Triple Click - EXCERPT: Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Here's a special treat — the first chapter of Jason Schreier's PLAY NICE: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, read by Ray Chase and free for all Triple Click listeners. You can buy the audiobook right here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781668639818/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Hello, triple clickers. Triple clickies? I don't know. This is Jason Schreier, and I am here to tell you that I have a book coming out this week. You probably heard of it. It's called Play Nice, the Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. And as a special treat for Triple Click listeners, I thought I would share an audio excerpt from the audiobook version. This is read by Ray Chase, the prolific voice.

actor who also did my previous two books and might be best known as the subway announcer in Persona 5. I think he also played some Final Fantasy thing. I don't know. You can look him up on IMDB. Anyway, this is the first chapter of the book in Audio Forum, and I hope you like it. The book comes out on October 8th in hardcover, digital, and audio. Here it is. Enjoy.

Before he'd even graduated high school, Alan Adaham knew he wanted to make video games. It was Southern California in the 1980s, and gaming was morving from a curious pastime into a lucrative business. Arcades were booming, cheap home computers like the Commodore 64 were becoming living room centerpieces, and the song Pac-Man Fever was cresting to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. During lunch breaks, Atham would head to his local arcade and blast through aliens in games like asteroids and space invaders. At home, he and his brother convinced their dad to buy an Apple II computer, which Atham could use both to play games and to create them. Born A.M. Adham, to Egyptian parents, an engineer and a preschool administrator,

he grew obsessed with the way video games functioned and how they made people feel. He'd talk about how gaming would be the new form of entertainment, synonymous with movies and stuff like that, said a college friend. I thought he was smoking dope. To Atham, interactivity made video games capable of evoking an unparalleled adrenaline rush. Instead of just watching something happen, you could actually feel it play out. through a high school friend he met Brian Fargo, a charismatic slightly older programmer who was actually paid to make video games, an absurd concept at the time for a company called Boone. Fargo, recognizing a smart, ambitious teenager, recruited at him to do playtesting.

He always seemed like a really sharp kid, but he didn't act like a kid, said Fargo. In 1983, Fargo and a small group of colleagues left Boone to form a startup called Interplay Productions, and soon they were making waves in the industry with games. like The Bards Tale, a fantasy adventure inspired by Fargo's Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Ataham looked at interplay with admiration and a little envy, wondering if he too could one day start his own company. He kept working with Fargo during the summers as he began attending the University of California, Los Angeles, with hopes of one day making video games that millions of people would play.

During his sophomore year at UCLA, Adaham designed and programmed his first game, Gunslinger, a rudimentary graphical text adventure set in the Wild West. A small company called Datasoft printed the game and distributed it to stores, where prospective buyers had no idea it had been coded by someone who wasn't yet old enough to legally drink. Gunslinger didn't get much attention, but to Atham it was proof that he could finish and release a video game of his own, a feat about which he bragged to anyone who would listen. One day at the UCLA Computer Lab, Atham took a seat next to a skinny, curly-haired student named Mike Morheim. The two men, both bookish and soft-spoken, had shared some classes,

but hadn't talked much. Atham stepped out of the room, locking his computer before he left. When the computer timed out and unlocked itself a few minutes later, Moorheim decided to prank his seatmate, swinging over and typing in his own password to relock the device. Atham returned, clacked a few letters on the keyboard, and somehow unlocked the computer. Morheim stunned, asked Atham just how the heck he'd pulled that off. It turned out the two young computer geeks had both used the same simple password. Joe, a meat cute that sparked a lasting friendship. Moreheim, too, obsessed over video games.

As a kid, he was fascinated by the insides of machinery. Radio's, television, microwaves. Whenever his family would get new electronics, he'd ignore the hardware and instead pour over the manual, curious to know the exact purpose of each port on the back of the VCR. In middle school, he and his siblings pooled together their savings to buy the Bally Astrocade, a game system that included a cartridge with the basic programming language on it.

allowing Moorheim to write simple software and slowly figure out how games functioned. The jolt of excitement from taking things apart and reassembling them pushed him to study electrical engineering at UCLA, where he sat in the front row of every class, asking questions and trying to absorb as much as possible. Their class of programmers was in the hundreds, but Moorheim was among the few who stood out to Adam as the best of the best, the ones who would finish their assignments early and then invent challenges for one another, battling over who could code a successful program in the fewest lines. Atham thought this fellow software-obsessed geek could be the perfect partner for the grand plan he had been formulating to make the best video game company in the world.

As the two men made their way through college in the late 1980s, the video game industry expanded at a rapid pace. The Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1987, led to groundbreaking games like Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda. Video games were growing more complex and more lucrative every year. Atham's old pals at Interplay were so successful, at making their own games, they also began funding and publishing other companies' titles. In 1990, as Atham was finishing his degree, he suggested to Moorheim that they team up and start a video game company. But Moorheim, who had graduated a few months earlier, was reluctant. He'd snagged a job writing test software at Western Digital, a stable computer technology company

that offered him a salary and benefits with little risk, and he specialized in hardware, not video game development. Atham persisted, laying out a lengthy case and even setting a up a meeting with Moorheim's skeptical father. As computer engineers in their 20s, Atham argued, this was the best possible time to take a risk. If it didn't work out, no big deal. They could all get jobs at IBM or Microsoft. There were very few other industries in which a couple of guys could go into business with a small amount of seed money and make something that hordes of people enjoyed. It was clear that Adam had a gift for persuasion. People said he had Jedi powers, said one person who worked with him. He was always calm, listening, not aggressive, always a

assuming. Then he'd start to talk and you'd get all charged up. Yes, I will follow you. After some hemming and hawing, Moorheim agreed to take the plunge. In February 1991, the pair founded Silicon and Synapse, meant to represent a sort of synergy between computer parts, Silicon, and the human brain, Synapse. Each of them invested around $10,000, Atham from his college fund, Moorheim threw a loan from his grandmother, and they rented out a tiny office in Irvine, California. They couldn't afford new computers, so they brought in the ones they had at home, and Atham recruited one of his other UCLA friends, Frank Pierce, to be their first employee. Years later, Pierce would become retconned as a Blizzard co-founder,

but at the time he took a salary rather than equity. One photo taken on their very first day showed Atham and Moorheim craning their necks and staring down at the camera, pursed lips, matching stubble, looking ready to conquer the world. In 1991, the video game industry was blowing up. Street Fighter 2 dominated arcades worldwide, Sega and Nintendo battled over living rooms, and Tetris had become a global sensation thanks to its bouncy music and addictive block puzzles. As the money kept pouring in, companies looked to release their games on as many platforms as possible,

often hiring outside contractors to help adapt a game from one machine to another. A game originally released for the DOS computer operating system might get a port or conversion to the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Amiga, and more, each developed by a different contractor and packed with new features to distinguish it from the others. Moorheim and Atham plan to one day design their own software, but to start, Silicon and Synapse would take on contract work as the company tried to make a name for itself. This was where Atham's relationship with Brian Fargo started to pay dividends. Fargo, who had received a 10% stake in Silicon and Synapse as an advisor, Adhem had 60%, and Moorheim had 30%, began giving the company a slew of these conversion contracts, starting with, with a Windows version of battle chess,

which transformed the rooks and knights into medieval warriors. Silicon and Synapse needed more programmers to keep up with the work, so they called Patrick Wyatt, who was finishing up his final months at UCLA, where he and Moorheim had been brothers at Triangle, a fraternity of men who spent most of their time talking about code. Moorheim asked if he wanted to make video games, and Wyatt, a computer science major, was intrigued.

