acting
as a sort of administrator. So in those days, battle
net was actually a peer to peer networking service. One
(11:27):
player's computer would become the host machine and the other
players connecting to that gaming session would be the clients,
and the battle Neet server just sort of acted as
an operator to make all these connections. But it wasn't
actually hosting the game itself. That allowed it to be
very lightweight, so the service was very lean and it's
why only one PC was needed to act as a server.
(11:48):
At least Initially, the player computers were really the ones
that we're doing all the heavy lifting. And while it
allowed for easy connectivity, it also opened up some opportunities
for some shenanigans, because you know, players could pretty easily
use cheats in their local games. I never really understood
that myself. I mean, what's the point of playing a
(12:09):
fake character who now can do incredible fake things against
other fake characters. But then they would take that same quality,
that same capability, and they would pour it over to
battle Neet matches, and obviously that led to some pretty
uneven matchups among players. It's not much fun to try
and match your skills against an opponent only to find
that person has used cheats to create a severely unfair advantage.
(12:32):
And cheating was so rampant in the early days of
battle Neet that it threatened to overshadow the service itself.
While Blizzard South aka Blizzard Prime tried to find ways
to mitigate the cheating online, it was also hard at
work developing the next new game that was a science
fiction RTS that was called StarCraft. Maybe you've heard of it.
(12:53):
The path to publishing wasn't exactly flawless at E three
before the launch of Diablo and of Battle Neet, Blizzard
revealed StarCraft to a pretty lackluster response. The general consensus
was that they had really done nothing more than take
Warcraft and then put a science fiction skin on top
(13:13):
of it. It was such a bummer of a response
that Blizzard gradually reduced the number of displays that were
showing early gameplay footage. At that E three they originally
had three monitors showing this footage of StarCraft. By the
end of the show, they had reduced that to one,
and they dedicated all the others to Diablo instead. Based
(13:34):
off that reaction, I'm sure the company was worried that
StarCraft would never be more than a footnote in the
company's history. Making things more complicated was the fact that
the RTS category was becoming a fully fledged genre of
its own. So you had games like Warcraft and Command
and Conquer leading the way, but lots of other studios
were dipping their toes in the game type. Many were
(13:54):
adding new innovations to gameplay, which made it even more
imperative that Blizzard south revisit the design and in concept
of StarCraft to turn it into something other than a warcraft.
To clone to do that, they'd have to go back
to the drawing board, which meant ditching all the production
that had been done on that game up to that point.
StarCraft wouldn't totally die, but it would be stored in carbonite.
(14:18):
Allah Han solo for quite a while. All Right, I've
got a lot more to say about Blizzard, but before
I get into that, let's take a quick break. Okay,
we're back. So Blizzard followed up the release of Diablo
(14:38):
with an expansion pack, which was actually developed by a
third party called Synergistic Software. Meanwhile, the team behind Diablo
was secretly at work on a full blown sequel, which
would take much longer to develop. Down at Blizzard South,
the developers were hard at work trying to create a
worthy game out of the StarCraft concept. Scrapping all their
(14:58):
work leading up to E three ninety six set them
back to square one, so they focused on the work
and rebuilt the game from scratch, getting it ready for
a Spring of release. While it remained a real time
strategy game, Blizzard made a big move and that the
three factions you could play each had different units, and
each of those units had its own abilities that set
(15:20):
it apart from the units of the other factions. You
couldn't play the game and assume your opponents had the
same capabilities that you had. You needed to plan to
defend against their strengths and to try and exploit their weaknesses.
The built in variety meant that strategy would be incredibly important,
and eager players dove into the game to learn the
best approach to any given scenario. Battle Net allowed players
(15:43):
to test their skills against each other. At the same time,
competitive gaming was starting to gain traction, and StarCraft became
a banner title for the new sport. It was such
a hit that sales in South Korea alone were more
than what Blizzard had seen globally for Warcraft two and
for Diablo, and ten years later, on twenty years later,
(16:06):
it's still a very popular game in competitive play in
South Korea. While Warcraft two was the studio's first breakout hit,
StarCraft would leave it in the dust. It propelled Blizzard
into the position of a world leader in video game development. Now.
Like Diablo and Warcraft two, Blizzard would tap a third
(16:27):
party studio to develop expansion packs to StarCraft, but neither
of the expansion packs produced by those third parties enjoyed
the same success as the base game did, and they
were criticized for not living up to the standards of
the original StarCraft game. So Blizzard went and made their
own expansion set called brood War, which gamers preferred and
(16:50):
they viewed it as a worthy expansion of the base
campaign of StarCraft. Once again, Blizzard got the message that
going outside the company to develop for flagship title wasn't
necessarily a good you know, use of their resources or
their intellectual property. And a couple of other big things
happened in for Blizzard. One was that Alan Adham, the
(17:13):
prime founder of Blizzard, who had been acting as the
company's president, stepped down from his position. He didn't leave
the company, he wanted to take a more direct role
in actually designing games. Mike Morheim, another co founder of
the company, would then take over the role of president
and would remain there for many years. Meanwhile, way above
(17:34):
the heads of the Blizzard crew over at Sendence Software.
Sentence Software was formed out of the their corporate overlords
at CEUC International. There was a massive, massive scandal, had
nothing to do with Blizzard, but Sendant, the parent company,
was at the heart of it, and they found themselves
(17:55):
in need of a lot of cash, so in order
to raise it, they sold off their software division, which
included Blizzard and Sierra Online. They sold it to a
French company called Havas. Havas was in turn swallowed up
by the mass media conglomerate Vivendi, also French, which tells
us that Quagon Gen was right. There's always a bigger fish.
(18:17):
So now Blizzard, which was still allowed to operate more
or less autonomously, had brand new corporate overwords, and this
would become a big issue in the near future. So
keeping in mind, this ownership question gets really complicated, I
feel a lot of empathy. Look up the history of
how stuff works sometime and you'll know what I mean.
(18:39):
So the other thing that happened wasn't a great story
for Blizzard. In this time period, the company had reached
out to a Russian video game developer to create a
point and click adventure style game based off the Warcraft
intellectual property. Players were to take control of an Orc
in his quest to become a war lord, the Lord
(19:01):
of the Clans. However, while the game was in development,
LucasArts announced to adventure games of their own, The third
in the Monkey Island series. I'm a huge Monkey Island
fan and also Grim fan. Dango a true masterpiece of
a computer game. They're both phenomenal, and they have interesting
(19:21):
stories and they have a great sense of humor. Their
art style is amazing. Meanwhile, the work coming out of
Russia wasn't really living up to Blizzards expectations for their
adventure game, and language barriers were making it challenging to
manage the project from California, so ultimately, Blizzard made the
tough decision to scrap the project, even though it was
(19:44):
probably just a couple of months away from being finished.
