Q&A With Blizzard President

Gamespot reports the Austin Game Conference has kicked off with a keynote speech from Blizzard president Mike Morhaine. Gamespot took the opportunity for a Q&A session:

GS: In your presentation, you talked about the Super Nintendo racing game RPM Racing, but didn’t mention it by name. I’ve noticed I don’t see much beyond World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft associated with the Blizzard name anymore.

MM: When we first started, our initial name was Silicon and Synapse. We kept that name for a few years, and then decided to change it because it was high concept. Nobody really understood what it meant. So we changed the name to Chaos Studios. Then we found out someone was using the name Chaos Technologies, and they wanted six figures for us to continue using it. So we picked something different, and that’s when we switched to Blizzard, which was about the same time we started self-publishing our titles like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. The console games weren’t published under the Blizzard brand, which is why you don’t associate them with Blizzard. A few years back, we ended up approaching Interplay and buying the rights to all our earlier Interplay titles. So we do own the rights and did release some of them as Game Boy titles.

GS: Do you think titles like Lost Vikings, Blackthorne, and Justice League Task Force count as brand withdrawals?

MM: I think if we were to do them today they might. But back then, most of them were actually pretty good titles. RPM Racing is probably an exception to that. We weren’t particularly proud of the title, and we banged it out pretty quick.