I said, that sounds like a lot of fun, Wyatt recalled. He started programming on battle chess, while simultaneously finishing his degree and working another job on campus. It was hellacious in a way because I was doing so much stuff, he said, but it was also really fun. Soon he had officially joined Silicon and Synapse as an engineer. As the year went on, they kept picking up conversion contracts for Interplay's eclectic suite of products,

ranging from a role-playing game based on Lord of the Rings to an educational game that taught players how to type. They'd fly past us and we'd figure out whether we could do it or not, said Wyatt. At the time, we'd call it. called it the Business Plan du jour. Each of these contracts would take a few months at most, and each Silicon and Synapse employee would juggle several at once. The goal at that point was just to keep alive, said Joey Rahal, who joined the company later that year. When they weren't completing work-for-hire projects, Silicon and Synaps's employees were fantasizing

about the original games they'd make. Inspired by Adams' lofty rhetoric, they thought they could conquer the video game industry, not just because they were good programmers, but because they understood video games. The industry's rapid growth had drawn interest from suited businessmen with expertise in spreadsheets and selling boxes, but not in the products themselves. In contrast, Adham and crew didn't need focus groups or market research to discern if a game was good. They could just make games they wanted to play. Adham decided that anyone who didn't play games wasn't welcome at Silicon and Synapse. Prospective employees would be asked their favorite video games then quizzed extensively to gauge their depth of knowledge.

The team would write code in the mornings, battle one another in Magic the Gathering card matches during lunch, and spent evenings playing games on the office television. James Anhalt, another engineer who had joined from UCLA, shared an apartment with Pierce, who served double duty as a programmer and the office receptionist. It was 24-7. The people you live with, hang out with, and work with were all the same, Anald said. There was a constant humming conversation about which games were good, which were bad, what they'd all do differently.

Interplay was working on a game called RPM Racing, a basic driving simulator in which players steered pastel sports cars and trucks down winding tracks, and the timeline was tight. Nintendo's next console, the Super Nintendo, was planned for that fall, and it was crucial for RPM racing to arrive alongside it. Fargo called in Silicon and Synapse to help develop the game and was again impressed with the team's efficiency and reliability. I knew I could count on them and they came through, he said.

Fargo then offered to let Atham pitch his own ideas, and by the end of 1991, Interplay had signed Silicon and Synaps to make two original games for the Super Nintendo. One was a sequel to RPM racing called Rock and Roll Racing that added personality to its predecessor's drab driving. There was heavy metal music, a cast of drivers with names like Cyberhawk and Snake Sanders, and an announcer offering colorful play-by-play commentary. Let the carnage begin! The second was The Lost Vikings. a puzzle platformer inspired by the classic strategy game Lemmings, in which players were tasked with keeping dozens of hapless wandering critters alive by clearing safe passages through tunnels and over lava.

But the initial concept that the player would control dozens or hundreds of tiny Nordic Vikings wasn't holding up because the creatures were too small to see on a television. In the future, the video game industry would cultivate a discipline known as game design to solve problems like this. But in the early 1990s, the process was less rigorous. Everyone at Silicon and Synapse was either an artist or a programmer, and Atham would call them all into a room to hammer out the solution. Everybody was allowed to say their peace, said Joey Rahal.

There was never any animosity about it, just pitch in. What do you think is cool? For the Lost Vikings, they eventually decided to whittle down the number of Vikings to three, which felt like a good balance. Eric the Swift could run and jump. Paliag the fierce could shoot arrows, and Olaf the Stout had a shield for blocking enemy projectiles and gliding across short distances.

The player could control only one at a time, but could switch between them to take down monsters or solve environmental puzzles. All of Silicon and Synapse's employees were men, and these design meetings, fueled by caffeine and testosterone, could get rowdy. Sometimes there was screaming, sometimes there were fistfights. The burgeoning video game industry was still in the early stages of becoming an industry, and a 10-man game-making company like Silicon and Synapse didn't yet have legal or HR people, or even standards for how to operate. They called it management by chaos, finding the best possible option through debate. We'd sit there and iterate on an issue until everyone was in agreement, said Jesse McReynolds, a programmer who joined later. We could argue over something for hours and hours.

The process worked in large part because Atham was so persuasive, earning him the nickname Velvet Hammer for his understated yet forceful approach. The development of the Lost Vikings would establish design principles that the company would follow for decades to come. Everyone at Silicon and Synapse was tasked with playing the game, so they all had a deeper understanding of how it functioned. And when they played too much and lost their sense of objectivity about what worked, they brought in external playtesters. To add levity, they gave the Vikings cartoon-like animations and added cheeky dialogue for when players died and had to restart.

I'm tired, Eric, we've been through this level too many times. Wake me when we finish it. When the Lost Vikings came out, Atham and a few other employees gathered at a nearer, by store to watch people play the demo. He was elated when a teenage boy looked over at the arcade stations and went for their game. The first level aimed to teach Eric the Swift's jump move by putting Eric next to an electricity pet. And when the boy started playing, he fell into the pit and died. The boy then immediately put down the controller and moved to another kiosk. I just thought,

oh my God, we killed this kid two seconds into the game and he's never going to know what an amazing game this is, Atham later said in a retrospective. The incident convinced him that video game intro sequences needed to be as safe, easy, and approachable as possible. You want your players right from the start to feel heroic and powerful, he said. Death traps aside, both rock and roll racing and the Lost Vikings were critical hits, leading one video game magazine to name Silicon and Synapse Best Software Developer of the year in 1993. Interplay, which had published both games, was thrilled with the reception and hungry for more.

They were clearly one of the better developers I worked with, said Interplay producer Alan Pavlish. They understood game design, they worked hard, and they took the time and effort to do the little bit extra that takes a game from a B or a B plus into an A or an A plus. Yet, the company wasn't making much money off this success. Silicon and Synapse employees didn't earn top salaries or have much in the way of benefits, but even with expenses kept low, Adam and Moorheim had trouble keeping up. Neither rock and roll racing nor the Lost Vikings were selling quite as well as they'd hoped. Some of the developers blamed that on the marketing, which was beyond their control. As the publisher, Interplay was funding, packaging, and selling most of their games, which also meant keeping the profits.

To find real success, Silicon and Synapse would need to publish a game itself. Stu Rose had grungy long hair, a perennial denim jacket, and dreams of one day becoming a cartoonist. But in the early 1990s, the newspaper industry was flailing, and he realized that his dream of drawing for the daily funny pages might not pan out. So he thought he might try his luck in video games. One night, while out with a friend who worked at Silicon and Synapse, Rose met Adam and other members of the team who said they were looking for new artists.

Why didn't my friend say anything, Rose remembered thinking. Soon after getting his own job at Silicon and Synapse, Rose discovered the answer. Alan Pavlish arrived at the office to look at an expected new build for the Mac conversion of Interplay's castles, but Rose's friend wasn't at the office. When they looked through his computer, they couldn't find the requisite art anywhere. Turns out, he had not really done much work, said Rose. Alan's face almost went white when he realized. The friend was let go and Rose took over the project,

which he finished in a few weeks, helping prove that he meshed with the other type A achievers at Silicon and Synapse. Sometime later, Rose was in Atham's office and saw a box from an educational game he had developed at a previous company. Whoa, that's weird. You have my product on the shelf, Rose recalled saying. Atham was confused saying he thought that Rose's friend had made it. I think he had basically used my portfolio to get the job.

said Rose. From that point on, the company formally added a new step to their interview process. Live drawing tests. Rose loved the nerdy congenial atmosphere at Silicon and Synapse. During lunch hours, they'd gather in one of the small office rooms and pull out the NeoGeo or Super Nintendo for office tournaments. One of their big obsessions was Doon 2, a PC game released in December 1992 by the Las Vegas-based developer Westwood Studios. Inspired by the beloved Frank Herbert novel, Dune 2 was one of the first games in a genre that would be called Real Time Strategy, or RTS. Rather than playing as a single character, you played as an omniscient commander with full view of the battlefield, where you could harvest resources, construct buildings, and train soldiers.

