Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment is an American PC game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in 1994, it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates. However, many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come. Every one of their games since Warcraft has been a best-seller.

Overview

Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & 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.

Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software, 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, including Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi.

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 Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North was located in San Mateo, California.

Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices near Paris, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, which has quickly grown to become the most popular MMORPG in history. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing Ghost. The team was renamed Blizzard Console and is now focusing on next generation consoles, after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.

Titles

The Lord of the Rings (1990) - Computer role-playing game
The Lost Vikings (1992) - platform game
Rock & Roll Racing (1993) - racing game
Blackthorne (1994) - fantasy platform game
The Death and Return of Superman (1994) - side-scrolling beat 'em up
Warcraft (1994) - fantasy real-time strategy game
The Lost Vikings II (1995) - platform game
Warcraft II (1995) - fantasy real-time strategy game
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) - expansion pack
Diablo (1996) - action-oriented computer role-playing game
Hellfire (1997) - expansion pack (co-created by Sierra Studios)
StarCraft (1998) - science fiction real-time strategy game
Brood War (1998) - expansion pack
Diablo II (2000) - action-oriented RPG
Lord of Destruction (2001) - expansion pack
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) - fantasy real-time strategy game
The Frozen Throne (2003) - expansion pack
World of Warcraft (2004) - MMORPG set in the Warcraft universe

Blizzard is currently working on an expansion to the highly successful World of Warcraft called The Burning Crusade. Notable unreleased titles include Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations and Ghost, which was indefinitely postponed on March 24, 2006 and whose current status is in question. IGN has stated that it has been cancelled, but this has yet to be confirmed or denied by Blizzard.

On a popular note, Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they will be producing a Warcraft live-action movie.

Bnetd

A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.

In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and 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.

This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1 2005.

Details on the EFF website

Blizzard's Press Release

Warden Client

Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client' in order to detect the use of third-party programs used for the purpose of cheating. 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 known to correspond to cheat programs. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game.

The Warden software has run afoul of controversy among some privacy advocates. Since Warden scans running processes other than the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across e-mail addresses, instant messenger IDs, and personally identifiable information, privacy advocates and others state that Warden behaves similarly to spyware. However, many World of Warcraft players note that only hashed strings are compared, and no personally identifiable information is transmitted back to Blizzard; moreover, all players consent, via the EULA and terms of use, to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running. Supporters of the Warden software claim that, instead of being spyware, Warden behaves more like anti-virus software, except that instead of detecting viruses, Warden detects third-party cheat programs, and thus helps to prevent cheating within the game.

Technical description of Warden on the forums of the WoW!Sharp third-party software development forums

World of Warcraft Terms of Use (See section 13.A)

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. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used. - 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 of Stratagus.

Trivia

The phrase "There is no cow level" is a running joke started by the company's game designers stemming from repeated rumors on Battle.net that a "secret cow level" existed in Diablo. The phrase "There is no cow level" was a cheat code in the original StarCraft game. In Diablo II, a cow level was made as a secret level. "There is no cow level" now also appears as a 'tip of the day' on the loading screen of World of Warcraft.
In Blizzard's real-time strategy games (the StarCraft and Warcraft series), clicking on a character repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with some of the most famous including the Orc Grunt's "Stop poking me!" or the Human Footman's "Are you still touching me?". This has been Blizzard's trademark for many years, and continues in Warcraft III the same units said similar things such as "Why are you poking me again?" and "Poke poke poke, is that all you do?", as well as "Me not that kind of orc!". Many of the humorous phrases came from movies and comics, like the famous "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or "Spider's sense... tingling" from Spider-Man. In some cases, the phrases refer to other Blizzard games, such as the Acolyte in Warcraft 3 saying "My life for Aiur- er, I mean, Ner'zhul", with Aiur being a planet in StarCraft.
In the Warcraft and "Starcraft" series, clicking on a "critter" repeatedly about 20 times will make it explode semi-violently. Critter explosions deal no damage to either buildings or units.
In Blizzard's MMORPG game World of Warcraft, clicking on a friendly NPC repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with the most famous being the gnome's "Blah blah blah blah blah."
The StarCraft cheat "operation cwal" was formed after the group Operation CWAL (Can't Wait Any Longer), who looked forward to StarCraft and did many things to show how much they longed for its release. Blizzard, noticing this group, named this cheat that rapidly increases the rate of unit and structure production after them. Primarily the group wrote fan fiction about special operatives raiding the Blizzard headquarters in order to free the game.
The games StarCraft and Warcraft are rumored to be based on the tabletop wargames Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000; it is rumored that Warcraft was supposed to be a Warhammer PC game in development but a fall out between UK-based Games Workshop, the creators of the two tabletop games, and Blizzard occurred. One link to this rumor can be found in Warcraft III; if a griffon rider is repeatedly clicked, he would eventually say "This Warhammer cost me 40K."
The three founders of the company are UCLA graduates. This is likely the reason why typing in "UCLA" as a cheat code in Warcraft II causes the words "Go Bruins!" to be displayed on the screen.

April Fool's

Every Year on the 1st of April, Blizzard posts creative humorous news on their website as an April Fool's joke.

In 2006, one of their jokes was related to the upcoming World of Warcraft's expansion: The Burning Crusade. It is was well known that the new Horde race would be the Blood Elves, but it hadn't been revealed at that time what the new Alliance race would be. On March 31st, one day early, they posted a news item on the World of Warcraft main page saying that the new race would be the Wisps (In Warcraft III, Wisps were resource-gatherers for the Night Elves). Wisps were given the 'Detonate' racial ability that caused them to permanently explode, requiring a new character to be rolled. The Alliance race was later officially revealed on May 10 at E³ as the Draenei, which in a way had connection to the Wisps, granting them inclusion in the Alliance.

The other news they posted on the World of Warcraft main page was that Blizzard planned to open a fast food chain named BurgerCraft, where people could order food and drinks named after Blizzard characters and games.

Blizzard also posted an absurdly long list of updates to World of Warcraft that would have ruined most characters and gameplay. These fake patch notes included many contradictory changes, one example being "Using friendly emotes will now significantly increase the Infernal and Doomguard's chance to remain loyal to the Warlock," with the following entry reading, "Friendly emotes are no longer available to the Warlock." Other April Fool's "give away" updates that were especially comical:

"Additional grass areas have been added to the enemy faction's zones. This grass is exceptionally green." (many users frequently complain about the ease of questing/leveling up/dungeons in enemy territories)
"Edwin Vancleef will occasionally shout 'Hey you guys!' as players fight their way through Deadmines." (a reference to the similarities between this dungeon and the movie The Goonies)
"New wing added to Scarlet Monastery called the Graveyard! Check it out!" (the Graveyard instance has always existed, however the majority of players do not bother doing it as there are no outstanding benefits of completing it)

The entire text of these patch notes can be found here.

Previous April Fool's jokes have included a new race, Pandaren, supposedly included in a patch for Warcraft III (the Pandaren Brewmaster later became a hireable Hero Class in the game's expansion, possibly due to positive response to the joke).

External links

Company & Corporate

The Bnetd case

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