My earliest memory is being in a snow hole, aged two-and-a-half, with my dad somewhere up a mountain in a blizzard. I don’t know what my dad saw in me – I was a geeky kid – but he had that philosophy: prepare the kid for the road, not the road for the kid.
It’s often hilarious to me that I’m writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there’s a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
I was born in a blizzard, a special out-of-season blizzard, the worst blizzard Oslo ever suffered. Family, home, circumstances, the country I lived in and the weather I was born in all conspired to make a skater of me.
My favorite New York memory is that blizzard in ’96. I get chills thinking about it. It’s my favorite time here – call me crazy. I’m from Canada, and it’s very cold up there.
I played soccer in the Alps when I was a kid. There was a blizzard that happened. And little local German kids were out there shoveling lines. Keeping it moving.
I hate it when you see in films people with their anoraks flapping open in a blizzard. They’d be dead in a couple of minutes. It’s got to be real. It’s got to work.
We’re basically responsible for making sure you have a great time. If you buy a Blizzard game, we want that to be a great experience.
Blizzard has moved into this mode of continuous development. We’re contributing a lot of content to our games to keep them evolving.
From a development standpoint, at Blizzard Entertainment one of our values of course is commitment to quality.
I’ve met several times with the Activision guys and we’ve talked at length about Blizzard’s philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.
A lot of the successful Blizzard games that you know actually grew out of failed projects. That was the case with ‘World of Warcraft.’ We canceled a project and decided to work on that one.
‘Into the Blizzard’ follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.
Activision and Blizzard both believe that we’re in an expanding market where we can reach more people across multiple platforms, geographies and age groups. Both of our companies are positioned very well to take advantage of those trends to keep lowering the barriers to get more people into gaming.
One of the things I think has been important for Blizzard is maintaining the direct relationship with our players. Having a platform that we owned and controlled was important for that strategy, and also to not be dependent on other publishers.
When we started Blizzard, we just wanted to make great games. What we realized is that the games we create are really just a framework for communities and human interaction.
When you think about ‘World of Warcraft’ as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard’s social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.
I would say a lot of us here think being called a geek is cool. A lot of us at Blizzard identify with it.
I want to thank all of the talented and hardworking people at Blizzard for their dedication, creativity and passion. It has been a privilege to lead this team.
Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch. In our early days, we crunched crazy hours to get the games done.
Activision has their own games. Blizzard has our own games. We’re not going to go in and fire their people and they aren’t going to come in and fire any of ours.
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