20 years Blizzard: Interview with Blizzard co-founders Mike and Frank

Twenty years is an eternity in the games industry. Few studios last anywhere near that long before either being consumed within a publishing company, or closing down entirely. Formed this week in February 1991, Blizzard Entertainment (then known as Silicon & Synapse), has not only survived, it has become one of the most powerful names in the industry, its name forged with Activision's to form the industry's largest publisher.

The compay's big brands – Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo and World of Warcraft – have prospered through subtly evolving the genres they inhabit. Warcraft added multiplayer gaming to the real-time strategy arena, while WoW made player vs player combat optional (so newcomers weren't continually slaughtered by nasty veterans) and scaled down on the beast-slaying grind of titles like Ultima Online. The result was a much more user-friendly MMOG experience – hence, the game now has 12 million subscribers and Cataclysm, the latest WoW expansion pack, shifted 4.7 million copies in its first month on sale last year. Meanwhile, StarCraft 2 was America's biggest PC launch of 2010, and the action RPG sequel Diablo III will no doubt perform equally well if it makes the as-yet-unconfirmed Q4 release date.

But what has it been like to run the company throughout these two decades, and where is it going next? To find out, I had a brief chat with co-founders Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce...

When you set up Silicon & Synapse, was it a business venture or were you all just passionate about making games?

Frank Pearce: I got involved for the love of it. I was playing a lot of video games in junior high and high school – I had an Intellivision console and I was playing games on my Apple IIc. When I was in high school I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I definitely felt if I could find a way to work in the games industry, that would be awesome. I just didn't know how to go about doing it. But I was really lucky to have met Allen Adham while I was at UCLA, because he had a similar passion and actually had a plan for it!
Mike Morhaime: I was always fascinated by technology and wanted to understand it so when I went to UCLA I studied electrical engineering figuring they knew how things worked. I met Alan while I was there – and Allen had this plan. We didn't really start talking about it until after I had graduated. I went to work for Western Digital, and when Allen graduated six months later, he separately recruited Frank and I. Frank was over at Rockwell, and he convinced both of us to quit our jobs and start this new venture. It sounded exciting and a little bit scary, but I was really interested in programming, in getting computers to do cool things. And what is cooler than games?

Read the full article at guardian.co.uk