A Brief Discussion of Blizzard Entertainment
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April 12, 2010 • Luke Earhart
Filed under A & E
Until 1994, Blizzard Entertainment was a relatively unknown company. One of the main reasons was because of the company constantly changing its name.
Their past games did not have a large impact on the video game world, and largely went unnoticed. Truly it was an underdog story…. until the release of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in 1994. This new adaptation of a strategy game showed potential and won a few awards. This was the first real-time strategy game based in a somewhat medieval setting, albeit in an obvious fantasy setting with Orcs. Blizzard would go on to make other Warcraft games like the sequel two years later, but they did more than just that.
In 1996 they released a much-anticipated action-RPG, Diablo. It was a very simple game compared to current releases, but it showed something new. It featured the player as the “hero” and you could be a rogue, warrior, or sorcerer; an obvious common fare for a fantasy game. The hero’s home base is a town called Tristram, and near that town is a sixteen-level dungeon, with the last level featuring the end boss, Diablo, the Lord of Terror. Epic sounding story-line aside, the new element that Diablo added to action RPG’s was the ability to play online with people around the world. Unlike Blizzard’s later games, Diablo was not fitted with a strong “anti-cheat” system. This lead to the near impossibility of finding a game without hackers. Simply, people cheated all the time. This system did set a basis for the next games developed by this company.
Going back to their strategy game roots, Blizzard released the science fiction thriller, Starcraft, in 1998. The story follows three races, humans called Terrans, the masters of Psionics called the Protos, and the insectoid-like Zerg. This strange, real time strategy (RTS), sci-fi game was another way for Blizzard to show just how original they were, and are. They amped up their battle.net multi-player features to provide fair matches against other players and allowing features like custom maps. This multi-player revolution became a must have for every RTS to come out in the future. Starcraft went down as one of the most influential games of all time, and even though it came out in 1998, people still play it all around the world, with many tournaments still going on even today.
After another Diablo, simply entitled Diablo II, Blizzard was fast becoming all the rage of the video game market. The multi-player was fantastic and their game would be played far longer than the standard fare of most games at the time. Then Warcraft III came out in 2002 to grace us with another RTS gem. This is where the universe of Warcraft really developed a significant story-line, but more importantly to the common folk, where custom maps made the multiplayer.
In 2003, the first version of Defense of the Ancients (a custom map made by fans of Warcraft, often abbreviated by DotA) hit battle.net with a bang. It was based off of a Starcraft map and consisted of each team having five players that have their own unique “hero.” The point of the game is to defend your team’s Ancient and destroy the other team’s. This quickly became one of the most popular custom maps, inspiring many artists. One such artist, a Swedish singer named Basshunter even made a song about DotA.
As if Blizzard didn’t have enough projects, they decided to try out one more. In 2004 they decided to expand on the Warcraft universe, and make a MMO out of it. Out of this project emerged the most popular and highly grossing video game to date, the World of Warcraft. Although it’s been a good six months since I’ve played, I still am very excited about the future of this game. Already two expansions have been released, with a third speculated to arrive this year. Truly Blizzard had a questionable start, but through new ideas and great video game design, this company has gone down in video game history.
Recent news has shown that Blizzard is still working hard, with WoW’s third expansion, Starcraft II, and Diablo III all in the works, they have a lot going on and a rather reputable future that all should be looking forward to.
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