YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Morhaime

lines on the record: 60
first: 2024-10-03
most recent: 2024-10-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, 1990s crunch is kind of a different world from Crunch that the video game industry or even the tech industry faces today. Back then, it was just a different dimension. It was your entire life is dedicated to this. And it was tied into the social elements of Blizzard in that everybody who worked there was friends with each other. They all wanted to be hanging out. They were voluntarily staying after work just to play games with each other and hang out with their closest friends or like going out to dinner or like playing Magic the Gathering in the halls or whatever it was. So for them, it was work and life were so intertwined that it was hard to separate the two. And then there were some periods StarCraft in particular, which was like the science fiction real-time strategy game that they made, that was really brutal. That was like we are going to work every single night we are going to work weekends. This is really tough to your point earlier. I mean, I think that like at that point in Blizzard's life cycle, they weren't facing the same kinds of pressures from their corporate parent.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the tensions that is just very clear, even from that description, but fleshed out in the book is. You have a bunch of nerds who are just excited to make games. You have a bunch of creatives and they are seemingly uninterested in what it means to run a good company. So then they just bring in some people or they sell themselves to someone else who will be interested in that. And then there's a culture war, right? Like you should make great product on schedule. We should make fun products that we want to make. You should make sequels. All this stuff. And that is kind of just expressed in these early years through crunch, right? From 94 to 2000, it's Warcraft, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo 2. And your book, you have it all kinds of reporting. This is just excessive crunch. They are just working all the time and it's their company, so it's fine. But this stays the culture. My reading of it is like there are just a bunch of kids who want to have fun making video games. And so the work themselves to death. And then the suits are like, oh, this is how it should work.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All companies, and they became part of this edutainment company. That was the beginning of two kind of parallel paths for Blizzard, one growing into this video game developer making franchises and games that people just absolutely loved. And two, shuffling from corporate parent to corporate parent along the way as they were trying to do the former.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interplay, which was run by Brian Fargo, who was a high school friend of Alan Adhams, and took on a lot of conversion contracts to bring these games to other platforms. So it would be like, we're going to bring Lord of the Rings to Amiga. We're going to bring battle chest to DOS or whatever it was back then. And then in 1994, two things happened. One is they had a breakout hit, and that was called Warcraft, and that was the beginning of the Blizzard Empire and the beginning of them starting to develop and publish their own games. And two is that they were purchased by a company called Davidson, and Associates best known for making Math Blaster.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lizard was the brainchild, really was the brainchild of one guy named Alan Adam, and he brought along Mike Moorheim. And the two of them, they were both students at UCLA. They were engineering students, and they considered themselves two of the top programmers. They both were really into video games. And they decided, hey, why don't we go and try this? We're young. We can do this with minimal seed money. They each took a loan of between 10 and $15,000 from their families. Alan, I think, took it from his college fund and Morheim like borrowed it from his grandmother and eventually paid it back. I think he had the check framed in Blizzard's museum later on, many years later. And the two of them, they said, we want to start a company that makes games that we like to play. A lot of these gaming companies in the 90s were run by business people and business people who didn't really care about games. They just saw this as a product to sell to children and make a bunch of money. And so these guys were like, we want to make games we really like. And so for the first few years, they just tried to stay afloat. They took on contracts. They worked really closely with a company called”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chapter. I email my editor. Do a new ending here. And when I come back to Microsoft and what happens now and the rationale for that big acquisition and whether that has played out. But it just occurred to me as I was reading the book that it's hard to talk about all of that unless you actually take the time to understand what Blizzard was, its culture, what you just mentioned, its big fight with Activision's culture after those companies merged and then how that whole. Of chaos rolled itself into Microsoft. So let's start with Blizzard, which is now a division of Microsoft, an ever-shrinking division of Microsoft. But it used to be a behemoth. How did this company start?”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were lining up to meet him. He was shaking hands. He was playing their games. People were really jazzed. And then at the end of January, Microsoft lays off nineteen hundred people, including hundreds of blizzard, cancels one of the big games they're working on, the survival game Odyssey, and everyone's just like, oh, Phil Spencer, it's just another executive. They're all the same. Counting on a big corporation to save us was not a good idea. So, yeah, quickly wrote a final chapter. I emailed my editor. I was like, hey, I think that we need to do a new ending here.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, Microsoft has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, especially, and a lot of that was focused on Activision Blizzard. Granted to be fair, I think some of at least some of those cuts were planned before Microsoft took over. So Microsoft inherited this process. But still, I mean, when I was writing this book, I really, I filed my first draft around January, so right before the first big layoff. And the original draft ended on kind of an optimistic note because a lot of people were really psyched about Microsoft who worked at Blizzard because as the book documents, there's this saga of activision and Blizzard going at it and them just having totally incompatible values and philosophies about making games and it caused a lot of problems. So a lot of people, especially after the California lawsuit and all of the cultural issues, a lot of people were really excited to be out of the Activision rule. The Activision C-suite. And Phil Spencer came to Blizzard's campus.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am very excited to talk to you. I don't know if you've caught this, but in our coverage of whatever is going on with Activision Blizzard in Microsoft, it feels like Microsoft accidentally caught not the right prize. They worked very hard to make a mistake. That is my feeling. And it's exciting to talk to you because your book is just incredible detailed explanation of this. Giant merger company that just”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are an investigative journalist who covers the video game industry for Bloomberg, and you have a book out next week called Play Nice, The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Welcome to Dakota.”
2024-10-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The toxic transformation of Warcraft maker Blizzard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT