Office life is drudgery. Even in the mid-19th century, when the modern office first became a thing, it already sucked: so many Bartlebys copying and copying until the work broke them, deep down in their souls. “Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn’t produce anything,” Nikil Saval wrote in “Cubed,” his 2014 history of white-collar life. “At best, it seemed to reproduce things.”
Could you make the office fun? Perhaps by copying something exciting, like a video game? As Jason Schreier suggests in “Play Nice,” his airtight chronicle of the embattled video game studio Blizzard Entertainment, that’s what the company’s recent-college-grad founders, Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, thought when they first opened the doors of a tiny space near the University of California, Irvine, in 1991.
The poorly washed, sometimes violent, often drunk 20-something coders they hired didn’t immediately start working on the hit games they’d be known for — the sci-fi skirmishes of StarCraft, the virtual fantasy realms of World of Warcraft, the heroic gunslinging of Overwatch. Instead, they accepted contracts from other companies to take already-popular games made for one system (say, Windows) and adapt them for another one (say, the Commodore 64), a process called porting that often involved reproducing the game in another coding language.
Schreier, a reporter for Bloomberg, is a widely respected industry hound with sources in every corner of the game-making world, from the badly lit cubicles to the glittering corner offices to the e-sports arenas where teams of nerds project their virtual battles for a screaming audience.
His first book, “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” (2017), a collection of dispatches from video game developers big and small, rests on scores of interviews and draws genuine insights from programmers and artists. For instance, many players, whether they’re plumbing a dungeon for treasure or tapping gems on their smartphone screens, don’t mind if their success depends on chance. A touch of randomness helps provoke the same dopamine drip that a Las Vegas slot machine does; but, after much trial and error, the developers behind Blizzard’s Diablo III found that, since there’s no jackpot, it’s better to ensure that the house doesn’t always win.
In “Play Nice,” Schreier covers Blizzard’s entire history and has less time to go deep on individual design choices. Even so, a single insight, or a dozen, are not enough to make a hit game from scratch, and Schreier’s protagonists flounder when they push too hard for originality. “Play Nice” makes clear that Blizzard got big not by taking chances on new ideas, but by letting other artists roll the dice on the hundreds of mostly inexplicable decisions that go into a blockbuster game and then swooping in behind them to ape the best stuff — with new features, stories and art, of course.
In deciding what to mimic, the co-founders and their employees followed their own obsessions. In the mid-90s they took a game everyone was playing at the office, Westwood Studios’s single-player sci-fi tactics simulator Dune II, about rival clans mining for spice on a desert planet, and turned it into the multiplayer fantasy battle tactics simulator Warcraft. The Blizzard version had orcs and humans mining for gold in a forest, but it was essentially the same. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” a Westwood co-founder told Schreier, “they were flattering us a lot.”
Each Blizzard copy had its own panache — the company, which expanded to thousands of employees by the mid-2000s, would become known for its smart design takes on familiar concepts. But their gut-feeling market strategy proved to be a brittle business model over the long term. As the company got bigger, and the developers got older, they grew more and more out of touch. In the mid-2010s, one Blizzard programmer suspected that his game was a flop only when his younger brother reported that none of his teenage friends were into it.
The company was also weighed down by a culture born from the chaotic misdeeds of its young, overwhelmingly male employees, who slept on mattresses in the office and never went home. Scenes of late-night Guitar Hero and Nerf gun battles seem to echo the antic energy that turned Facebook and Google into billion-dollar companies, but the story that unfolds reveals something more retrograde: “Mad Men,” without the hygiene or nice décor. Romantically speaking, “nearly every top executive at Blizzard was involved with someone lower than them at the company,” Schreier reports. And in early years, it was not unusual to find vomit in the halls of Blizzard Entertainment or to step away from your computer and come back to a screen full of pornography, as a cool prank. At one point there is so much wreckage that only half of the office chairs are functional.
Many of the women in this story face hostility and (surprise!) lower pay. Across 30 years and more than 300 pages Schreier scatters tales of harassment like breadcrumbs, until a 2021 sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuit precipitates both a moral reckoning and a lot of financial trouble for the company. Microsoft had been lurking for decades. After the crisis, it swallowed Blizzard whole as part of a $69 billion acquisition — the largest in video game history.
One of Schreier’s great strengths is that he can control a crowd. He brilliantly maintains many different threads — corporate, personal, artistic — while giving so many coders, designers and money-minded executives their due, all without putting too much strain on his book’s momentum.
What’s missing in this high-flying story is a sense of gravity. Schreier’s industry moguls and hard-bitten programmers move through a near contextless world where nothing seems to exist outside of Blizzard’s offices, not #MeToo (an obvious catalyst for the lawsuit) or the reactions to the nerd-centric culture war known as GamerGate (an apparent influence on the look and design of the hugely successful Overwatch). The telling suffers from a version of the problem that has hampered Blizzard over the years: It struggles to imagine anything beyond the rooms and halls where these people spent every day and night of their lives. Reading such a broad history, I kept feeling like it would be nice to clear some of the fog from the map.
Still, there is pathos. In one of the sadder scenes in the book, Adham returns in 2016 to the company he helped found, after a 12-year hiatus triggered by burnout. He tries to shepherd along a project called Odyssey, Blizzard’s version of Minecraft or Rust. These games drop players into a wilderness or a wasteland to forage and fight. The appeal is you start from nothing and build your way up.
Back in the day, Blizzard could have spent years polishing a game like Odyssey, but by then the company had become a behemoth, taken over by a protégé of the Las Vegas casino developer Steve Wynn whose conservative corporate hires favored Blizzard’s own proven successes, copies not from outside the company but within.
Plus, Odyssey was taking too long. When was the next sequel to Diablo coming out? What about the next World of Warcraft expansion? Faster and faster. Blizzard became a pale imitation of itself. The games got stale. Revenue diminished. One more insight crops up: If you want to thrive, in video games or in the wild, it’s fine to reproduce, but it’s usually better to get out of your own gene pool.
The post The Copycats Who Made Some of the Biggest Video Games in the World appeared first on New York Times.