gaming · ai · game development
The Blizzard I Grew Up With, and Why I'm Excited About Gaming Again
Discovering Diablo as a kid, the Blizzard games that shaped me, why ambitious games became so hard to make, and why AI has me excited about gaming again.
My first encounter with Blizzard was through Diablo.
The original Diablo. The one from 1996.
I realize that might sound almost prehistoric to some younger gamers. :) Then again, I remember being a kid and feeling equally amazed when someone talked about experiencing technology that existed before I was born. As children, we somehow assume history started around the same time we did.
Anyway, I digress.
I still remember the first time I saw Diablo running on a computer. I was completely captivated. Had my parents allowed it, I probably would have stayed up all night playing.
I was already familiar with computer games by then. Through a fortunate coincidence, we’d had a 386 PC at home when I was around five or six years old. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much that seemingly small detail influenced the direction my life eventually took, including my choice of career.
But that’s a story for another day.
Diablo introduced me to Blizzard, and Blizzard went on to introduce me to some of the most memorable experiences of my childhood and early adulthood.
StarCraft. Warcraft. Diablo II. And eventually, World of Warcraft.
I can genuinely say that each of those games brought back something of the excitement I felt when I first discovered Diablo.
There was something unmistakable about Blizzard games back then. A certain atmosphere, attention to detail, and sense of craftsmanship that I struggle to put into words.
They didn’t just feel like games someone had developed. They felt like worlds someone had genuinely loved creating.
And then came World of Warcraft.
I remember watching its early announcement trailer. I remember the seemingly endless wait for its release. I remember finally stepping into Azeroth for the first time.
And, of course, I remember the raids that lasted until sunrise.
Those were almost dreamlike years.
Maybe nostalgia is doing some of the work here. I’m sure it is. But even allowing for that, I still haven’t experienced another MMO that captured quite the same magic as WoW.
That’s entirely subjective, of course. I’m not suggesting there haven’t been excellent games since. There have been countless extraordinary games, including some that deserved far more recognition than they received.
But Blizzard, and the worlds it created, will always occupy a special place in my memories.
For years, I kept wondering what their next masterpiece might be.
I imagined an MMO set in the StarCraft universe. Or perhaps one built around Diablo’s darker world. I hoped Blizzard might eventually surprise us with something as ambitious and unexpected as WoW had once been.
Instead, we got more expansions, more seasons, and more iterations of familiar experiences.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Millions of people continue to enjoy them.
But personally, somewhere along the way, I started feeling that we were exploring increasingly familiar territory rather than discovering entirely new worlds.
And yes, I realize I’m beginning to sound like an old-school gamer complaining about the good old days. My apologies to anyone still reading. :)
When Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, I remember feeling a strange sadness.
Not because I believed everything had been perfect before, or because I thought a change in ownership would suddenly destroy Blizzard’s creative spirit.
The industry had been changing for years.
But the announcement felt symbolic of something I’d been noticing for a long time: the increasing difficulty of taking enormous creative risks in an industry where the financial consequences of failure had become equally enormous.
I remember reading an interview with Chris Metzen back in 2016, where he reflected on Blizzard’s experience with Titan, the ambitious MMO project that never made it to release.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the story of a cancelled game. It was the realization of how difficult it had become to pursue something on the scale of World of Warcraft, even for a studio like Blizzard.
Games of that scale require extraordinary investments of time, money, and talent. A failed bet can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, threaten entire studios, and affect thousands of people’s livelihoods.
It’s hard to blame companies for becoming cautious under those circumstances.
I understood the economics.
But as a gamer, I couldn’t help feeling that something important might be slipping away.
I still hoped that someday, Blizzard or another studio would surprise me the way those early games had.
That even in my forties, I’d discover something so extraordinary that I’d willingly sacrifice a few nights of sleep just to spend more time in its world.
For a while, though, that possibility felt increasingly distant.
And that brings me to why I’m writing this today.
For the first time in quite a while, I’m genuinely excited about where game development might be heading.
AI and the tools emerging around it are beginning to challenge some of the assumptions we’ve held about what it takes to build ambitious games.
Not just how quickly we can write code or generate assets, but what kinds of projects might become economically possible in the first place.
Ideas that once required hundreds of developers and enormous budgets might eventually become achievable by much smaller teams.
Worlds that would never have survived a traditional business case might finally get a chance to exist.
Of course, none of this guarantees great games.
Technology can make creation more accessible, but it can’t automatically provide imagination, taste, emotional depth, or the countless thoughtful decisions that make a game memorable.
And the easier it becomes to create games, the harder it may become for any individual game to find its audience.
Those are real challenges.
But here’s what excites me.
Maybe we don’t need to wait for another Blizzard to emerge from the Blizzard we already know.
Maybe the next few decades will give us hundreds of small studios with the creative ambition of Blizzard in the 1990s, equipped with tools that would have seemed unimaginable back then.
Not hundreds of companies producing the next World of Warcraft.
Hundreds of teams attempting things we haven’t even thought of yet.
Most will probably fail. Some will create forgettable experiences. Others might surprise us in ways we can’t currently predict.
And perhaps a few will create worlds that a new generation of players will remember thirty years from now, just as vividly as I remember my first night playing Diablo.
As someone who has loved PC games for most of his life, I find that possibility incredibly exciting.
And I have to admit, there’s another thought that makes it even more exciting.
For the first time, I can imagine a future where I might not have to remain just a player watching these worlds come to life.
Maybe, someday, I’ll get to help create one.
That little possibility makes the whole thing feel strangely personal.
After all these years, I’m starting to feel a bit like that kid sitting in front of a computer, discovering Diablo for the first time.
Curious about what comes next.
And hoping to be surprised again.
Fingers crossed. 🤞