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April 21, 2011 07:59 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/pvimJuW7DHs/all-your-base-are-be.html
All Your Base are Belong to Us: how 50 years of videogames conquered pop culture
In All Your Base Are Belong to Us, Harold Goldberg's comprehensive, new history of videogames, the author details the humble origins of what would become a multibillion dollar company, Blizzard Studios. Just after graduating college, Allen Adham, Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce got together to make games their way. They eventually hired Chris Metzen, who brought some tight, savvy storytelling to the company. But their early success was complicated by the ups and downs of making what would become the uber popular MMO, World of Warcraft. Here's an excerpt. Shortly after Blizzard was sold once again -- this time to the French- based Vivendi/Universal -- EverQuest began demanding hours upon hours from the lives of hard-core gamers everywhere. The staff at Blizzard in Irvine was not immune to its many enticements, and Adham, now back in the fold, was completely fascinated. So was one of his newer hires, Rob Pardo. Pardo originally had dreams of becoming a movie director, but he ended up managing a local Software Etc. store. After becoming a game tester, he worked his way up to producer at Interplay and was slowly moving into game design. Pardo looked at the smart but soft-spoken Adham as a game design mentor. They began to have intense, constructive discussions; but the two really began to bond when playing EverQuest together. Pardo was so fascinated by EverQuest that he became the Guild Master of Legacy of Steel, one of the gangs of guys who became ber-experts at the vagaries of the game. Meanwhile, Blizzard was bogged down in creating a role playing game called Nomad, which had a post-apocalyptic theme and dinosaurlike monsters that were outfitted with tanklike weapons. The wow element would be that you controlled not just one person, but a complete squad of characters. Yet few were satisfied with the direction of Nomad, because none of the Nomad team was able to explain satisfactorily to the top dogs why people would want to play the game and what was special about it. It also had a new game engine, the software that made the game work, which wasn't quite perfected. In mid-1999 Adham began to consider making an MMO at Blizzard. With the team, he tossed around the idea of using one of their established series as a springboard into the worlds of massively multiplayer games instead of creating a new universe from scratch. Adham and Pardo began retreating to the food court of the Fashion Island Mall in Irvine to have intense discussions. "Should we do StarCraft, Warcraft, or Diablo?" wondered Adham. The latter, a game based on epic throw-downs between the forces of heaven and hell, was being made at a separate office entirely, in northern California. Whatever the game would be, it would be centered in the Irvine headquarters, where it could be easily overseen. Diablo, while alluring and popular, didn't seem to have the great depth of a StarCraft or Warcraft. And as they looked at EverQuest, which they admired to the point of drooling, they saw that that world could be improved upon....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/pvimJuW7DHs/all-your-base-are-be.html
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