Unity creative advisor Rob Pardo has started a new game studio, Bonfire.
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World of Warcraft’s ex-lead designer Rob Pardo creates Bonfire Studios

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Rob Pardo was the lead designer of World of Warcraft, and he had a stellar career in his 17 years at Blizzard Entertainment. But he left the big video game publisher in 2014, and today, he announced his new company, Bonfire Studios.

Pardo helped turn Blizzard into a huge company with how he helped design World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online game which came out 12 years ago and still has paying subscribers (and which the studio says is at its highest point in years after the Legion expansion’s launch August 30). As the CEO of Bonfire, Pardo is being equally ambitious, as he has raised $25 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and from Riot Games, League of Legends maker and a division of Chinese internet giant Tencent, the New York Times reported.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.