The following year, Blizzard would push Diablo Too back from
a late release because the game wasn't quite ready yet.
They also announced plans for Warcraft three, which originally was
going to have some big changes from the previous titles
in the series. It would have more of a role
(20:05):
playing element, so you would still have some real time
strategy features, but you would control hero units in the game,
and the story would unfold as your hero completed quests
and encountered other important characters. After announcing the plans, Blizzard
got to work, but early demos of their idea didn't
appeal to anyone on the team. It was generally felt
(20:27):
that the process just was not working. So in two
thousand they announced that Warcraft three was actually going to
be a lot more like its predecessors and also worse.
This would mean the game would take longer to develop.
Blizzard South would then split into two big camps. One
was focused on developing Warcraft three. The other group focused
(20:50):
on a project called Nomad, which was going to be
a brand new intellectual property for the company. Unfortunately, that
one would also get bogged down and Blizzard would exit
before it ever got publicly announced. Now, Blizzard hasn't really
ever said a whole lot about what Nomad was going
to be like, but they did reveal that they intended
(21:11):
it to be a squad based game set in a
science fiction genre, and that it was inspired by a
tabletop miniature strategy game called Necromunda, which is part of
the Warhammer forty k universe, which might be the nerdiest
thing I've ever said, and I'm not judging I play
these games, guys. But part of the problem was that
(21:32):
the team on Nomad never really agreed exactly where the
balance in the game needed to be. Some wanted it
to be more of a strategy game, similar in some
ways to the RTS genre. Others wanted to have more
of an RPG focus, a more role playing and story.
A few folks on the team weren't really crazy about
the idea at all, and they just wanted to work
(21:53):
on something else, and since it seemed like there wasn't
a chance that these visions were going to cohere, the
company ultimately decided to cancel it. The Warcraft adventure game
and Nomad weren't the first canceled projects at Blizzard. There
had been an attempt to make a science fiction shooter
game called Crixia in the mid nineties, and there was
(22:14):
a failed collaboration with Change Links Software to make a
sequel to the space strategy game packs Imperia. Before StarCraft,
some Blizzard developers were working on a different real time
strategy game with a post apocalyptic sci fi field called
Shattered Nations. And we're gonna talk about some more canceled
games before we finish out this series. Somewhat mitigating player
(22:37):
disappointment over the changes to Warcraft three was the fact
that Blizzard North was finally ready to release Diabload too.
In June two thousand, which, like the first game, was
an enormous hit. The graphics for the game only received
relatively minor upgrades, which threatened to impact player perception about
the title, but there were lots of improvements in other
(23:00):
aspects of the game and had a larger scale. And
because the team knew that multiplayer was going to be
a component from the very beginning, they built it into
the design process, so it was much better incorporated than
it was for the first Diablo. This came at a price, however.
The development process for Diablo two was famously brutal. Programmers
(23:20):
and designers were working long hours for a full year.
Sometimes they'd be working more than twenty four hours at
a stretch in a row, all in an effort to
finish this game. Even when they pushed the game back
from to mid two thousand, there really wasn't any room
to breathe. Blizzard, both North and South, were not strangers
(23:42):
to this kind of cycle. Commonly in the biz we
refer to it as crunch. You see it in all
forms of production, but it has a seriously negative impact
on work life balance, as in there isn't any balance
between work in life. Today, companies are becoming a little
more sensitive to going into crunch mode as the optics,
(24:02):
as they say, aren't very good. There have been some
rather high profile cases of employees putting their personal lives
and health at risk just to finish a game. Cases
like the Diablo to development process would become much more common,
and not just at Blizzard, as time would go on. Well,
if you're a general gamer, you know, the average stereotypical gamer,
(24:23):
you're probably either not aware or you don't care about
the plight of those actually toiling to create the games
that you play. But one thing that the average gamer
does tend to be quite vocal about our problems with games.
Don't know if you've ever been on the internet, but
they're not shy about saying that kind of thing. Diablo's
biggest problem early on was that it was so popular
(24:47):
that everyone was trying to go online and it was
crashing the battle Neet servers, Which is the best kind
of apology you have to give to your public guys,
I'm sorry, we're so awesome that you have to play
our game and you're destroying our server system. We're so sorry,
thank you, But yes, that was one of the big issues.
(25:07):
This also would mark when Blizzard would veer away from
that pure networking approach that I talked about earlier that
they had created with battle NEETs. So with the old method,
it was incredibly easy for cheaters to exploit the system.
I mean, they were hosting games on their own computers,
so entering into multiplayer games with an unfair advantage was
very easy. You could grief other players as well, because
(25:28):
Diablo had friendly fire on so you have an overpowered
character who blasts fireballs everywhere and then you're the only
one standing. Ha ha ha. Isn't that fun? Well. The
way that they decided to address this was by completely
changing the architecture of battle Neet. So they went with
a more traditional server clients set up in which Blizzard
(25:48):
would run the games on its servers and players would
log in to access the games, and that helped out
on the abuse that they had seen in the previous
Diablo game. It's really only possible because we had seen
a greater rollout of broadband technology at that point. The
same team that made Diablo two would work on the
expansion set called the Lord of Destruction, which added more
(26:11):
features to the base Diablo two game. Blizzard made the
decision early on to essue third party studios. They had
not had any good real experiences with that anyway, and
they said, you know, it just makes more sense for
us to do it ourselves if we're going to do this.
So they had the same team that made Diablo to
make the expansion Set and Low and Behold. People liked it.
(26:33):
Lord of Destruction launched in June two thousand one, just
one year after Diablo two had come out, and it
was another success for the team up at Blizzard North.
They would then turn their sides on developing yet another
Diablo game, which would have been Diablo three. But if
you can tell from that language, it would not turn
out the way the team imagined it would. That will
(26:56):
be more uh for part three of this series race,
but we'll get a little bit into it. Meanwhile, the
team that had been developing Nomad were hard at work
on a brand new project. Their goal was to create
a game in which hundreds, maybe thousands of people could
explore simultaneously. It would be a persistent online world. Players
(27:17):
would control characters they created and explore the world. They
would take on quests that would join other players, making factions.
They'd work together and coordinated raids on dungeons and opposing
player factions. They wanted to make a massively multiplayer online
role playing game or m m O RPG, and when
(27:37):
they looked across their collection of i P they decided
that the Warcraft universe made the most sense to adapt
into that format, and so work began on World of Warcraft. Now,
MMOs were not a new thing even in the early
two thousand's. Games like Ultima Online and ever Quest originally
(27:57):
debuted in the mid to late ease and MMOs were
a really attractive type of game to develop. I'll explain why. See,
you design a compelling game. That's step one. It has
to be something that people want to play. That means
you can then get, if you're lucky, a nice large
base of players. Moreover, the general business strategy was to
(28:20):
charge a subscription fee every month for each player. So
it wasn't just that these players were going out and
buying your game at full price. I mean they were,
but they were also paying for the privilege to continue
to play the game. In return, you indicate that you're
you're going to keep building content and you're going to
roll out new stuff for players to experience over time.
