About Me
This company was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, we were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, we shipped our breakthrough hit Warcraft.In 1996, we acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North is located in San Mateo, California.We launched our online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of our action-RPG Diablo.On November 23, 2004, we released World of Warcraft, which has quickly grown to become one of the most popular MMORPGs in history.On May 16, 2005, we announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape, a console game maker, which is now Blizzard Console, currently working on Starcraft: Ghost.On August 1, 2005, we announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.We are a PC game developer and publisher. Since our release of Warcraft in 1994, we have been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Our headquarters is based in Irvine, California. Our company has a history of largely overshooting release dates. However, many of our fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as we have a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come. We also have a reputation for taking fierce legal action against anyone who reverse engineers their software, copies our game concepts, or publishes third-party server software that is compatible with our games.
