Blizzard Entertainment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | |
| Type | Subsidiary of Activision Blizzard |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1991 (as Silicon & Synapse) |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, USA.[1] |
| Key people | Michael Morhaime (president and co-founder) Frank Pearce (vice president and co-founder) Rob Pardo (vice president) Chris Metzen (vice president of Creative Development) |
| Industry | Video games |
| Products | Warcraft series StarCraft series Diablo series |
| Employees | 4,600[2] |
| Website | Blizzard Entertainment |
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded in February 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse by three graduates of UCLA, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. Based in Irvine, California, the company originally concentrated primarily of the creation of game ports for other studios before beginning development of their own software in 1993 with the development of games like Rock N' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1994 the company became Blizzard Entertainment Incbefore being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Blizzard went on to create several successful PC games, including the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo series, and the MMORPGWorld of Warcraft.
Blizzard Entertainment offers events to meet players and to announce games, the BlizzCon inCalifornia, United States, and the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in other countries.
Contents[hide] |
[edit]History
Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, a year after[3] all three had received their bachelor's degrees from UCLA.[3][4] In the early days the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess.[5][6] In 1993, the company developed games like Rock N' 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, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On-Line by a company called CUC Internationalin 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line which included Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard was part of the Vivendi Gamesgroup of Vivendi. In July 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision, using Blizzard's name in the resulting company, Activision Blizzard.
In 1996, Blizzard 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 was located in San Mateo, California; the company originated in Redwood City, California.
Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them under Game Boy Advance.[7]In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France, responsible for the European in-game support ofWorld of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, its MMORPG offering. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The company was then merged into Blizzard's other teams after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation ofBlizzard North into the headquarters at 131 Theory in UC Irvine's University Research Park in Irvine, California.
In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft. Mike Morhaime accepted the award.
[edit]Titles
- StarCraft II was officially announced as of May 19, 2007, at the Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea.
- Diablo III was officially announced as of June 28 , 2008 at the 2008 Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France.
Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations, andStarCraft: Ghost, which was "indefinitely postponed" on March 24, 2006 after being in development hell for much of its lifespan, and whose current status is in question. The company also has a history of declining to set release dates, choosing to instead take as much time as needed, generally saying a given product is "done when it's done."[17]
Pax Imperia II was originally announced as a title to be published by Blizzard. Blizzard eventually dropped Pax Imperia II, though, when it decided it might be in conflict with their other space strategy project, the now-legendary StarCraft. THQ eventually contracted with Heliotrope and released the game in 1997 as Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they will be producing a Warcraft live-action movie. The movie will be released by Legendary Pictures.[18] They have recently announced that director Sam Raimi has agreed to direct the upcoming movie.
Blizzard recently trademarked the name 'Cataclysm' and have announced that this will be the name of the next expansion to the current: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.[19]
[edit]Controversies
[edit]Battle.net
 | This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008) |
Battle.net is an online gaming service used for its games World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Starcraft: Brood War, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Warcraft III, and Warcraft III Expansion Set: The Frozen Throne. It was released in January 1997 coinciding with the release of Diablo. It functions as a way to play over the Internet, featuring cooperative and player-versus-player game playing, a game matchmaking system, and online chat among other features. Battle.net is free, and only requires an Internet connection and account registration in order to use. World of Warcraft players can link their paid subscription to Battle.net so that the two accounts share the same login and authentication rules. Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.
In February 2002 lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers ofbnetd, a reverse engineered, GNU GPL licensed Battle.net emulation package. With bnetd a gamer was not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games online.
Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd Blizzard claimed[cite this quote] that the public availability of any such software package facilitated piracy and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA.[citation needed] As this case was one of the first major test cases for the DMCA the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved. Attempts to negotiate a settlement to the dispute failed and the issue went to court where Blizzard won the case on all counts. The defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.[20]
This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1, 2005.[21]
[edit]Warden Client
Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client'. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game, and the Terms of Service contain a clause consenting to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running.[22]
The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. This determination is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes assumed to correspond to cheat programs.[23] The Warden scans all processes running on a computer, not just the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across what would be considered private information and other personally identifiable information. It is because of these peripheral scans that Warden has been accused of being spyware and has run afoul of controversy amongprivacy advocates.[24][25][26]
The Warden's reliability in correctly discerning legitimate vs illegitimate actions was called into question when a large scale incident happened when many Linux users were banned after an update to Warden caused it to incorrectly detect Cedega as a cheat program.[27] Blizzard issued a statement claiming they had correctly identified and restored all accounts and credited them with 20 days play.[28]
The Warden is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has been accused of attempting to inspect customers' computers. In 1998 Blizzard Entertainment had a class action lawsuit filed against them for "unlawful business practices" for the action of collecting data from a user's computer without their permission.[29]
[edit]FreeCraft
On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft, claiming trademark infringement. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music.
As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name ofStratagus.[original research?]
[edit]World of Warcraft Private Server Complications
| This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009) |
On December 5, 2008 Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to many administrators of high population World of Warcraft private servers (essentially slightly altered hosting servers of the actual World of Warcraft game, that players do not have to pay for.) Blizzard used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to influence many private servers to fully shut down and cease to exist.[30] Private or free servers sometimes charge a fee for providing you with in game items such as Epic sets of armor, weapons and gold. Some skills, abilities and quests aren't fully functional, creating a sizable gap in functionality between the official and private servers. Despite this action, hundreds of these servers still exist.
[edit]Founder Electronics infringement lawsuit
In 2007-08-14, Beijing University Founder Electronics Co., Ltd. sued Blizzard Entertainment Limited for copyright infringement claiming 100 million yuan in damages. The lawsuit alleged the Chinese edition of World of Warcraft reproduced a number of Chinese typefaces made by Founder Electronics without permission.[31]
[edit]MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
On July 14, 2008, the U.S. District of Arizona ruled on the case MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. The Court found that MDY was liable for copyright infringement since users of its Glider bot program were breaking Blizzard's End User License Agreement and Terms of Use.[32]
[edit]Blizzard Account
Blizzard released its Blizzard Account system in 2008. This service allows people who have purchased Blizzard Products (particularlyStarCraft, Diablo II, and WarCraft III and their expansions), to download games they have purchased, without needing the CD. Soon, it will store a player's "Blizzard Level" (similar to a Gamerscore), when World of Warcraft's Achievement Points get added to the system, and expanded with future Blizzard titles, like StarCraft II and Diablo III.[33]
Most recently, Blizzard has stated that all current World of Warcraft accounts will have to switch over to "Blizzard Accounts" by November 11th, 2009. Failure to do so will prevent the user from logging in until the switch has occurred. Players that do this or have already switched to a "Blizzard Account" are being given a free in game penguin pet. [34]
[edit]Companies created by former employees
Over the years, some former Blizzard employees have moved on and established gaming companies of their own:
- Flagship Studios,[35] creators of Hellgate: London, also worked on Mythos.
- ArenaNet,[36] creators of the Guild Wars franchise.
- Ready at Dawn Studios,[37] creators of Daxter, God of War: Chains of Olympus and an Ōkami port for the Wii.
- Red 5 Studios,[38] currently working on a yet to be announced next-gen MMOG.
- Castaway Entertainment,[39] currently in a state of financial crisis, ceased working on a game similar to the Diablo series, Djinn.
- Click Entertainment,[40] creators of Throne of Darkness.
- Carbine Studios,[41] currently working on a yet to be announced massively multiplayer title.
- Turpitude Design,[42] founded by Stieg Hedlund.
- Hyboreal Games,[43] founded by Michio Okamura.
- Runic Games,[44] founded by Travis Baldree, Erich Schaefer, and Max Schaefer
[edit]See also
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Blizzard Entertainment |
[edit]References
- ^ "Company Profile". Blizzard Entertainment. Retrieved 2007-08-21.
- ^ Gamasutra Staff (2009-09-17). "GDC Austin: An Inside Look At The Universe Of Warcraft". Gamasutra. Retrieved 2009-09-18.
- ^ a b M. Abraham (2006-11-06). "UCLA Engineering Celebrates Accomplishments at Annual Awards Dinner". UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Retrieved 2007-09-22.
