Michael Morhaime

Last updated

Michael Morhaime
Michael Morhaime at BlizzCon 2009 (2).jpg
Morhaime at BlizzCon 2009
Born (1967-11-03) November 3, 1967 (age 56)
Alma mater University of California, Los Angeles (BE)
Occupation(s) Business executive; video game developer
Known forCo-founder and former CEO of Blizzard Entertainment
TitleFounder and CEO of Dreamhaven
Spouse
Amy Morhaime
(m. 2010)
[1]
Awards AIAS Hall of Fame Award (2001) [2]

Michael Morhaime (born November 3, 1967) is an American video game developer and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Dreamhaven, located in Irvine, California. Morhaime is best known as the co-founder and the former president of Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc., that was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. He served on the Vivendi Games executive committee since January 1999, when Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. became a subsidiary of Vivendi Games.

Contents

Early life and education

Morhaime was born into a Jewish family and graduated from Granada Hills High School in 1985. He is also an alumnus of Triangle Fraternity [3] and received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1990 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). [4] [5]

In sixth grade, Morhaime, along with his brother and sister, purchased a video game console called the Bally Professional Arcade, first released in 1978. Morhaime discovered that the console was programmable, and he taught himself how to write simple games on it, building off of example programming code he found in a gaming newsletter. [6]

As an electrical engineering student at UCLA, Morhaime focused more on hardware than on software. "I procrastinated a lot," he admitted. [6] Things changed after he got an internship at a San Jose microchip company. In his internship there, he learned about circuit design, and when he returned to school he was ahead of his computer architecture class. "I used to be the guy that sat in the back," he said, but after his stint in Silicon Valley, he said, "I started sitting up front." [6]

Career

Blizzard Entertainment

It was in that time period at UCLA that Morhaime met the two other people with whom he would create Silicon & Synapse, the company that would be renamed later as Blizzard Entertainment. The initial founders—Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce—rented a small office in Irvine, California, hoping the proximity to other companies would prove advantageous to them. [6]

In 1995, Blizzard released Warcraft II , its first number one selling game. "It's probably the game that put Blizzard on the map," Morhaime said. Besides its large number of sales, "it was the first game you could play over the Internet with a good experience," which was a novelty at the time, as well as being a defining selling point for its later titles. [6]

Blizzard's greatest success came with a hard but not unwelcome lesson. In planning for the release of World of Warcraft (WoW) in late 2004, Morhaime thought that the market for the much larger and more interactive new game—the first in their history to require players to pay a monthly subscription fee—would grow slowly and would be an unpopular surprise to the gaming community. "We felt it was very likely the fee would be a deterrent for people, and that WoW would not sell as quickly as some of our previous games," he said. All of Blizzard's production and marketing decisions were based on that assumption. To Blizzard's surprise (and very shortly later, terror) WoW sold extremely quickly, leaving the underprepared Blizzard unable to keep merchants supplied with the game for a short time. "For the whole first year, we scrambled to keep up with demand," he said. "It probably took years off of our lives." World of Warcraft had approximately 11 million subscribers as of 2010. In 2017, Morhaime earned $12.3 million as the CEO of Blizzard. [7]

On October 3, 2018, Morhaime announced he was stepping down as the company president and CEO, instead becoming an advisor to the company. Morhaime was replaced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer on World of Warcraft. [8] His advisory role concluded on April 7, 2019. [9]

Dreamhaven

In 2020, Mike Morhaime founded Dreamhaven, a new video game company. The company is based in Irvine, California, and has two game development studios called Secret Door and Moonshot Games. [10] [11] Dreamhaven, Inc. operates under Moonwell Studios LLC. [12]

Honors and awards

In 2008, Morhaime was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. [13] On the same year, Morhaime was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for Blizzard's creation of World of Warcraft . Along with Don Daglow of Stormfront Studios and John Carmack of id Software, Morhaime is one of only three designers or producers to accept awards at the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards and at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Interactive Achievement Awards. [14]

Morhaime received the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Technology category in 2012. [15] In 2019, Morhaime was appointed the 2019 Honor Award at the Gamelab Barcelona, in Spain for his success in the gaming industry. [16]

Multimedia

In 2012, Morhaime made a cameo appearance on The Guild , a web series about the lives of a gamers' online experiences with an MMORPG that draws references to World of Warcraft. He is known for his work with the gaming community, but also worked on the 2016 film Warcraft: The Beginning .

