Key Blizzard man talks to IGN
May 29, 1998

Bill Roper is a busy man.

He agreed to sit and talk to us, but it took fifteen minutes for us to get from the Sierra showroom floor to the private upstairs area. Why? Because every thirty seconds another freelance programmer, designer, musician, artist or other industry denizen was passing Bill a business card and grabbing his ear for a quick pitch. Blizzard is hot stuff right now, and Bill Roper is one of the key men there. Everyone seems to know it.

His current title is Director of Third Party Development, which means he's looking over outside efforts that go under the Blizzard name, including the Starcraft expansion pack. But he also keeps his eye on other projects, from Diablo II to future games.

Blizzard today consists of two offices, Blizzard North and Blizzard South, and careful industry watchers will keep track of what those development teams are up to. Blizzard North (formerly Condor) consists of one team, and currently they're up to their necks in Diablo II. Blizzard South on the other hand has just completed Starcraft, and most of team has taken a well-earned vacation.

Roper told us that Blizzard South is actually expanding into two different teams, both of whom are currently cooking up new original Blizzard projects. We can't tell you what those projects will be, since even Blizzard doesn't know at this point. Both teams are in one of the really enjoyable phase of game development -- kicking around ideas. "We've got more ideas than we could ever do," he says.

Games can be announced too early, Roper adds, and Blizzard is still learning this. "We announced Diablo II at ECTS last year with a logo and some sketches." This time around, they'll be keeping the new projects closer to the vest.

But is a Warcraft III in the works? It's a possibility, Roper admits, but it all depends on what the actual teams want to do.

"We left a lot of cliffhangers hanging in the Warcraft II expansion pack," he says. "We view Warcraft as our Star Wars. It's our franchise." He says there will be a Warcraft III, "some day."

So how does Roper account for Blizzard's considerable success? After, all their last three games, Warcraft II, Diablo and Starcraft, were both critically acclaimed and quite successful in the retail channel.

"We like to think it's our philosophy," says Roper. "We only do Triple A titles, those that meet our expectations."

Which is how Warcraft Adventures got canceled, even after a year's worth of time and money had been poured into its development. Big issues in the game's cancellation, Roper says, were the fact that the game was behind in the technology curve, middling in terms of graphics, and it "wasn't doing anything you hadn't seen before."

"Art direction is very important to us," says Roper. "We probably threw out enough art from Starcraft to do a whole other game. [Art direction] is really important to us, we do a lot of changing of art, probably more than is good for us. The days of games being satisfied by hexes and little boxes are definitely over."

If excellent art direction is one key to Blizzard's success, the keystone of its success has to be its ability to appeal to both the mass market and the hardcore gamer simultaneously.

"There's been great games that don't sell well," says Roper, and then launches into Blizzard's 'donut hole' theory of games sales, a model developed by Blizzard's Allen Adham, according to Roper.

In the donut theory, hardcore games -- say a quality flight sim or wargame -- does quite well with the hardcore gaming audience, or the 'hole' of the donut. On the other hand, mass market games like Myst or Deer Hunter succeed in the body of the donut, but are disdained by the hardcore, the 'hole.'

Blizzard's success is acheived by creating games which are easy to play, easy to get into ('donut' games) but are deep and sophisticated enough to capture the hardcore as well. Roper says that if one of their games is getting dumbed down too much they call it 'donut,' whereas if it gets too complicated and niche oriented, the team calls it too 'hole.' However cumbersome the metaphor, the truth is it's worked for Blizzard.

Others have also remarked on how close-knit Blizzard seems to be, as a company. Only 100 or so employees work for Blizzard. It's pointed out that at trade shows, such as CGDC or E3, the Blizzard developers can usually be found in a pack, similarly clad in their black Blizzard T-shirts, moving in a group through the throngs.

"We're very much a family," says Roper, laughing at the description. "We all hang out together, we vacation together, I've even married three [couples] at Blizzard." (Roper is an ordained minister.) The average age at Blizzard is about 26 or 27.

Whatever the case, even without anything new to show at E3, Blizzard remains one of the top developers for PC games.

This interview was originally posted by Next Generation Online. I could not find a byline for the interview. The pictures were found at OGR in their E3 coverage. This article and pictures are the copyrighted property of NGO and OGR respectively. Brood War is the copyrighted property of Blizzard