(28:43):
But really, what it means is that a game becomes
an ongoing stream of revenue. Best yet, with most games,
you would sigh once it became pretty clear you would
hit your saturation point. Right Like, if you had a
traditional game, then eventually you hit the point where sale
are gonna start to drop off, it would be pretty
obvious you weren't going to see any more dramatic jumps
(29:04):
in sales figures. But with MMOs that didn't matter as
much because once you had your initial player base, they'd
still be paying you that monthly subscription fee, even if
you only sold a relatively small number of copies. Once
those initial sales died down, you'd still be sitting on
a nice monthly revenue stream. Now, that didn't mean the
(29:25):
game immediately launched right away when they announced it. Nope,
it would take a few more years before it was
ready to rule out to players. But the course have
been laid for one of Blizzard's biggest success stories. But
before we get to the success, we're gonna have a
little more heartbreak. It's my favorite part. In fact, I'm
(29:47):
gonna have to really revel in this. So let's take
a quick break. Okay, I alluded to this before the break.
We're coming up to one of the big heartbreaks in
canceled game history. This is legendary in the world of
(30:08):
computer games when you talk about vapor were so. While
Blizzard was hard at work developing Diablo three and Warcraft
three and World of Warcraft, as well as starting to
lay out plans for a full StarCraft sequel, the company
also reached out to another developer to make an entirely
different type of game based on Blizzards intellectual property. This
(30:30):
game would be a science fiction third person shooter, a
console game set in blizzards StarCraft universe, co developed with
a studio called Nihilistic Games. I guess they just didn't
believe in anything. Blizzard announced these plans at the two
thousand to Tokyo Game Show, and it was going to
be called StarCraft Ghost and boy, what a fitting title
(30:55):
that turned out to be. Now, the goal was to
make this console action shooter because one of the challenges
Blizzard was facing was that's real time strategy games were
hard to translate to a console experience. A controller doesn't
really offer you the type of speed and precision that
a keyboard or mouse would, and those are very important
(31:17):
elements of a real time strategy game. But at the
same time, Blizzard recognized that console gamers represented a huge
market and that's one that the company wasn't really able
to take advantage of with most of the games that
it was producing, So that helped motivate the team to
to get this project underway. Now. At the announcement, Blizzards
stated that they intended for StarCraft Ghost to come out
(31:40):
for the quote next generation end quote of video game consoles.
So in two thousand two, if you look at what
were the state of the art consoles at the time,
you had the Nintendo GameCube, the original Xbox, and the
PlayStation two. So the next generation of consoles wouldn't come
out for a few years, right, They announced it in
(32:00):
two thousand two, But the Xbox three sixty wouldn't come
out to two thousand five, and the WE and the
p S three wouldn't come out until two thousand six.
So this announcement was made well in advance of any
game coming out, and sometimes that can come back to
bite you on the butt, since a lot can change
over the years. Or maybe they intended to develop for
(32:21):
the GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS two and maybe
it just didn't work out. Things did not go smoothly
on the development front. Now I'm gonna stick with this
story for a bit, then I'll get back to the
rest of Blizzard. The company was not happy with how
things were going with Nihilistic, and then the two companies
would part ways in June two thousand four, with the
(32:41):
game still unfinished. Blizzard then signed an agreement with another
development studio called Swinging Ape Studios to help finish this game.
Not much was said about the game, other than a
revelation in two thousand five that Blizzard had decided to
cancel a version of it for the game Cube, but
the other versions were still active development. In two thousand six,
(33:02):
Blizzard published a StarCraft Ghost novel, which to date is
really the only published piece of content from StarCraft Ghost
from Blizzard. It became a famous example of vaporware, right
up there with Duke Knewcombe Forever, which actually did come
out at one point. It was terrible, but it came out.
(33:24):
It wouldn't be until two thousand fourteen when Mike Moreheim
would finally say publicly that the game had in fact
been canceled and it wasn't just in cold storage twelve
years after they announced it. Now, between the announcement of
World of Warcraft and the actual launch of the game,
(33:45):
Blizzard would publish the third full game in the Warcraft series,
Warcraft three. Now. As I mentioned earlier, the version that
Blizzard had talked about several years previous was different from
what the company actually produced. In the original concept, heroes
in the game would essentially be playable characters, marrying the
real time strategy and role playing game genres and giving
(34:06):
players a chance to shape a story. In the actual
Warcraft three, the hero units were there, but they were
more like specialized game pieces that could do things that
other units couldn't. They weren't characters, and there wasn't really
an RPG factor in the game. It did feature some
three D gameplay, which was a new thing for the
(34:26):
Warcraft series, and it also featured the most extravagant cut
scenes Blizzard had featured in a game up to that point.
I mean, seriously, it was right around this time that
those of us who were paying attention to Blizzard were saying,
you know, they could just package up their cinematics and
release them as a c g I movie. But it's
actually a little too early in the timeline for me
(34:47):
to talk about Warcraft the movie right now, but don't worry,
we'll get to it. So the Blizzard team would then
go on to work for an expansion pack for the
base Warcraft three game. It was called Frozen Throne, which
every time I said it out loud before I recorded it,
I said throzen Frone, and I was sure I was
(35:09):
going to do it again. It was actually going through
my mind just now, just letting you guys get an
insight into how Jonathan works, because I haven't done that
podcast yet. Like Rude War and Lord of Destruction, Blizzard
actually used the exact same development team that worked on
the original game to make the expansion pack, which helped
ensure that the quality would remain the same. In two
thousand three, Blizzard North experienced an enormous shake up. Several
(35:34):
people in the executive management and lead developer levels had
grown disenchanted with Vivendi that's the parent company for the
whole shebang. Right there was uncertainty about whether or not
Vivendi was going to spin off the game's division, or
it might sell it off to yet another owner, and
all of that uncertainty was making it very difficult to
plan development cycles for games. After numerous communications issues and
(35:58):
worries about the corporate direction of Avendy and whether Blizzard
North was even being listened to, a whole slew of
Blizzard North folks just up and left. That included the
founders of the company, so Max and Eric Schaefer and
David Brevic, who all founded Condor Incorporated. They left with
some other high level employees and they formed a new
(36:20):
company that they called Flagship Studios. Seems like they were
maybe thumbing their nose at Vendy a little bit, saying
that they made the flagship game for Blizzard. Another group
of influential employees from Blizzard North also left, creating a
different game studio called Castaway Games. Also seems like there
might be some shade being thrown there anyway. The departures
(36:42):
through the development of Diablo three into total disarray. The
following year, Blizzard South would also see a very big
name departure. Alan Adham, the founder who was the reason
that Blizzard even existed, decided he had endured enough stress
and long hours. You're remember he stepped down from president
a few years earlier, but he figured now was time
(37:04):
to try something new it's time to get into the
exciting world of corporate finance. I'm not even making that up.
