Blizzard cofounder Frank Pearce: 25 years of making games isn’t enough

Blizzard Entertainment is the division of Activision Blizzard that’s brought us games like StarCraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft, and it turned 25 this week. We ran an interview with Blizzard chief executive Mike Morhaime, who was one of the three original founders who started the company during the golden age of PC games.

But we also interviewed Frank Pearce, another cofounder who had to code games and answer the phones too when the company started in 1991. But now he’s the chief development officer at the 4,000-employee company in Irvine, California. The company started in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, with Allen Adham, Morhaime, and Frank Pearce as its founders. They started out as work for hire, making games for Interplay Productions. But now they’ve grown into a 4,000-employee powerhouse, with $1.56 billion in the 12 months that ended December. 31, the leading subscriber online game in World of Warcraft, a 30 million seller in Diablo III, and two growing esports with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (a card battler) and Heroes of the Storm (an online multiplayer strategy game). Throughout the ups and downs, the changes in ownership, a transition in power, the company has outlived the competition.