Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment is a Californian PC game developer and publisher, founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games such as Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions), before briefly changing its name to Chaos Studios in 1994. However, when it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed, the name Blizzard Entertainment was chosen.
That same year, the company was acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million, and shortly afterwards, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit - Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; which then merged in 1997 with a hotel, real-estate and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant. In 1998, it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months. The company sold its consumer software operations, including Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi.
In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.
In January 1997, Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices near Paris, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft, and on November 23, 2004, they released the massively popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, which now boasts over 8 million players.
On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The team was renamed Blizzard Console and is now focusing on next generation consoles, after StarCraft: Ghost was 'postponed indefinitely'. On August that same year, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.
Titles
- The Lord of the Rings (1991) (Amiga port) - Computer role-playing game
- Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess (1991) (Amiga port) - Xiangqi simulation
- The Lost Vikings (1992) - platform game
- Rock & Roll Racing (1993) - racing game
- Blackthorne (1994) - fantasy platform game
- The Death and Return of Superman (1994) - side-scrolling beat 'em up
- Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- The Lost Vikings II (1995) - platform game
- Justice League Task Force (SNES version) (1995) - fighting game
- Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) - expansion pack
- Diablo (1996) - action-oriented computer role-playing game
- StarCraft (1998) - science fiction real-time strategy game
- StarCraft: Brood War (1998) - expansion pack
- Diablo II (2000) - action-oriented RPG
- Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001) - expansion pack
- Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) - fantasy real-time strategy game
- Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003) - expansion pack
- World of Warcraft (2004) - MMORPG set in the Warcraft universe
- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2007) - expansion set for World of Warcraft.
Notable unreleased titles include Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was cancelled on May 22, 1998, Shattered Nations and StarCraft: Ghost, which was indefinitely postponed on March 24, 2006 and whose current status is in question.
Warden Client
Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client' in order to detect the use of third-party programs used for the purpose of cheating. The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. This determination is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes known to correspond to cheat programs. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game.
However, the Warden software has attracted a fair amount of controversy amongst some privacy advocates. Since Warden scans running processes other than the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across personally identifiable information such as e-mail addresses and instant messenger IDs, there is a suggestion that the program behaves similarly to spyware. However, many World of Warcraft players note that only hashed strings are compared, and no personally identifiable information is transmitted back to Blizzard; moreover, all players consent, via the EULA and terms of use, to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running. Supporters of the Warden software claim that, instead of being spyware, Warden behaves more like anti-virus software, except that instead of detecting viruses, Warden detects third-party cheat programs, and thus helps to prevent cheating within the game.
