Blizzard Entertainment Inc.
Overview
Silicon & Synapse was founded in 1991 by
Michael Morhaime,
Ayman Allen Adham and
Frank Pearce, and was located in California. The small company did many ports at the time, mainly consisting of board games and other titles, but it was not until
Interplay Entertainment and Silicon & Synapse collaborated on the SNES side-scroller
The Lost Vikings that its breakthrough came. With critical acclaim, the game hit the shelves in 1992, and right away it was a smash hit.
With the success of The Lost Vikings, the young designers of Silicon & Synapse got ahead of them selves and decided to release a few bootleg-like copies of The Lost Vikings. Interplay immediately broke the contract and the partnership was out. Interplay Entertainment then sued Silicon & Synapse for forgery claims, but they never won. They tried everything they could to shut them down, and in 1994, wanting to start fresh with a new identity, Silicon & Synapse changed the name to
Chaos Studios. However, that same year Chaos Studios was forced to changed its name again due to a conflict with the
other company named Chaos, and the name
Blizzard Entertainment was born.
Blizzard became one of the most influential development studios in the world, thanks to well-received franchises such as
Warcraft,
Diablo and
StarCraft. First working as a third party developer for the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and DOS, their first title under the company name Blizzard,
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, pushed them into the spotlight. Since then, they have won countless awards of excellence for every title they have released, and have built one of the biggest free online gaming services on the internet, Battle.Net.
The company's main ownership has shifted many times over the years, through mergers, name changes or acquisitions:
In its history, the company also had many titles in development that were eventually cancelled. These include:
- Crixa
- Denizen
- Games People Play: casual card game
- Nomad
- Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain: picked up and finished by Heliotrope Studios.
- Raiko
- Shattered Nations: strategy game
- Warcraft Adventures: point-and-click adventure game set in the Warcraft universe.
Also Known As
- Chaos Studios (from Feb, 1994 to Apr, 1994)
- Silicon & Synapse, Inc. (from Feb, 1991 to Feb, 1994)
Trivia
Company contact and location information (2008):
Blizzard Entertainment
P.O. Box 18979 Irvine
California 92623
United States
Company phone: +1-949-955-1382
Company email: support@blizzard.com
Company contact and location information (Nov. 1994):
Blizzard Entertainment
P.O. Box 18077
Irvine, CA 92713
United States
Company phone: +1-714-556-5571 or +1-800-953-SNOW
BBS: +1-714-556-4602
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