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Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is a video game developer and publisher. It is currently is a part of Activision as Activision-Blizzard. The company is mainly focused on PC games with occasional console ports
History[]
The company was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. While it was focused on porting games to PC, they started console development with RPM Racing, which was published by Interplay. This was one of the earliest titles for the SNES and showcased the unique capabilities of the system. They also released their original titles until 1994 where they were bought by Davidson & Associates. They also made their big break on PC with WarCraft that same year. Their console development was soon discontinued with their last console game for several years being StarCraft 64 with Mass Media.
Through a series of mergers, the company became a part of CUC International. However, CUC was clearly committing accounting fraud which led the company to lose most of its value by 1998 when the scandal was revealed. Blizzard was sold as a part Sierra On-line to French publisher Havas. Havas was then acquired by Vivendi that same year.
In 2002, Blizzard acquired the rights to its 3 original titles as Silicon & Synapse from Interplay and published ports of the titles for the Game Boy Advance in the following year. Vivendi merged the company with Activision in 2008 while dissolving the Vivendi Games brand. This was the start of Activision-Blizzard with Vivendi being the majority shareholder. Through the success of Activision's franchises, the company was able to buy shares from Vivendi that in 2013, Vivendi only owned 11.8% and the majority of the shares owned by the public. Vivendi sold its remaining shares over the next few years.
With the success of the Switch, Blizzard returned to Nintendo hardware after 15 years with the port of Diablo III: Eternal Collection with distribution by Nintendo. Blizzard also released a amiibo to celebrate this release. In 2021, Vicarious Visions was merged into the company, becoming Blizzard Albany. In October 2023, Microsoft completed their acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. It is unclear the future of Blizzard games on Nintendo hardware at this point.
List of games[]
- RPM Racing (1991)
- The Lost Vikings (1992)
- Rock n' Roll Racing (1993)
- Blackthorne (1994)
- Justice League Task Force (1995)
- Lost Vikings 2 (1997)
- StarCraft 64 (2000)
- Diablo III: Eternal Collection (2018)
- Overwatch (2019)
- Blizzard Arcade Collection (2021)
- Diablo II: Resurrected (2021)
- Overwatch 2 (2022)
External links[]
- Blizzard Entertainment at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia