We have some new alleged details on Blizzard’s history, between Mike Morhaime and Bobby Kotick.
Morhaime, alongside Frank Pearce and Allen Adham, founded the game company Silicon & Synapse, Inc. in 1991. The company changed their name to Blizzard and released their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games and their original title, Diablo. By 1998, the company was owned by Vivendi Games, and they would go on to make their next big tentpole franchises in StarCraft and World of WarCraft.
In 2006, Vivendi talks to Activision’s owner Bobby Kotick about an acquisition. This may all seem like ancient history now, but Kotick’s ride to success started off from acquiring the former third party Atari 2600 developer, and building the company’s portfolio with successful titles and studios for every genre. He funded the founding of Infinity Ward, creators of Call of Duty, and acquired the Guitar Hero IP, along the way.
As explained in this Forbes article, Kotick had second thoughts about the Vivendi proposal. Vivendi head Jean-Bernard Lévy proposed a deal where Lévy would control the new company, and Kotick would answer to him.
As the story goes, Kotick approached Morhaime himself about acquiring his game company. Morhaime pitched him on the strong brand power they had in China, revealing that Chinese players spent a total of $ 150 million in World of WarCraft subscriptions annually. So lest we forget; it was Morhaime who convinced Kotick to buy them.
The merger in July 2008 leads to the end of the Vivendi Games brand, and the new company being called Activision Blizzard. The following month, they sign a deal with NetEase to bring their games to China. Jason Schreier’s upcoming book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment reveals new insights into their history, and thanks to Gamespot, we pick up where the Forbes article left off.
After convincing Kotick to make the deal between Vivendi and Activision, Morhaime now found himself at odds with him. He worked to keep Activision leadership away from Blizzard affairs, a task that became difficult when they cancelled an $ 80 million project FPS MMO codenamed Project Titan.
Among Morhaime’s points of contention were keeping Blizzcon, as well as their customer service team, and cinematics team. Interestingly, when Morhaime tried to resign in 2017, Kotick convinced him to stay. Morhaime would formally depart the company in 2018.
As we now know, Kotick would eventually take back control of Activision Blizzard. Morhaime would found a new studio named Dreamhaven, and Activision would face a California misconduct and discrimination lawsuit in 2021. Microsoft would eventually acquire Activision Blizzard, securing Kotick’s exit from the company along the way.
Taking everything into account, it’s certainly interesting that Kotick valued Morhaime enough to want to keep him, even as Morhaime grew to dislike Activision’s intrusion into Blizzard. One certainly wonders how they feel about how things have played out since then.
As Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 seems set to secure Microsoft Gaming’s future as the industry’s biggest power player, the two may have enough distance from the situation to confirm this tale. But, we’ll see if they’ll be willing to speak up when the book comes out.
You can pre-order Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment here.
