Blizzard got big by figuring out how to get noticed
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Blizzard is one of the most celebrated game developers the world over, and during a panel at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last week, Allen Adham shared some secrets to the studio’s success.
The chief design officer, and original co-founder, shared how the company accumulated millions of fans over thirty years of game-making.
“People know Blizzard today, but if you go back far enough in time, we were just a little indie developer. We weren’t even called Blizzard.” Thirty-two years ago, the company was called Silicon & Synapse, and “no one knew what it meant or how to spell it.”
Adham recalls always making great games, “but they didn’t break through until Warcraft 1 set the stage for Warcraft 2.”
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The problem is discoverability. If people don’t know your game, “How do you break through?”
At the time, people bought games from retail stores, which were a chaotic mass of boxes. “How do you get someone scanning all this product to pick your game off the shelf?”
For Blizzard, the answer was big, giant heads on the box. Adham recalls all the early games having progressively bigger heads on the covers — a technique to get attention from shoppers.
“We wanted to break through quickly.” Blizzard wanted to “deeply and emotionally connect with players.” Players who would understand and love the game being offered.
Warcraft was high fantasy. “We didn’t want to pay for an IP,” admits Adham. “We tapped into a common folklore.” He advised the audience
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