Brian Birmingham

Brian Birmingham is a software engineer who worked at Blizzard Entertainment from 2006 to 2023. He was a lead developer on World of Warcraft Classic, the 2019 re-release of the game as it stood in patch 1.12, and stayed with the Classic team through its later versions. He left Blizzard in January 2023 after publicly objecting to a mandatory employee ranking policy.

Career at Blizzard

Birmingham joined Blizzard in 2006 and worked as a software engineer on World of Warcraft. In Play Nice, his 2024 history of Blizzard, journalist Jason Schreier writes that Birmingham grew unhappy with where the live game was going, feeling that it was becoming less like the kind of game he wanted to play. That made him a natural fit for the Classic project, which he went on to lead from the engineering side. Outlets have given his title in several ways: lead software engineer, technical lead and co-lead developer.

World of Warcraft Classic

Blizzard announced World of Warcraft Classic at BlizzCon 2017, and at BlizzCon 2018 Birmingham, fellow engineer Omar Gonzalez and game director Ion Hazzikostas presented the "Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic" panel. They described recovering three things from the original game: its database, its art assets and its source code. The team chose patch 1.12 as the baseline and rebuilt that version of the game on top of the modern World of Warcraft code, which let developers work with current tools while keeping the old game's content and rules.

In a BlizzCon 2018 interview with JudgeHype, Birmingham said Blizzard did not need the old physical servers for this. Most of the work, he said, was converting the original game data to fit the modern engine, a daily challenge because each kind of data was different. He also explained that 1.12-era add-ons would not be made compatible, because the old interface code exposed too much information and had made botting easier, and he named the modern one-click mailbox as a convenience the developers wanted to bring over.

Interviews in early 2019 described how the team checked its work against a running copy of the original 1.12 client and server. One example Birmingham gave was the behavior of a warlock's summoned demon in the BlizzCon demo, which the team compared against the original and found to match. He also admitted that his own memory had been off on some details, such as exactly how the warrior ability Charge behaved.

Classic launched in August 2019. Birmingham continued with the team through The Burning Crusade Classic, the Season of Mastery event realms, about which Wowhead interviewed him in January 2022, and Wrath of the Lich King Classic, which he discussed with Blizzplanet alongside Josh Zierhut in April 2022.

Departure

In 2021 Activision Blizzard introduced a performance review rule requiring managers to rate about five percent of their staff as "developing," the lowest tier. Bloomberg reported in January 2023 that Birmingham had been made to lower one employee's rating from "successful" to "developing" to meet the quota. He then emailed colleagues to say he could not keep working under the policy and would resign unless it was reversed. After a conversation with human resources, he was let go.

On January 24, 2023, Birmingham confirmed on Twitter that he was no longer a Blizzard employee and said he would return if allowed, so he could keep fighting the policy from inside. He also clarified that the rule came from parent company Activision Blizzard King rather than from Blizzard itself, and said he held no ill will toward his former colleagues.

Sources

• Brian Birmingham, Warcraft Wiki
• Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (2024), p. 277
• Interview BlizzCon: WoW Classic, un projet extrêmement important pour Blizzard, JudgeHype (2018)
• BlizzCon 2018: Restoring History, Creating WoW Classic panel, Wowhead
• Interview WoW Classic: expérience, défis, souvenirs, JudgeHype (2019)
• Developer Interview with Brian Birmingham on Classic Season of Mastery, Wowhead (2022)
• Wrath of the Lich King Classic Interview with Zierhut and Birmingham, Blizzplanet (2022)
• Blizzard manager fired over policy, Kotaku (2023)
• Blizzard WoW Classic lead fired after objections to employee ranking system, TheSixthAxis (2023)