Hear me out, this is not a joke. How does this man - wait, first of all. How does he make video games when he didn’t even know how to make video games? That’s the first thing. Then he goes onto make one of the biggest video game companies on the planet - of all time. With the biggest franchises of all time, with the biggest MMORPG of all time, and every release was a great game you could play forever. And he does this by hiring all these crazy people, and nobody knows how he found them. Mike and his friends magically found all these crazy people who would obediently make him these amazing games. But that isn’t all, then magically, again I say magically. When the whole company hit the fan and was in free fall due to misconduct he gets away in his escape mobile and starts a brand new company with all the money bags, remember this is with all his friends who are 100% squeaky clean and now he is going to build his second empire.
I have lived a long time and let me tell you nobody gets this lucky. It’s just not possible. I usually think about Blizzard often and so today when I thought about Mike and the concept of luck, it just seems so unreal, so impossible.
Sure I been lucky in my life, I’ve seen people lucky, I’m sure we all have but not the consistent insane luck Mike has. It is just so crazy. It really is.
If I remember correctly, it was Allen Adham who asked Michael Morhaime and Frank Pearce to join him help create Silicon & Synapse. I believe Allen Adham is the only one left Mike and Frank have already jumped ship.
I’m sure Allen Adham is a cool guy and his work contributed to the success of many successful Blizzard games. But Mike is the energy reactor you know - see his leadership? When Mike left Blizzard all the rockstars followed his lead. In fact, so many people followed Mike he had to make two studios! Name another leader who has that big of a following.
https://www.dreamhaven.com/about
Seems Mike is invisible to many, like some encrypted matrix code. He has a perfect hidden power level, it defies reality.
For many people the face of Blizzard was Chris Metzen who left in 2016 long before the current mess.
A few years later he would go on to form his own company warchiefgaming.
You do realize that not everyone that works at a company will take part in all of the bad conduct. There are those with high moral standards that won’t lower their moral standards and take part in such things.
Except he knew of what was going on, he fired a person who brought up the issues, and swept the rest under the rug. He was a big factor of what was going on there even if he never did any of the bad stuff personally. He could have stopped it.
I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he was telling Bobby Kotick he had it under control the whole time. Then he skipped out as soon as he could. That doesn’t absolve Kotick but the blame it all on Bobby narrative is pure fiction. Microsoft is going to clean house and the rats are edging towards the life rafts.
Tiny correction here. He left in Sept 2016. He was having serious mental and physical health issues as well as wanting to spend time with his family.
I don’t particularly like Kotaku, but the Scott Johnson interview with Metzen that is linked there is very very good. It goes into a lot of the details from Metzen’s point of view. Quite helpful to anyone trying to balance health and a career like that.
There are also follow up interviews over the years since between Scott Johnson and Metzen. I gather they are actually friends.
There some effects to that, as in plural. They found and teamed up with Condor, also known as Blizzard North, through a game development job by the same company for different console platforms. That was a plus, after teaming up with Condor they changed their name to Blizzard. Shortly after a few game releases, they got under Vivendi to have access to immense amount of resources.
They had a good core team with smart business men, so they use their social environment to hire people and things took off after they found Blizzard North and went under Vivendi. You can read wikipedia about it or listen to the Brevik’s post mortem talk of Diablo 1 and 2 over youtube.
If that’s a subtle pun, good job. https://venturebeat.com/2016/02/12/blizzards-execs-eye-mobile-as-their-next-winning-game-strategy-but-not-virtual-reality/
Where is the proof that he done all of those things.
Yes Kotick better take all of the blame for his own abusing of others along with the ones that he help to get away with doing it. Any personal hand he had in that cookie jar he needs to take full responsibility for and full blame for as well.
Many of the accounts that came out last summer. One female went to Mike over concerns like the office cube crawl. She was later fired. Many of those accounts mentioned they spoke with him and nothing was done.
But if you ate trying to claim the dude who ran the company had no clue of any of this, I have some bridges to sell you. Because he knew. There’s a reason he left as the investigations were starting. He knew.
We can all argue investigations SHOULD have been happening earlier, but they were not.
Metzen left in 2016.
Mike Morhaime stepped down in 2018.
Lawsuit based on 2 years of investigations filed July 2021. That puts the investigations starting in 2019. JAB would have known about them for sure given the State of CA was investigating during his tenure as lead.
Allen left Blizzard in 2004 and returned in 2016 to cash some more. I strongly believe that you give credits to this guy beyond what he really deserves.
The company was founded by all 3. Asking 2 other guys to make a company doesn’t mean the created company is yours or that you take the most credit for it.
From my point of view, it was Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce who really pushed up the company. Allen was just … “there” for the cash.
In 2004 he left Blizzard, moving into the financial sector, which he described as “another big form of video game”.
See? Someone who sees “financial sector” as another big form of video game, has nothing to do with …video games. Hence, was in for the cash.
I give him credit for being one of the 3 founding members. Mike did not “make one of the biggest video game companies” on his own. It takes a team and all three and now multi- millionaires. With that said Bobby K is going to be the biggest winner with his severance package.
When you go to work or make investments is it “for the cash” or do you just do everything for free.