- ^ "Blizzard Entertainment 10th Anniversary Celebration". Blizzard Entertainment. Archived from the original on 2002-01-26. Retrieved 2007-09-22.
- ^ a b c d e f "Blizzard Timeline". Blizzard Entertainment. Archived from the original on 2003-06-08.
- ^ "Ported by Blizzard Entertainment Inc.". Mobygames.
- ^ The Making of The Lost Vikings. Interview with Blizzard Insider. Blizzard Insider (url). Blizzard Insider. 2002-11-22. Retrieved on 2007-06-23.
- ^ a b c d "A Decade of Blizzard". IGN. 2001-02-01. Retrieved 2008-07-07. "Commodore 64 Battle Chess, Windows Battle Chess, Amiga Battle Chess II, Amiga Lord of the Rings, and Windows Shanghai were some of our early projects."
- ^ a b c d "Company Profile". Blizzard Entertainment. Retrieved 2008-07-07. "Prior to the release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Blizzard served as a third-party developer, creating entertainment software for various platforms, including DOS, Macintosh, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo. The company's best-known titles from this era include Rock 'n Roll Racing, The Lost Vikings, Blackthorne, and The Death and Return of Superman."
- ^ "Blizzard North: Condor and Diablo". Blizzard Entertainment. Archived from the original on 2002-02-22.
- ^ Ocampo, Jason; Eduardo Vasconcellos (October 10, 2008). "Blizzcon 08: StarCraft II Split Into Three Games". IGN. Retrieved 2008-10-13.
- ^ http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/08/starcraft-ii-officially-delayed-to-2010/
- ^ Worldwide Invitaional 2008
- ^ http://us.media.blizzard.com/232309/_images/en-US/splash.swf
- ^ a b Blizzard Entertainment - Employment Opportunities
- ^ IGN: Blizzard's New MMO Not Related To WoW
- ^ GamePro Staff (2006-08-29). "GamePro Q&A: Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan on The Burning Crusade". GamePro. Retrieved 2006-09-30.
- ^ "Blizzard Entertainment - Press Release". 2006-05-09. Archived from the original on 2006-05-26. Retrieved 2006-08-31.
- ^ "Cataclysm hits World of Warcraft". August 21, 2009.
- ^ Shinkle (12 Oct.), "Vivendi wins lawsuit against bypassing its game Web site", Knight Ridder Tribune Business News.: 1
- ^ "Blizzard Entertainment(R) Media Alert: Court Upholds BnetD Ruling in Favor of Blizzard Entertainment(R)", Business Wire, 6 Sep.
- ^ WoW -> Legal -> Terms of Use
- ^ rootkit.com
- ^ WoW's Warden stirs controversy - news - play
- ^ Definitions and Supporting Documents
- ^ Look! what is Blizzard doing on your pc? - MMOsite News Center
- ^ Linux Users Banned From World of Warcraft? | Linuxlookup
- ^ Blizzard Unbans Linux World of Warcraft Players | Linuxlookup
- ^ Errata: Blizzard Entertainment
- ^ Blizzard legal targets private servers (Accessed Oct. 12, 2009)
- ^ Founder prosecuting Blizzard online game World of Warcraft Tort Claiming 100 million yuan
- ^ MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc; and Vivendi Games, Inc., Order (District of Arizona 2008)
- ^ MTV Multiplayer » Blizzard Plans To Track Gamer Achievements Across ‘WoW,’ ‘Starcraft’ And ‘Diablo’
- ^ [1]
- ^ "About Flagship Studios". Archived from the original on 2007-12-12.
- ^ ArenaNet
- ^ "About Ready At Dawn Studios". Archived from the original on 2007-02-10.
- ^ Red 5 Studios[dead link]
- ^ About Castaway Entertainment
- ^ Click Entertainment
- ^ Carbine Studios
- ^ "Austin GDC 2008 Speaker List".
- ^ Hyboreal Games Q&A - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads
- ^ Sean Hollister (2008-08-14). "Captaining The Lifeboat: Runic Games’ Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree". Gamecyte. Retrieved 2009-04-11.
No comments:
Post a Comment