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Post by Steve Farrelly @ 02:32am 15/02/11 | 14 Comments
This year Blizzard celebrated 20 years in the industry, and to help them celebrate, Blizzard Australia teed up an interview for AusGamers with co-founder, Frank Pearce, to talk about the company's humble beginnings porting SNES titles, creating their first IPs, what they're doing today and how they see the industry's future. Oh, and BBQs and beer.

This is an interview for anyone who's ever worked in the industry, wants to work in the industry or is a massive Blizzard fan - Frank is nicely candid, utterly humble, and completely entertaining.

Click here for the full interview.



blizzardinterviewfrank Pearce20th anniversary





Latest Comments
`ViPER`
Posted 08:18am 15/2/11
Why no talk about warcraft or warcraft 2?
kos
Posted 09:39am 15/2/11
Why no talk about warcraft or warcraft 2?


It was always our goal to self-publish games that we created from scratch, you know, with our own intellectual property, because that’s where you create value, and so at the time we were playing a game called Dune 2, which was a real-time strategy game, and we applied that same formula that we applied to Lemming right; “wouldn’t it be cool if this was high-fantasy like Dungeons & Dragons”, so we said “we should make a real-time strategy game in a high-fantasy setting, oh and by the way, wouldn’t it be cool if you could play against a real, live human opponent instead of a artificial intelligence opponent”, and we banged that out in about a year or so, and really, that was the first PC game that shipped with the Blizzard logo on the box, and you know, I think it was accepted pretty well by gamers, I mean it wasn’t a huge success from a sales perspective, but I think it definitely put Blizzard on the map and laid the foundation for the sequel and subsequent games.
`ViPER`
Posted 09:45am 15/2/11
Pretty sure they are talking about warcraft 1 there.
kos
Posted 10:02am 15/2/11
Exactly?
Mr Pantz
Posted 10:13am 15/2/11
I miss Dune 2, was my fav game as a kid and it came with my second computer that and Discworld. I used to play them all day, everyday. I can't remember how many times I clocked Dune 2 and still didn't get sick of it.
Khel
Posted 10:34am 15/2/11
Except Dune 2 wasn't made by Blizzard, it was made by Westwood :P
Khel
Posted 10:41am 15/2/11
Oh, nm, after reading the interview I see why you mentioned Dune 2
`ViPER`
Posted 10:56am 15/2/11
I just would have liked them to talk more about the evolution from warcraft 1 through to WoW, they kinda skipped it and went yeah we made warcraft 1 and now we have 4500 employees.
kos
Posted 11:13am 15/2/11
Yeah agree with you on that point, the interview felt like it was all about them starting up and what they did when they were just 3 guys and then just jumped to "now we're huge and have 4500 employees" but nothing much more. It was still interesting to read about them starting up and you probably wouldn't read about that in many or any other interviews, but I too would have really liked to hear about how they actually grew and progressed RTS-wise from Warcraft through Starcraft and Warcraft 3 and how that led them on to WoW.

Still a good interview though! In the immortal words of Frank Pearce: "Thank you, Stephen."
Khel
Posted 01:22pm 15/2/11
Yeah, but all the "How we came from Warcraft to WoW" stuff was covered during WoW's 5 year anniversary thing. This is 20 years of Blizzard and more about where Blizzard itself came from (at least thats my perception of it).
rationsauce
Posted 03:31pm 15/2/11
good read, except prolly a bit more on diablo would've been interesting.
Morbz
Posted 03:52pm 15/2/11
rock n roll racing kicked ass...
deeper
Posted 09:19pm 15/2/11
good article i thought - might not of covered everything of what everyone wanted to read/hear, but i found it enjoyable anyway
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