I'll admit up front that I used to be a bit of a Blizzard fan boy. All the way back with The Lost Vikings, Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft and so on this is a game company that constantly kept me and my friends entertained. At the very tail end of 1996, then Blizzard North, introduced Diablo, and it very quickly became an obsession. Diablo was a game changer, a true original. The first of it's kind hack-n-slash dungeon crawler that 'spawned' (see what I did there?), an entire genre. Read more
Warning! This is long and ranty and link heavy! [Links will open in new tabs]
I remember Silicon and Synapse. You might not, but I do. They weren't big enough to work on their own projects, so they did ports of other games to various other consoles. None of these ports were particularly big, but they established the company as detail-oriented and good at what they did. And a key element from those days has stayed with Blizzard: they know how to refine.
Which is at least some of what I want to talk about. But the other thing I want to talk about is how distant Silicon and Synapse are from the Blizzard we have today and why - after almost twenty five years of playing Blizzard's games, I am going to slowly start winding down Blizzard projects I'm still pursuing. Read more