Someone chose to go from video game studio to corporate finance.
So in two thousand four he resigned from Blizzard. He
had been the motivating force that convinced the other two
founders of the company, Frank Pierce and Mike Moreheim, to
(37:27):
join with him to create this crazy, risky venture. And
now he was gone from the company, though he wouldn't
be gone forever. That right, there's what we call foreshadow
and but I won't get back to that until the
next episode, so just be patient. Okay. Moreheim had already
been serving as president, so actually the company didn't have
too much interruption in its day to day operations. Moreheim
(37:51):
oversaw Blizzards acquisition of the aforementioned Swinging Apes Studios, the
one that had been working on StarCraft Ghost, and it
would get renamed into Blizzard Console. Now, all the turmoil
might have made it seem like the company that had
so recently been on top could collapse in on itself,
but in the fall of two thousand four, Blizzard published
(38:11):
a game that would ensure their longevity. This was, of course,
World of Warcraft, the M M O RPG that would
set a new standard of success for the genre. To
say the game was a hit would be a severe understatement.
It would become one of the biggest money makers in
video games history. So in our next episode, I'll talk
(38:33):
more about the evolution of World of Warcraft and how
Blizzard would periodically inject new life into the game with
various expansion packs, world resets, and other strategies. I'll also
talk about the final fate of Blizzard North, which spoiler
alert is not a happy one, and will take a
closer look at some of the controversies that Blizzard has
(38:56):
had to weather more free recently. You know, like what
happens when a popular gamer suddenly expresses support for Hong
Kong while your company is simultaneously trying to make a
whole lot of money in China. But all of that
will come in the next episode. If you guys have
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, well I got
some suggestions for you, buddy. You can email me addresses
(39:19):
tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or draw
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W don't forget to visit our website, that's tech stuff
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twelve hundred of them. So go take a search before
(39:40):
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I mean, I'll probably talk about it again. I don't
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Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and Love all Things Tech. And in
our last episode, I talked about the origins of Blizzard
Entertainment leading up to the acquisition of Condor Incorporated and
(00:27):
the launch of the battle Neet service upon the release
of the game Diablo. So we're going to pick up
from there because it turns out there's a whole lot
of stuff that's happened to this relatively young company. All right,
So we're in a super important time in Blizzard's history
in this timeline. So Warcraft gave the company momentum and
(00:48):
set the stage for a sequel, Warcraft Two Tides of Darkness. Meanwhile,
the founders of Condor Incorporated reached out to Blizzard, and
as I mentioned earlier, the two companies had first come
into contact when they were each developing versions of Justice
League Task Force. Now, in the time that followed, Condor
had reached out to a lot of different publishers with
(01:09):
their idea for Diablo, but they got nowhere then out
of desperation more than anything else, they turned to Blizzard. Now,
the pitch was incredibly ambitious. Condor would develop a PC
based game, which they had never done before, and it
would be an RPG style game, role playing game, and
it would marry that with a more action oriented style
(01:33):
of gameplay. Ultimately, and originally, they were also thinking about
modeling all their characters using the claymation process. So claymation,
for those not familiar with the term, is a form
of stop motion animation. You build the animated stuff out
of some sort of multiple material, such as you know, clay,
and you pose them precisely the way you want them
(01:54):
to look in a particular sequence. Then you take a photo,
then you adjust the model ever slightly, Then you take
another photo, and you do that over and over again
until the sequence of photos follows the entire range of
motion that you wanted to capture. It's similar to hand
drawn animation in that way. So if you want to
show a character swinging a sword, for example, you'll have
(02:16):
to determine how many frames of animation that will require
and how far you need to move the model for
each frame. If you move too far between pictures, you
get really choppy animation. David Brevic was inspired by an
arcade game called Primal Rage that used claymation to model
its characters. Primal Rage was a fighting game akin to
something like Mortal Kombat or Teken. The monstrous fighters in
(02:39):
the game, of which there were seven, each required around
four hundred frames of animation to model all of their movements.
The process takes a very long time, and it gets
pretty darned expensive. The end effect can be great, but
it's an enormous task for even a seasoned video game studio,
let alone one that had only been around for less
than two years. Further, dia Blow would require a lot
(03:03):
more animation than a fighting game with seven characters, unless
the team were to limit the types of monsters you'd
encounter in the game. Ultimately, they would choose to ditch
the stop motion plan. Blizzard was intrigued by Condor's pitch,
though there may have been some skepticism about whether or
not Condor could actually pull it off. Blizzard agreed to
(03:23):
publish the game once it was developed, and they set
a budget of three hundred thousand dollars for Condor, with
a goal of publishing in time for the nineteen nine
six holiday season. Now Condor actually had to build the
game they had been dreaming of for a couple of years,
which is a big change from just thinking about it.
They chose to go with an isometric view, with the
(03:44):
world being made up of tiles that characters, monsters, and
objects could inhabit, and originally they wanted to make the
game turn based. Players would have worked with character limitations
that would dictate how far they could move during a turn,
or how frequently they could attack, and so forth. This
was the game David Brevic wanted to make because it
(04:04):
was in a style similar to the games he had
loved playing as a gamer himself. But at some point
during the development process, the Blizzard team talked to Brevic
and tried to convince him to change from a turn
based game to a real time game. Brevick resisted. The
decision was ultimately put to a vote inside Condor, and
(04:25):
everyone except Brevic voted to go real time, so Brevick agreed,
though not before asking for a milestone payment from Blizzard,
which they agreed to. The Oblow would thus transform from
a turn based computer RPG into one of the first
action role playing games, or a RPG acronyms are fun. Also, technically,
(04:49):
Brevick would say that what he really did was he
just made the turns last about one a second. So
it's still a turn based game. It's just those turns
went really fast. One other thing that was almost a
part of Diablo, and I found this really interesting. This
was scrapped before the game would launch, was a concept
in which players, you know, actual people who would go
(05:09):
out and buy the game, could then go out and
buy supplemental stuff to add their games, in the form
of like a an an expensive c D. You would
go and buy a CD add on, not a full
expansion set, but maybe a five dollar c D, and
and that add on would include things like weapons and
armor packs or skin packs, stuff like that. It hearkened
(05:30):
back to the days of trading cards, and it presages,
it's a great word, right, the oncoming trend of lootboxes
and video games. You know that stuff that everybody loves.
It doesn't create legal problems around the world. Well, they
wouldn't find their way into Diablo. That that feature never
made it to Diablo, but in future games Blizzard would, um,
(05:52):
let's just say, take full advantage of this concept, and
they would tweak it for online delivery rather than on
optical discs. Now In Dublow, you play a hero originally
one of three character classes, although expansion sets would expand
that you know, thus the name, and you would be
out to defeat a demonic antagonist named Surprise Surprise Diablo,
(06:14):
who was attempting to gain control of the surface world.
The game involved lots of clicking with the mouse, like
lots and lots of clicking like get a new mouse
every three months. That much clicking. It was a hacken
slash style game, and advancement in the game is largely
tied to finding better loot to make your character more
powerful and more resilient to damage. The maps for the
(06:36):
levels of the game are created by random generations, so
that the layout is never the same for different playthroughs,
which made it really interesting. The game featured elaborate at
least for the time cinematics. Blizzard had already established a
reputation for inserting a lot of story into their games,
but now it was as if you were having a
short c g I film connecting elements of gameplay, and
(06:59):
it would become another hallmark for Blizzard, which then got
a reputation for increasingly elaborate, highly produced cinematic segments, and
while it was a bit muted compared to other Blizzard games,
the sense of humor was still there too. If you
do encounter Diablo, for example, he would say something in
an incomprehensible demonic language, unless you were recorded and play
(07:22):
it backward, in which case the demonic one would actually say,
and I'm not making this up, eat your vegetables and
brush after every meal. Evil right. As Condor continued development
on Diablo, things changed for Blizzard. In February, a marketing
company called c U C International announced it was acquiring
(07:45):
Davidson and Associates. Now, if you remember from the last episode,
that was the parent company that owned Blizzard, and it
was also in the process of acquiring another software company,
c Era Online game company that I've covered in past episodes.
The change in ownership wouldn't stop there for Blizzard, but
we'll get to all that. Several months before the scheduled
(08:08):
launch of Diablo, Blizzard Entertainment, as part of this larger conglomerate,
made an offer to acquire Condor outright, which Condor accepted,
and it would mean that Condor would change its name
and it would become Blizzard North because it was located
in northern California, while as you know, the original Blizzard
they were in southern California. While Condor was now officially
(08:31):
part of Blizzard itself, the division would still enjoy much
of the same freedom, at least at first, that Blizzard
South had experienced when it was bought by Davidson and associates.
Now this would mean that when Diablo launched, it would
officially be a Blizzard title, though not developed by the
original Blizzard team. Blizzard would help out a little bit
(08:52):
in the development process, particularly when it came to implementing
a multiplayer feature that wasn't in the original design concept
for Diablo. The changes to Diablo would mean that ultimately
it would miss its original deadline for the holiday season
in ninet. Instead, it would publish in January, and despite
the inopportune launch date, the game would prove to be
(09:14):
a smashing success. That smashing was in mouse buttons. I
might be getting hung up on that. I just remember
really punishing my mouse playing that game. Diablo's success would
be linked with the rise of a service from Blizzard,
and that was of course Battle Neet. So, as I mentioned,
the last episode. Warcraft and Warcraft two were both designed
(09:35):
so that players could go head to head against each
other on a local area area network, or they could
direct dial if they happen to know the other IP address.
But you could also use a third party client called
Collie to trick computers into believing they were part of
a local area network when in reality they were connecting
over the Internet. Now that wasn't ideal, as it limited
(09:58):
the people who had the knowledge and the drive to
actually make those connections or download the Colleague client, but
Blizzard employees noted that some companies were starting to come
up with alternatives. One of those was another project out
of Westwood Studios. You'll remember that's the company that had
created dune To that kind of launched the real time
strategy genre, and it was called, appropriately enough, Westwood Chat.
(10:21):
It was an Internet based chat client that allowed users
to not just chat, but also play games with one
another online. Blizzard wanted to make something similar to that.
The result was Battlenet, a server based system in which
players could log into a remote server and get matched
up with other players in games like Diablo. In fact,
Diablo was essentially a launch title for the service. You
(10:44):
could play Diablo as a single player experience on your
own computer, and you could you could just avoid going
online entirely, and in fact, that's how people like me
tended to play the game. But if you wanted to
play with other folks in a cooperative style game, you
could use battle Neet to facilitate the connection and that
would allow that co op game of up to four players.
And best of all, it was a free service and
(11:05):
started off as a very modest endeavor. In fact, originally
battle Net was a service that existed on a single
server one PC, a machine that was tucked away under
a person's desk at Blizzards headquarters, and it was acting
as a sort of administrator. So in those days, battle
net was actually a peer to peer networking service. One
(11:27):
player's computer would become the host machine and the other
players connecting to that gaming session would be the clients,
and the battle Neet server just sort of acted as
an operator to make all these connections. But it wasn't
actually hosting the game itself. That allowed it to be
very lightweight, so the service was very lean and it's
why only one PC was needed to act as a server.
(11:48):
At least Initially, the player computers were really the ones
that we're doing all the heavy lifting. And while it
allowed for easy connectivity, it also opened up some opportunities
for some shenanigans, because you know, players could pretty easily
use cheats in their local games. I never really understood
that myself. I mean, what's the point of playing a
(12:09):
fake character who now can do incredible fake things against
other fake characters. But then they would take that same quality,
that same capability, and they would pour it over to
battle Neet matches, and obviously that led to some pretty
uneven matchups among players. It's not much fun to try
and match your skills against an opponent only to find
that person has used cheats to create a severely unfair advantage.
(12:32):
And cheating was so rampant in the early days of
battle Neet that it threatened to overshadow the service itself.
While Blizzard South aka Blizzard Prime tried to find ways
to mitigate the cheating online, it was also hard at
work developing the next new game that was a science
fiction RTS that was called StarCraft. Maybe you've heard of it.
(12:53):
The path to publishing wasn't exactly flawless at E three
before the launch of Diablo and of Battle Neet, Blizzard
revealed StarCraft to a pretty lackluster response. The general consensus
was that they had really done nothing more than take
Warcraft and then put a science fiction skin on top
(13:13):
of it. It was such a bummer of a response
that Blizzard gradually reduced the number of displays that were
showing early gameplay footage. At that E three they originally
had three monitors showing this footage of StarCraft. By the
end of the show, they had reduced that to one,
and they dedicated all the others to Diablo instead. Based
(13:34):
off that reaction, I'm sure the company was worried that
StarCraft would never be more than a footnote in the
company's history. Making things more complicated was the fact that
the RTS category was becoming a fully fledged genre of
its own. So you had games like Warcraft and Command
and Conquer leading the way, but lots of other studios
were dipping their toes in the game type. Many were
(13:54):
adding new innovations to gameplay, which made it even more
imperative that Blizzard south revisit the design and in concept
of StarCraft to turn it into something other than a warcraft.
To clone to do that, they'd have to go back
to the drawing board, which meant ditching all the production
that had been done on that game up to that point.
StarCraft wouldn't totally die, but it would be stored in carbonite.
(14:18):
Allah Han solo for quite a while. All Right, I've
got a lot more to say about Blizzard, but before
I get into that, let's take a quick break. Okay,
we're back. So Blizzard followed up the release of Diablo
(14:38):
with an expansion pack, which was actually developed by a
third party called Synergistic Software. Meanwhile, the team behind Diablo
was secretly at work on a full blown sequel, which
would take much longer to develop. Down at Blizzard South,
the developers were hard at work trying to create a
worthy game out of the StarCraft concept. Scrapping all their
(14:58):
work leading up to E three ninety six set them
back to square one, so they focused on the work
and rebuilt the game from scratch, getting it ready for
a Spring of release. While it remained a real time
strategy game, Blizzard made a big move and that the
three factions you could play each had different units, and
each of those units had its own abilities that set
(15:20):
it apart from the units of the other factions. You
couldn't play the game and assume your opponents had the
same capabilities that you had. You needed to plan to
defend against their strengths and to try and exploit their weaknesses.
The built in variety meant that strategy would be incredibly important,
and eager players dove into the game to learn the
best approach to any given scenario. Battle Net allowed players
(15:43):
to test their skills against each other. At the same time,
competitive gaming was starting to gain traction, and StarCraft became
a banner title for the new sport. It was such
a hit that sales in South Korea alone were more
than what Blizzard had seen globally for Warcraft two and
for Diablo, and ten years later, on twenty years later,
(16:06):
it's still a very popular game in competitive play in
South Korea. While Warcraft two was the studio's first breakout hit,
StarCraft would leave it in the dust. It propelled Blizzard
into the position of a world leader in video game development. Now.
Like Diablo and Warcraft two, Blizzard would tap a third
(16:27):
party studio to develop expansion packs to StarCraft, but neither
of the expansion packs produced by those third parties enjoyed
the same success as the base game did, and they
were criticized for not living up to the standards of
the original StarCraft game. So Blizzard went and made their
own expansion set called brood War, which gamers preferred and
(16:50):
they viewed it as a worthy expansion of the base
campaign of StarCraft. Once again, Blizzard got the message that
going outside the company to develop for flagship title wasn't
necessarily a good you know, use of their resources or
their intellectual property. And a couple of other big things
happened in for Blizzard. One was that Alan Adham, the
(17:13):
prime founder of Blizzard, who had been acting as the
company's president, stepped down from his position. He didn't leave
the company, he wanted to take a more direct role
in actually designing games. Mike Morheim, another co founder of
the company, would then take over the role of president
and would remain there for many years. Meanwhile, way above
(17:34):
the heads of the Blizzard crew over at Sendence Software.
Sentence Software was formed out of the their corporate overlords
at CEUC International. There was a massive, massive scandal, had
nothing to do with Blizzard, but Sendant, the parent company,
was at the heart of it, and they found themselves
(17:55):
in need of a lot of cash, so in order
to raise it, they sold off their software division, which
included Blizzard and Sierra Online. They sold it to a
French company called Havas. Havas was in turn swallowed up
by the mass media conglomerate Vivendi, also French, which tells
us that Quagon Gen was right. There's always a bigger fish.
(18:17):
So now Blizzard, which was still allowed to operate more
or less autonomously, had brand new corporate overwords, and this
would become a big issue in the near future. So
keeping in mind, this ownership question gets really complicated, I
feel a lot of empathy. Look up the history of
how stuff works sometime and you'll know what I mean.
(18:39):
So the other thing that happened wasn't a great story
for Blizzard. In this time period, the company had reached
out to a Russian video game developer to create a
point and click adventure style game based off the Warcraft
intellectual property. Players were to take control of an Orc
in his quest to become a war lord, the Lord
(19:01):
of the Clans. However, while the game was in development,
LucasArts announced to adventure games of their own, The third
in the Monkey Island series. I'm a huge Monkey Island
fan and also Grim fan. Dango a true masterpiece of
a computer game. They're both phenomenal, and they have interesting
(19:21):
stories and they have a great sense of humor. Their
art style is amazing. Meanwhile, the work coming out of
Russia wasn't really living up to Blizzards expectations for their
adventure game, and language barriers were making it challenging to
manage the project from California, so ultimately, Blizzard made the
tough decision to scrap the project, even though it was
(19:44):
probably just a couple of months away from being finished.
The following year, Blizzard would push Diablo Too back from
a late release because the game wasn't quite ready yet.
They also announced plans for Warcraft three, which originally was
going to have some big changes from the previous titles
in the series. It would have more of a role
(20:05):
playing element, so you would still have some real time
strategy features, but you would control hero units in the game,
and the story would unfold as your hero completed quests
and encountered other important characters. After announcing the plans, Blizzard
got to work, but early demos of their idea didn't
appeal to anyone on the team. It was generally felt
(20:27):
that the process just was not working. So in two
thousand they announced that Warcraft three was actually going to
be a lot more like its predecessors and also worse.
This would mean the game would take longer to develop.
Blizzard South would then split into two big camps. One
was focused on developing Warcraft three. The other group focused
(20:50):
on a project called Nomad, which was going to be
a brand new intellectual property for the company. Unfortunately, that
one would also get bogged down and Blizzard would exit
before it ever got publicly announced. Now, Blizzard hasn't really
ever said a whole lot about what Nomad was going
to be like, but they did reveal that they intended
(21:11):
it to be a squad based game set in a
science fiction genre, and that it was inspired by a
tabletop miniature strategy game called Necromunda, which is part of
the Warhammer forty k universe, which might be the nerdiest
thing I've ever said, and I'm not judging I play
these games, guys. But part of the problem was that
(21:32):
the team on Nomad never really agreed exactly where the
balance in the game needed to be. Some wanted it
to be more of a strategy game, similar in some
ways to the RTS genre. Others wanted to have more
of an RPG focus, a more role playing and story.
A few folks on the team weren't really crazy about
the idea at all, and they just wanted to work
(21:53):
on something else, and since it seemed like there wasn't
a chance that these visions were going to cohere, the
company ultimately decided to cancel it. The Warcraft adventure game
and Nomad weren't the first canceled projects at Blizzard. There
had been an attempt to make a science fiction shooter
game called Crixia in the mid nineties, and there was
(22:14):
a failed collaboration with Change Links Software to make a
sequel to the space strategy game packs Imperia. Before StarCraft,
some Blizzard developers were working on a different real time
strategy game with a post apocalyptic sci fi field called
Shattered Nations. And we're gonna talk about some more canceled
games before we finish out this series. Somewhat mitigating player
(22:37):
disappointment over the changes to Warcraft three was the fact
that Blizzard North was finally ready to release Diabload too.
In June two thousand, which, like the first game, was
an enormous hit. The graphics for the game only received
relatively minor upgrades, which threatened to impact player perception about
the title, but there were lots of improvements in other
(23:00):
aspects of the game and had a larger scale. And
because the team knew that multiplayer was going to be
a component from the very beginning, they built it into
the design process, so it was much better incorporated than
it was for the first Diablo. This came at a price, however.
The development process for Diablo two was famously brutal. Programmers
(23:20):
and designers were working long hours for a full year.
Sometimes they'd be working more than twenty four hours at
a stretch in a row, all in an effort to
finish this game. Even when they pushed the game back
from to mid two thousand, there really wasn't any room
to breathe. Blizzard, both North and South, were not strangers
(23:42):
to this kind of cycle. Commonly in the biz we
refer to it as crunch. You see it in all
forms of production, but it has a seriously negative impact
on work life balance, as in there isn't any balance
between work in life. Today, companies are becoming a little
more sensitive to going into crunch mode as the optics,
(24:02):
as they say, aren't very good. There have been some
rather high profile cases of employees putting their personal lives
and health at risk just to finish a game. Cases
like the Diablo to development process would become much more common,
and not just at Blizzard, as time would go on. Well,
if you're a general gamer, you know, the average stereotypical gamer,
(24:23):
you're probably either not aware or you don't care about
the plight of those actually toiling to create the games
that you play. But one thing that the average gamer
does tend to be quite vocal about our problems with games.
Don't know if you've ever been on the internet, but
they're not shy about saying that kind of thing. Diablo's
biggest problem early on was that it was so popular
(24:47):
that everyone was trying to go online and it was
crashing the battle Neet servers, Which is the best kind
of apology you have to give to your public guys,
I'm sorry, we're so awesome that you have to play
our game and you're destroying our server system. We're so sorry,
thank you, But yes, that was one of the big issues.
(25:07):
This also would mark when Blizzard would veer away from
that pure networking approach that I talked about earlier that
they had created with battle NEETs. So with the old method,
it was incredibly easy for cheaters to exploit the system.
I mean, they were hosting games on their own computers,
so entering into multiplayer games with an unfair advantage was
very easy. You could grief other players as well, because
(25:28):
Diablo had friendly fire on so you have an overpowered
character who blasts fireballs everywhere and then you're the only
one standing. Ha ha ha. Isn't that fun? Well. The
way that they decided to address this was by completely
changing the architecture of battle Neet. So they went with
a more traditional server clients set up in which Blizzard
(25:48):
would run the games on its servers and players would
log in to access the games, and that helped out
on the abuse that they had seen in the previous
Diablo game. It's really only possible because we had seen
a greater rollout of broadband technology at that point. The
same team that made Diablo two would work on the
expansion set called the Lord of Destruction, which added more
(26:11):
features to the base Diablo two game. Blizzard made the
decision early on to essue third party studios. They had
not had any good real experiences with that anyway, and
they said, you know, it just makes more sense for
us to do it ourselves if we're going to do this.
So they had the same team that made Diablo to
make the expansion Set and Low and Behold. People liked it.
(26:33):
Lord of Destruction launched in June two thousand one, just
one year after Diablo two had come out, and it
was another success for the team up at Blizzard North.
They would then turn their sides on developing yet another
Diablo game, which would have been Diablo three. But if
you can tell from that language, it would not turn
out the way the team imagined it would. That will
(26:56):
be more uh for part three of this series race,
but we'll get a little bit into it. Meanwhile, the
team that had been developing Nomad were hard at work
on a brand new project. Their goal was to create
a game in which hundreds, maybe thousands of people could
explore simultaneously. It would be a persistent online world. Players
(27:17):
would control characters they created and explore the world. They
would take on quests that would join other players, making factions.
They'd work together and coordinated raids on dungeons and opposing
player factions. They wanted to make a massively multiplayer online
role playing game or m m O RPG, and when
(27:37):
they looked across their collection of i P they decided
that the Warcraft universe made the most sense to adapt
into that format, and so work began on World of Warcraft. Now,
MMOs were not a new thing even in the early
two thousand's. Games like Ultima Online and ever Quest originally
(27:57):
debuted in the mid to late ease and MMOs were
a really attractive type of game to develop. I'll explain why. See,
you design a compelling game. That's step one. It has
to be something that people want to play. That means
you can then get, if you're lucky, a nice large
base of players. Moreover, the general business strategy was to
(28:20):
charge a subscription fee every month for each player. So
it wasn't just that these players were going out and
buying your game at full price. I mean they were,
but they were also paying for the privilege to continue
to play the game. In return, you indicate that you're
you're going to keep building content and you're going to
roll out new stuff for players to experience over time.
(28:43):
But really, what it means is that a game becomes
an ongoing stream of revenue. Best yet, with most games,
you would sigh once it became pretty clear you would
hit your saturation point. Right Like, if you had a
traditional game, then eventually you hit the point where sale
are gonna start to drop off, it would be pretty
obvious you weren't going to see any more dramatic jumps
(29:04):
in sales figures. But with MMOs that didn't matter as
much because once you had your initial player base, they'd
still be paying you that monthly subscription fee, even if
you only sold a relatively small number of copies. Once
those initial sales died down, you'd still be sitting on
a nice monthly revenue stream. Now, that didn't mean the
(29:25):
game immediately launched right away when they announced it. Nope,
it would take a few more years before it was
ready to rule out to players. But the course have
been laid for one of Blizzard's biggest success stories. But
before we get to the success, we're gonna have a
little more heartbreak. It's my favorite part. In fact, I'm
(29:47):
gonna have to really revel in this. So let's take
a quick break. Okay, I alluded to this before the break.
We're coming up to one of the big heartbreaks in
canceled game history. This is legendary in the world of
(30:08):
computer games when you talk about vapor were so. While
Blizzard was hard at work developing Diablo three and Warcraft
three and World of Warcraft, as well as starting to
lay out plans for a full StarCraft sequel, the company
also reached out to another developer to make an entirely
different type of game based on Blizzards intellectual property. This
(30:30):
game would be a science fiction third person shooter, a
console game set in blizzards StarCraft universe, co developed with
a studio called Nihilistic Games. I guess they just didn't
believe in anything. Blizzard announced these plans at the two
thousand to Tokyo Game Show, and it was going to
be called StarCraft Ghost and boy, what a fitting title
(30:55):
that turned out to be. Now, the goal was to
make this console action shooter because one of the challenges
Blizzard was facing was that's real time strategy games were
hard to translate to a console experience. A controller doesn't
really offer you the type of speed and precision that
a keyboard or mouse would, and those are very important
(31:17):
elements of a real time strategy game. But at the
same time, Blizzard recognized that console gamers represented a huge
market and that's one that the company wasn't really able
to take advantage of with most of the games that
it was producing, So that helped motivate the team to
to get this project underway. Now. At the announcement, Blizzards
stated that they intended for StarCraft Ghost to come out
(31:40):
for the quote next generation end quote of video game consoles.
So in two thousand two, if you look at what
were the state of the art consoles at the time,
you had the Nintendo GameCube, the original Xbox, and the
PlayStation two. So the next generation of consoles wouldn't come
out for a few years, right, They announced it in
(32:00):
two thousand two, But the Xbox three sixty wouldn't come
out to two thousand five, and the WE and the
p S three wouldn't come out until two thousand six.
So this announcement was made well in advance of any
game coming out, and sometimes that can come back to
bite you on the butt, since a lot can change
over the years. Or maybe they intended to develop for
(32:21):
the GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS two and maybe
it just didn't work out. Things did not go smoothly
on the development front. Now I'm gonna stick with this
story for a bit, then I'll get back to the
rest of Blizzard. The company was not happy with how
things were going with Nihilistic, and then the two companies
would part ways in June two thousand four, with the
(32:41):
game still unfinished. Blizzard then signed an agreement with another
development studio called Swinging Ape Studios to help finish this game.
Not much was said about the game, other than a
revelation in two thousand five that Blizzard had decided to
cancel a version of it for the game Cube, but
the other versions were still active development. In two thousand six,
(33:02):
Blizzard published a StarCraft Ghost novel, which to date is
really the only published piece of content from StarCraft Ghost
from Blizzard. It became a famous example of vaporware, right
up there with Duke Knewcombe Forever, which actually did come
out at one point. It was terrible, but it came out.
(33:24):
It wouldn't be until two thousand fourteen when Mike Moreheim
would finally say publicly that the game had in fact
been canceled and it wasn't just in cold storage twelve
years after they announced it. Now, between the announcement of
World of Warcraft and the actual launch of the game,
(33:45):
Blizzard would publish the third full game in the Warcraft series,
Warcraft three. Now. As I mentioned earlier, the version that
Blizzard had talked about several years previous was different from
what the company actually produced. In the original concept, heroes
in the game would essentially be playable characters, marrying the
real time strategy and role playing game genres and giving
(34:06):
players a chance to shape a story. In the actual
Warcraft three, the hero units were there, but they were
more like specialized game pieces that could do things that
other units couldn't. They weren't characters, and there wasn't really
an RPG factor in the game. It did feature some
three D gameplay, which was a new thing for the
(34:26):
Warcraft series, and it also featured the most extravagant cut
scenes Blizzard had featured in a game up to that point.
I mean, seriously, it was right around this time that
those of us who were paying attention to Blizzard were saying,
you know, they could just package up their cinematics and
release them as a c g I movie. But it's
actually a little too early in the timeline for me
(34:47):
to talk about Warcraft the movie right now, but don't worry,
we'll get to it. So the Blizzard team would then
go on to work for an expansion pack for the
base Warcraft three game. It was called Frozen Throne, which
every time I said it out loud before I recorded it,
I said throzen Frone, and I was sure I was
(35:09):
going to do it again. It was actually going through
my mind just now, just letting you guys get an
insight into how Jonathan works, because I haven't done that
podcast yet. Like Rude War and Lord of Destruction, Blizzard
actually used the exact same development team that worked on
the original game to make the expansion pack, which helped
ensure that the quality would remain the same. In two
thousand three, Blizzard North experienced an enormous shake up. Several
(35:34):
people in the executive management and lead developer levels had
grown disenchanted with Vivendi that's the parent company for the
whole shebang. Right there was uncertainty about whether or not
Vivendi was going to spin off the game's division, or
it might sell it off to yet another owner, and
all of that uncertainty was making it very difficult to
plan development cycles for games. After numerous communications issues and
(35:58):
worries about the corporate direction of Avendy and whether Blizzard
North was even being listened to, a whole slew of
Blizzard North folks just up and left. That included the
founders of the company, so Max and Eric Schaefer and
David Brevic, who all founded Condor Incorporated. They left with
some other high level employees and they formed a new
(36:20):
company that they called Flagship Studios. Seems like they were
maybe thumbing their nose at Vendy a little bit, saying
that they made the flagship game for Blizzard. Another group
of influential employees from Blizzard North also left, creating a
different game studio called Castaway Games. Also seems like there
might be some shade being thrown there anyway. The departures
(36:42):
through the development of Diablo three into total disarray. The
following year, Blizzard South would also see a very big
name departure. Alan Adham, the founder who was the reason
that Blizzard even existed, decided he had endured enough stress
and long hours. You're remember he stepped down from president
a few years earlier, but he figured now was time
(37:04):
to try something new it's time to get into the
exciting world of corporate finance. I'm not even making that up.
Someone chose to go from video game studio to corporate finance.
So in two thousand four he resigned from Blizzard. He
had been the motivating force that convinced the other two
founders of the company, Frank Pierce and Mike Moreheim, to
(37:27):
join with him to create this crazy, risky venture. And
now he was gone from the company, though he wouldn't
be gone forever. That right, there's what we call foreshadow
and but I won't get back to that until the
next episode, so just be patient. Okay. Moreheim had already
been serving as president, so actually the company didn't have
too much interruption in its day to day operations. Moreheim
(37:51):
oversaw Blizzards acquisition of the aforementioned Swinging Apes Studios, the
one that had been working on StarCraft Ghost, and it
would get renamed into Blizzard Console. Now, all the turmoil
might have made it seem like the company that had
so recently been on top could collapse in on itself,
but in the fall of two thousand four, Blizzard published
(38:11):
a game that would ensure their longevity. This was, of course,
World of Warcraft, the M M O RPG that would
set a new standard of success for the genre. To
say the game was a hit would be a severe understatement.
It would become one of the biggest money makers in
video games history. So in our next episode, I'll talk
(38:33):
more about the evolution of World of Warcraft and how
Blizzard would periodically inject new life into the game with
various expansion packs, world resets, and other strategies. I'll also
talk about the final fate of Blizzard North, which spoiler
alert is not a happy one, and will take a
closer look at some of the controversies that Blizzard has
(38:56):
had to weather more free recently. You know, like what
happens when a popular gamer suddenly expresses support for Hong
Kong while your company is simultaneously trying to make a
whole lot of money in China. But all of that
will come in the next episode. If you guys have
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, well I got
some suggestions for you, buddy. You can email me addresses
(39:19):
tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or draw
me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle for
both of those. For the show is text Stuff H S.
W don't forget to visit our website, that's tech stuff
podcast dot com. You'll find a link to an archive
of every ever love An episode I've ever recorded, all
twelve hundred of them. So go take a search before
(39:40):
you suggest something, because chances are I've talked about it already.
I mean, I'll probably talk about it again. I don't
remember what I talked about if I'm being honest. Also, hey,
we have a link to our merchandise store. Every purchase
you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
(40:00):
Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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