Blizzard released Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness in 1995 and, after acquiring Condor Studios (renamed Blizzard North), action-RPG Diablo in 1996. Both games were major hits, selling millions of copies at a time when just 100,000 sales was deemed a win. Things went to another level with StarCraft in 1998, originally envisaged as a light sci-fi reskin of Warcraft II, the game was rebuilt into a multiplayer phenomenon, becoming the best-selling real-time strategy game of all time and a surprise success in South Korea, where it became a national phenomenon. Diablo II (2000) and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002 furthered Blizzard's reputation for quality, high production values, and an emphasis on gameplay and fun.
In 2004 Blizzard ascended to another level of fame by releasing World of Warcraft, the most successful massively multi-player online roleplaying game of all time. The game's success was such that it was featured on TV shows like South Park, and its sales exploded to tens of millions of copies. Even the game's expansions broke all-time sales records for the fastest-selling video games. Blizzard was now a company generating billions of dollars of revenue.
This success saw video games mega-corporation Activision acquire Blizzard in 2008...which is where the problems began. The company continued to see success through the likes of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and two expansions, Diablo III (2012), Hearthstone (2014) and Overwatch (2016), but the company started scoring PR own goals. Activision's drive to constantly monetise their games through nickel-and-diming players started infesting Blizzard's games, to the annoyance of fans, and the company seemed to lose track of their once tight relationship with their fanbase. The company also saw major problems behind the scenes, with old hands leaving in droves as they saw corporate interfering in their development processes. The company soon became embroiled in repeated scandals, first for allegedly censoring a player during a tournament event and then for a series of sexual harassment cases. Even the company's reputation for quality started taking hits, through the disappointing WarCraft III Reforged (2020) and the underwhelming Overwatch 2 (2023). Finally, Microsoft purchased Activision-Blizzard for $69 billion, the largest merger in corporate history, giving the company hope that maybe things were changing...just before hitting them with massive lay-offs.
The story of Blizzard Entertainment is undeniably fascinating. There's a distinct arc here which may be familiar - plucky little company becomes huge, morphs into the very thing it hated - but in the hands of veteran video game journalist Jason Schreier (who may have "blacklisted by Todd Howard" on a T-shirt somewhere), the story is well-told. Schreier draws on decades of experience and a formidable rolodex of contacts to tell the story from multiple angles, with senior developers, artists, quality assurance teams and those on the corporate side of things all giving their perspective on the story. He tries to be even-handed, noting that the sexual harassment scandal applied to all of Activision, with some of the highest-profile cases occurring on that side of the company, but the media focused almost entirely on Blizzard. He also notes the rapidly growing costs of video game development are causing problems for the entire sector, but Blizzard may be more badly impacted because their exacting quality standards mean their games were already taking forever to come out, and these issues are making delays even more notable.
The book features a ton of trivia, some well-known, some brand new. I was intrigued to learn they named StarCraft's spec-ops character "Kerrigan" in response to Command & Conquer: Red Alert's "Tanya," drawing on a (misspelled) real-life rivalry, whilst Dune II art was used as a placeholder on the original build of Warcraft, which they swapped out before release only to realise with horror that they'd left Dune II's iconic font in place. What is interesting is the degree to which internal battles at Blizzard mirrored heated debates in the fandom: a subset of Blizzard developers was constantly urging for a new RTS game to be put into development after work on StarCraft II's expansions wrapped in 2015, with proposals for StarCraft III, Warcraft IV and even a Call of Duty RTS all floating around at different times. News that Netflix had TV adaptations of Overwatch, Diablo and StarCraft all in development at one time or another is also surprising.
At 370 pages, the book is already on the long side for a non-fiction tome about a video game company, but it's a tribute to Blizzard's packed history that it feels like a lot of elements are given short shrift. World of Warcraft's infinite roster of expansions is mentioned only in passing, and it feels like the nuts and bolts details of each game are skimmed over, presumably for reasons of space. There's also maybe a feeling that some stories have been told so often, such as the details of what happened to doomed spin-off game StarCraft: Ghost, that they don't need repeating here. One potential criticism is that the book doesn't give us a good handle on what the abandoned MMORPG Titan was supposed to be like (save that Overwatch recycled some art and ideas from it), but given that Blizzard cancelled the game because they didn't have a good handle on it, that's unsurprising.
On the plus side the book does give us a lot more info on other things, such as the hellish development of Diablo III, and that chapter provides nice companion to Schreier's earlier book, Blood, Sweat and Pixels.
Play Nice (****) is an invigorating, fascinating read. It feels like some elements could have been explored in more detail, perhaps as a two-volume project, but I get that's a tough sell for a non-fiction book about video game development.
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