Every second you juggle decisions about where to move your armies, how to spend your money, and what to prioritize. There was just one problem, thought Rose and his colleagues. Dune 2 didn't have a multiplayer mode. At best, the hyper-competitive staff of Silicon and Synapse, could argue over strategies and see who had the highest scores, but they couldn't battle one another directly. Everything's better with friends had become one of the company's core philosophies.

There was nothing as thrilling as coordinating with a buddy to solve puzzles in the Lost Vikings or getting to declare that you were the office's best Samurai Showdown 2 player. They all agreed, Dune 2 with multiplayer could be one of the best video games on the planet. At the same time, Alan Adham was thinking up ways to transform the company into an original game publisher. Inspired by a set of Dungeons and Dragons games known as the Gold Box Collection because of their distinct gilded packaging, he envisioned a series with a cohesive look on store shelves.

Each game would be loosely connected and take place during a different historical period, such as ancient Rome or the Vietnam War. One of the artists, Sam Didier, whose visions of big beards and giant shoulder pads would help drive the company's distinct art direction suggested a name, Warcraft. Someone else pitched a high fantasy setting inspired by Lord of the Ring. in the Warhammer series of tabletop games, and soon enough, they had a game idea. Warcraft, Orcs, and Humans would be a copy of Dune 2, with multiplayer and highly polished gameplay,

set in a land of swords, spells, and monsters. Pat Wyatt began programming Warcraft, orcs, and humans in the summer of 1993, as the rest of Silicon and Synapse scrambled to stay alive by taking on as many game contracts as possible. Since there were no artists on the project yet, he started out by copy-pasting all the artwork from Doon 2. Later, when Warcraft shipped, Wyatt realized that while they'd replaced all of Doon 2's art with their own,

they forgot to change the font. They altered it for future versions, but at first, the game's text looked identical to Doon 2's. So, yeah, he said, we owe them a little bit of a debt there. He then began devising his own innovations, like a mouse-based shortcut for selecting multiple units so the player could order them all to move or attack. I was thinking, this is fun all by itself. Wyatt said. At first, he thought there should be no limit on the number of units that you could select, but Atham insisted that restrictions would force players to make calculated decisions,

instead of recruiting a massive number of knights and archers and then hurling them all at the enemy. After a few weeks of company-wide management by chaos sessions, Atham won the argument. Stu Rose then joined Warcraft as the first main artist. He drew the map interface and animations for the game's two races, the orcs and the humans, each of which had their own armies and infrastructure. The development process was so unstructured that he was also tasked with naming the heroes and cities. I was just coming up with them in my head, he said. Um, okay, they're going to go to a place called Goldshire.

Yeah, that's it. Later, Rose provided the voice of the human peasant, a worker minion that could mine for gold, harvest lumber, and construct buildings. Work completed, Rose would assure the player in his flat baritone every time a new farm or barracks was finished. Warcraft was coming together nicely, but the company's co-founders were beginning to feel the financial pressure. By the end of 1993, Silicon and Synapse had switched names.

Now, it was Chaos Studios, alluding to their unique process, and was struggling to pay the bills. Atham and Moorheim had been covering payroll for a dozen employees on their credit cards, racking up debt to keep the company afloat. The two founders were tens of thousands of dollars in the whole, so desperate that they were getting cash advances on their Discover cards at the supermarket and then depositing that money into the company's bank account. Although they were nervous, Adham and Moorheim didn't see these financial woes as an existential threat. The contracts were still coming in, and it always seemed like they were just a few months away from stability.

Sure, they had debt, but at least they hadn't been forced to take out second mortgages or beg Fargo for a loan. It never even occurred to them that it might be time to sell the company.