Blizzard Entertainment

From Free net encyclopedia

Blizzard Entertainment is an American PC game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in 1994, it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates. However, many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come.

1 Overview
2 Titles
3 Bnetd
4 Warden Client
5 Trivia
- 5.1 April Fool's
6 See also
7 External links
- 7.1 The Bnetd case

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Overview

Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft.

Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software, in 1997. 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 in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. 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 VU Games group of Vivendi Universal.

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. Blizzard North is located in San Mateo, California.

Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo.

On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, which has quickly grown to become one of the most popular MMORPGs in history.

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 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.

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Titles

The Lord of the Rings (1990) - RPG
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 (1994) - fantasy real-time strategy game
Justice League Task Force (1995) - one-on-one fighting game
The Lost Vikings II (1995) - platform game
Warcraft II (1995) - fantasy real-time strategy game
Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) - expansion pack
Diablo (1996) - action-oriented computer role-playing game
Diablo: Hellfire (1997) - expansion pack (co-created by Sierra Studios)
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

Blizzard is currently working on an expansion to the highly successful World of Warcraft called World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Notable unreleased titles include StarCraft: Ghost which was 'indefintely postponed' on March 24, 2006, and Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans which was cancelled on May 22, 1998.

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Bnetd

A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.

In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.

This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1 2005.

Details on the EFF website

Blizzard's Press Release

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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.

The Warden software has run afoul of controversy among some privacy advocates. Since Warden scans running processes other than the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across e-mail addresses, instant messenger IDs, and personally identifiable information, privacy advocates and others state that Warden 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.

Technical description of Warden on the forums of the WoW!Sharp third-party software development forums

World of Warcraft Terms of Use (See section 13.A)

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Trivia

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The phrase "There is no cow level" is a running joke started by the company's game designers stemming from repeated rumors on Battle.net that a "secret cow level" existed in Diablo. The phrase "There is no cow level" was a cheat code in the original StarCraft game. In Diablo II, a cow level was made as a secret level. "There is no cow level" now also appears as a 'tip of the day' on the loading screen of World of Warcraft.
In Blizzard's real-time strategy games (the StarCraft and Warcraft series), clicking on a character repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with some of the most famous including the Orc Grunt's "Stop poking me!" or the Human Footman's "Are you still touching me?". Blizzard most likely took note of this, because in Warcraft III the same units said similar things such as "Why are you poking me again?" and "Poke poke poke, is that all you do?". Many of the humorous phrases came from movies and comics, like the famous "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or "Spider's sense... tingling" from Spider-Man. In some cases, the phrases refer to other Blizzard games, such as the Acolyte in Warcraft 3 saying "My life for Aiur- er, I mean, Nerh-zul", with Aiur actually a world in Starcraft.
In the Warcraft series, clicking on a "critter" repeatedly about 20 times will make it explode semi-violently.
In Blizzard's MMORPG game (World of Warcraft), clicking on a friendly NPC repeatedly will invoke humorous sound bites, with the most famous being the gnome's "Blah blah blah blah blah."
The StarCraft cheat "operation cwal" was formed after the group Operation CWAL (Can't Wait Any Longer), who looked forward to StarCraft and did many things to show how much they longed for its release. Blizzard, noticing this group, named this cheat that rapidly increases the rate of unit and structure production after them. Primarily the group wrote fan fiction about special operatives raiding the Blizzard headquarters in order to free the game.
The games StarCraft and Warcraft are rumored to be based on the tabletop wargames Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000; it is rumored that Warcraft was supposed to be a Warhammer PC game in development but a fall out between UK-based Games Workshop, the creators of the two tabletop games, and Blizzard occurred. One link to this rumor can be found in Warcraft III; if a griffon rider is repeatedly clicked, he would eventually say "This Warhammer cost me 40K."
The three founders of the company are UCLA graduates. This is likely the reason why typing in "UCLA" as a cheat code in Warcraft II causes the words "Go Bruins!" to be displayed on the screen.

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April Fool's

Every Year on the 1st of April, Blizzard posts creative humorous news on their website as an April Fool's joke.

In 2006 one of their jokes was related to the upcoming World of Warcraft's expansion: The Burning Crusade. It is well known that the new Horde race will be the Blood Elves, but it hasn't been revealed what the new Alliance race will be. On March 31st, one day early, they posted a news item on their main page saying that the new race would be the Wisps (from WC3, wisps were the gatherers for the night elves) which would have as one of their special skills, the ability to explode, thus helping out their party members, but dying... forever!

The other news they posted on their main page was that they were planning on opening a fast food chain named BurgerCraft. Where people would find meals and offers all named after Blizzard Characters and games.

Past April Fool's jokes include the new Pandaren race to be added on a Warcraft 3 patch (the Pandaren Brewmaster later became a hireable Hero Class on the The Frozen Throne expansion)

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