Personal life

Morhaime (left) playing with ETC at BlizzCon 2009 Michael Morhaime and Dave Berggren playing with L80ETC at BlizzCon 2009.jpg
Morhaime (left) playing with ETC at BlizzCon 2009

In 2010, Morhaime married his long-time girlfriend Amy Chen. [1] [17] In 2017, Morhaime bought a mansion in a gated Rancho Mirage community in Riverside County, California for $2.25 million. [18] He is a member of ETC, a metal band formed of and by Blizzard employees, where he plays bass guitar. [19]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blizzard Entertainment</span> American video game publisher and developer

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded in February 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham. The company originally concentrated on the creation of game ports for other studios' games before beginning development of their own software in 1993, with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1993, the company became Chaos Studios, Inc., and then Blizzard Entertainment soon after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates early in the following year. Shortly after, Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

<i>Warcraft: Orcs & Humans</i> 1994 video game

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game (RTS) developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, and published by Interplay Productions in Europe. It was released for MS-DOS in North America on 15 November 1994, and for Mac OS in early 1996. The MS-DOS version was re-released by Sold-Out Software in 2002.

<i>StarCraft: Ghost</i> Cancelled video game

StarCraft: Ghost was a military science fiction stealth-action video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. It was intended to be part of Blizzard's StarCraft series and was announced in September 20, 2002. It was to be developed by Nihilistic Software for the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 video game consoles. Several delays in development caused Blizzard to move back the release date and the game has not materialized. Nihilistic Software ceded development to Swingin' Ape Studios in 2004 before Blizzard bought the company, and plans for the GameCube version were canceled in 2005.

<i>World of Warcraft</i> 2004 video game

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. Set in the Warcraft fantasy universe, World of Warcraft takes place within the world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events of the previous game in the series, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. The game was announced in 2001, and was released for the 10th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise on November 23, 2004. Since launch, World of Warcraft has had nine major expansion packs: The Burning Crusade (2007), Wrath of the Lich King (2008), Cataclysm (2010), Mists of Pandaria (2012), Warlords of Draenor (2014), Legion (2016), Battle for Azeroth (2018), Shadowlands (2020), and Dragonflight (2022). Three further expansions, The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan, were announced in 2023.

Warcraft is a franchise of video games, novels, and other media created by Blizzard Entertainment. The series is made up of six core games: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Warcraft Rumble. The first three of these core games are in the real-time strategy genre, where opposing players command virtual armies in battle against each other or a computer-controlled enemy. The fourth and best-selling title of the franchise is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), where players control their character and interact with each other in a virtual world.

<i>Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans</i> Unreleased video game

Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans is a cancelled graphic adventure game developed by Blizzard Entertainment and Animation Magic from 1996 until 1998. Set in the Warcraft universe after the events of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, it followed the orc character Thrall in his quest to reunite his race, then living on reservations and in slavery following its defeat by the human Alliance. Assuming the role of Thrall, the player would have used a point-and-click interface to explore the world, solve puzzles and interact with characters from the wider Warcraft series.

<i>Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal</i> 1996 video game

Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal is an expansion pack for the real-time strategy video game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh. It was developed by Blizzard Entertainment and Cyberlore Studios, and published by Blizzard in North America and Europe in 1996. It requires the full version of the original game to run and adds new story campaigns and multiplayer maps. The expansion was later released alongside Tides of Darkness for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1997 as Warcraft II: The Dark Saga, and was included in the Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition for Windows PC and Macintosh in 1999.

<i>World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade</i> 2007 video game expansion set

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is the first expansion set for the MMORPG World of Warcraft. It was released on January 16, 2007 at local midnight in Europe and North America, selling nearly 2.4 million copies on release day alone and making it, at the time, the fastest-selling PC game released at that point. Approximately 3.53 million copies were sold in the first month of release, including 1.9 million in North America, nearly 1.6 million in Europe, and over 100,000 copies in Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BlizzCon</span> Annual gaming convention by Blizzard Entertainment

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References

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