Mike Morhaime

Mike Morhaime is an American game executive who co-founded Blizzard Entertainment in 1991 and served as its president and CEO for most of its history, including the launch and peak years of World of Warcraft. He stepped down in 2018 and founded the game company Dreamhaven in 2020.

Early life

Morhaime grew up in the Los Angeles area and graduated from Granada Hills High School in 1985. As a sixth grader he and his siblings bought a Bally Professional Arcade console; when he found it could be programmed, he taught himself to write simple games using sample code from a newsletter. He studied electrical engineering at UCLA, graduating in 1990. An internship at a microchip company in San Jose, where he learned circuit design, changed him from a student who sat at the back of the class into one who sat at the front.

Founding Blizzard

At UCLA Morhaime became friends with Allen Adham after they found they shared a computer password. After graduation Adham talked him out of a job offer at Western Digital, and in February 1991 the two founded Silicon & Synapse in Irvine, California, with their friend Frank Pearce as the first employee. Morhaime funded his share with a $10,000 interest-free loan from his grandmother. The studio later became Chaos Studios and then Blizzard Entertainment.

Morhaime has called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) the game that put Blizzard on the map. Besides selling well, it was one of the first games that offered a good experience playing over the internet, which became a selling point of Blizzard's later games.

In late 1998, when Adham stepped back on sabbatical, Morhaime became president of the company. He used that authority early on: when staff, including Chris Metzen, objected to the direction of an early Warcraft III prototype led by Mike O'Brien, Morhaime removed O'Brien from the project, and the game was rebuilt as Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. From 1999 to 2008 he also sat on the executive committee of Vivendi Games, Blizzard's parent company.

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft was the first Blizzard game to charge a monthly subscription, and Morhaime later said the company expected it to sell more slowly than its earlier games because of the fee. All of Blizzard's production and marketing plans were built on that assumption. Instead the game sold so quickly at its November 2004 launch that stores ran out of copies for a time. "For the whole first year, we scrambled to keep up with demand," he said. The early server problems and the scramble that followed are covered in Launch of World of Warcraft. The game had about 11 million subscribers by 2010.

In 2008 Morhaime was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, and that year he accepted a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for Blizzard's creation of World of Warcraft. In 2012 he won the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the technology category.

Away from management, Morhaime plays bass in Elite Tauren Chieftain, the heavy metal band of Blizzard employees fronted by Samwise Didier, which has played at many BlizzCons.

In May 2016 Morhaime met with former WoW team lead Mark Kern, then the spokesman for players asking Blizzard to run official servers of the original, pre-expansion game. Kern said Blizzard made no promises and was in "listen mode." Blizzard announced World of Warcraft Classic at BlizzCon 2017.

Leaving Blizzard

On October 3, 2018, Morhaime announced that he was stepping down as president and CEO and would become an advisor. J. Allen Brack, executive producer of World of Warcraft, replaced him. His advisory role ended on April 7, 2019. Reporting since then, including Jason Schreier's book Play Nice, has described long-running tension between Morhaime and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick over control of Blizzard.

After a California state lawsuit against Activision Blizzard in July 2021 over workplace harassment and discrimination, Morhaime, who was not named in the suit, posted a public apology in which he said he was ashamed.

Dreamhaven

In 2020 Morhaime founded Dreamhaven, a game company in Irvine with two internal studios, Secret Door and Moonshot Games. In 2025 it released its first games: Sunderfolk, a cooperative tactics game from Secret Door (April 23), and Wildgate, a crew-based space shooter from Moonshot (July 22). Dreamhaven is also publishing The Legend of California, the first game from Jeff Kaplan's new studio, Kintsugiyama.

Sources

• Michael Morhaime (Wikipedia)
• Michael Morhaime (Warcraft Wiki)
• Allen Adham (Wikipedia)
• Mike Morhaime meets with legacy WoW server representative Mark Kern (PCGamesN)
• Activision Blizzard Names World of Warcraft Executive Producer J. Allen Brack As New President of Blizzard Entertainment (Business Wire)
• World of Warcraft Classic (Wikipedia)
• Jeff Kaplan (Wikipedia)