Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard began life on 8 February 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. Its founders were Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce, three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles, who set up offices in Irvine, California. For its first two years it mostly ported other studios' games, many of them for Interplay, before releasing its own titles in 1993, such as Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. That year it changed its name to Chaos Studios.

In early 1994 it was bought by the distributor Davidson & Associates. A Florida company claimed the 'Chaos' trademark and, after 'Ogre Studios' was rejected, the studio became Blizzard Entertainment in May 1994. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans followed that November. In 1996 it bought Condor Games, renamed Blizzard North, which made Diablo (1997), launched together with the Battle.net online service. StarCraft (1998), Diablo II (2000) and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) came next. From 1998 it was part of Vivendi Games.

World of Warcraft launched in North America on 23 November 2004 and defined its peak years; it holds the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG by subscribers. The first BlizzCon took place in 2005. In July 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision to form Activision Blizzard. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), Diablo III (2012), Hearthstone (2014), Heroes of the Storm (2015) and Overwatch (2016) followed, the last of these built from Titan, a cancelled project.

Morhaime stepped down in 2019. In 2021 a California lawsuit over harassment and discrimination shook the company and led to the departure of his successor, J. Allen Brack. Microsoft completed its purchase of Activision Blizzard on 13 October 2023; Blizzard remains in Irvine as part of the Xbox division, led since 2024 by president Johanna Faries. Its latest releases are Diablo IV (2023) and Midnight (2026), the newest World of Warcraft expansion.