Sign inAllen Adham
Allen Adham is an American game developer and businessman who founded Blizzard Entertainment with Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce in 1991. He led the young company and set its design philosophy, and he was the original lead designer of World of Warcraft until he left in early 2004, months before launch. Morhaime once called him "the genesis of Blizzard."
Early life and first games
Adham was born Ayman Adham in Los Angeles on September 6, 1966, to Egyptian parents, and grew up in Irvine, California. He played arcade games through high school and wrote his own games on an Apple II at home. Through a friend he was hired by Brian Fargo to playtest games during the summers, first at Boone Corporation and then at Interplay Entertainment. During his second year at UCLA he designed and programmed Gunslinger, published by Datasoft. He took two years off from his studies to serve in the United States Army.
Founding Blizzard
At UCLA Adham became friends with Mike Morhaime; the two discovered they used the same computer password. After they graduated, Adham persuaded Morhaime to turn down a job offer from Western Digital, and in February 1991 they founded Silicon & Synapse in Irvine, with their UCLA friend Frank Pearce as the first employee. Adham put in $10,000 from his college fund. An early deal with Interplay, which paid the studio to port games to other systems, funded its move into original games. Interplay published its first two original titles, Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings.
Adham was the company's leader and its executive producer, making top-level design decisions and programming on the early games. Two of his rules shaped Blizzard for decades:
- Hire players. He interviewed job candidates on how much they knew about games, believing games were best made by people who played them.
- Easy to learn, hard to master. After watching testers struggle with the opening of The Lost Vikings, he required that Blizzard games be simple to pick up but deep enough to reward skill.
Unhappy with how Interplay marketed the studio's games, Adham decided the company would publish its own. Its first self-published game was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), modeled on the real-time strategy game Dune II, which was popular in the office. That year Adham agreed to sell the studio, then called Chaos Studios, to Davidson & Associates for $6.75 million, and a naming dispute soon led to the name Blizzard Entertainment.
Adham also brought in key people. He met David Brevik of Condor at the 1994 Consumer Electronics Show, which led to Blizzard publishing Diablo and buying Condor, renamed Blizzard North. In 1997 he hired Rob Pardo, then a quality assurance tester, for his skill at real-time strategy games. He also put Mike O'Brien to work building the Battle.net online service.
Work on World of Warcraft
Adham had wanted Blizzard to make an online role-playing game since Ultima Online came out in 1997. In late 1998 he tried to resign from Blizzard and instead took a sabbatical, while Morhaime became president. In 1999, when Blizzard's cinematics department, which Adham had set up for StarCraft, proposed a game modeled on EverQuest (his favorite game of all time), Adham came back from his break to oversee the project. That project became World of Warcraft.
Adham was the game's original lead designer and, according to Blizzard, set the course for its development. He later told Game Informer that he was running the company and leading the game's design at the same time, working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. In January 2004, burned out, he left Blizzard again, and Rob Pardo took over the game's design. World of Warcraft launched that November. The story of how the game was made is covered in Development of World of Warcraft.
In 2006 Adham, Morhaime and Pearce received UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering Professional Achievement Award for their work at Blizzard.
Later career
After leaving, Adham went into finance and started Tenfold Capital Management, a hedge fund. He kept playing Blizzard's games, including a lot of World of Warcraft. He later said leaving had been the biggest mistake of his life and that he should have taken a sabbatical instead.
Blizzard announced his return at BlizzCon 2016. He became head of the company's incubation efforts for new games and in 2018 joined its executive leadership team. His teams worked on Orbis, a planned location-based mobile game using Blizzard characters, and Odyssey, a survival game. Neither was released. When Odyssey was cancelled in January 2024, during layoffs that followed Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard, Adham left the company again.
Sources
Categories: Developers
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