Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime says, “You should take your reputation very seriously and try to build a track record you can be proud of.” (Nancy Pastor, For The Times / June 10, 2010)The company behind the Warcraft series has grown from three desks in an Irvine office into an industry heavyweight.
The gig: Chief executive and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment Inc., maker of mega video game franchises including World of Warcraft, one of the most popular online video games in history with more than 11 million monthly subscribers. Morhaime and two fellow UCLA students started Blizzard in Irvine in 1991. The company just released an intergalactic war game called StarCraft II, which took five years to complete. Morhaime, 42, captains the long voyages from the games' inception to their release. In his nearly 20 years at Blizzard, the Northridge native has gone from a full-time code monkey to the big gorilla at a company whose Warcraft game alone brings in close to $1 billion for its parent company, Activision Blizzard.
Game on: In sixth grade, Morhaime pooled funds with his brother and sister to buy an early video game console called the Bally Professional Arcade, first released in 1978. Morhaime discovered that the device was programmable, and he figured out how to write simple games on it, with the help of example programming code he found in a monthly gaming newsletter.
"I knew the day it would come out, so I'd go wait at the mailbox, take it to school with me, and just read that thing over and over again to try to figure out how all the programs worked," he said. "I was so excited about how cool it was that you could get this machine to do things."
Powering up: As an electrical engineering student at UCLA, Morhaime took a detour from games for a while to understand the nuts and bolts of the computers that ran them. Was he a model student? "I procrastinated a lot," he admitted. But things changed after he got an internship at a San Jose microchip company. He read everything he could about circuit design, and by the time he got back to school he knew more than anyone else in his computer architecture class.
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