David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…All right. All right, David, you ready to dive in? Let’s do it, as always. So we’re going to tell the history of Blizzard, the Blizzard Entertainment side of Activision Blizzard, mostly because we think there’s kind of more interesting stuff both from tech themes going on in that regard and the story as I alluded to earlier is just crazy – yet another example of you can’t make this stuff up. So Blizzard was started initially as a company called Silicon & Synapse by three college friends from UCLA right after they graduated in 1991, they had all studied computer science together: Allan Adham, Frank Pearce, and Mike Morhaime. They love video games and they wanted to get into the scene and they decided kind of “hey, rather than working for someone else, this industry is young, let’s start a company.” And so they did and they started out at first not actually making their own games because they just graduated from college, they really didn’t know what they were doing. They started porting other people’s games from platform to platform. Like one of the big titles that they ported was Battle Chess. I kind of vaguely remember this and they ported that version onto the Commodore 64, and that both led them to make some money as a baby startup but also got them experience with game development and they got kind of access to these code bases of what games look like. So they did that for a little while and then in 1992, the next year, they sort of got some confidence in themselves and said, “okay, it’s time to make our own games.” So they did. I believe the first title of their release was Rock & Roll Racing for the Super Nintendo. It came out in 1992, followed quickly by The Lost Vikings. And I remember these titles and this is where Blizzard sort of really starts to develop its personality and these guys, like they are quirky dudes. And Rock & Roll Racing I believe was the first video game, at least the first console game to feature like actual music, like licensed music in the game, and it was a racing game and had cars with lasers on them and rocket boosters. Kind of like fun stuff. Then Lost Vikings, I believe the plot of this was that three Vikings from ancient Norse mythology get kidnapped by an alien space pirate and they have to escape. Both of them are incredibly successful and they win a bunch of awards and really established this tiny little game studio down in Southern California as a premier game developer in the early ‘90s. Yeah. Early innings of computer gaming sort of after the original console wars but long, long way before the esports crazy MMORPG world we live in today.…

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