Tales of the Tape #2: Allen Adham - The Architect Behind Blizzard's Magic
A series of articles where I summarize thought provoking podcasts/documentaries.
Welcome back to Tales of the Tape. This week, I dove into a16z games' conversation with Allen Adham, co-founder and former Chief Design Officer of Blizzard Entertainment. If you've been following gaming for any length of time, you know Adham's fingerprints are on virtually every iconic Blizzard franchise: Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch.
Before we dive in, I need to acknowledge something: I'm a massive Blizzard fan. Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne shaped my entire career trajectory, and I still actively play Hearthstone and World of Warcraft. A bit of bias might occur.
That said, I also want to emphasise: there are always multiple versions to every story. We are not aware of the whole situation between the original founders, what happened during the Activision years, or the dynamics between Adham (who appears to be closer to Kotick) and Mike Morhaime. What we do have is Adham's perspective, and it's fascinating.
This conversation offers something rare: insights from someone who helped create the blueprint for modern game development, told just weeks after he stepped down from the company he co-founded nearly 30 years prior.
The $22,000 Gamble That Changed Gaming
The origin story of Blizzard reads like a dream that somehow became reality. Adham had $11,000 left in his college fund, which his parents had told him to spend on either a car or a European vacation. Instead, he used it to start a game company. Mike Morhaime borrowed $11,000 from his grandmother. That's it. $22,000 total, and they never took another penny of outside funding.
But here's the part that gets me: their business plan was essentially "let's make video games, and if it doesn't work, we'll be 22 and can get regular jobs." That's pure passion driving strategy (or a whole new level of delusion? I don’t know). When Adham talks about trying to recruit "basically anybody at UCLA who was good at computer science" into this "hairbrained idea," you can hear the infectious enthusiasm that must have been impossible to resist.
The coincidence that brought Adham and Morhaime together feels like something out of a screenplay. They're sitting side by side in a computer lab. Adham goes for coffee, locks his computer, and then comes back to unlock it. Morhaime turns to him, confused because while Adham was gone, the computer timed out, and Morhaime had locked it with his password. They were using the same password. If that moment doesn't happen, maybe Blizzard never exists.
Sometimes the biggest companies start with the smallest moments.
The Secret Formula: Simple to Learn, Impossible to Master
While other developers were obsessing over targeting specific audiences, Blizzard rejected the conventional wisdom that you had to pick between casual and hardcore players. Their inspiration? Chess and Go.
Think about it: you can explain chess rules to an eight-year-old in five minutes, but that same eight-year-old could play every day for the rest of their life and never master it. Go is even more elegant; you can explain the rules in 30 seconds, yet it's strategically deeper than almost any game ever created.
"Strategic depth does not require complexity," Adham says, and this became Blizzard's holy grail. Create games simple enough to invite casual players in, but deep enough to graduate them into hardcore enthusiasts over time.
This philosophy shows up everywhere in their catalogue. World of Warcraft's quest system is immediately understandable, but the endgame raiding requires coordination that rivals professional sports. StarCraft's basic mechanics are easy to learn, but its strategic depth has sustained a professional esports scene for over two decades.
The Psychology of Mass Appeal
Adham reveals another crucial piece of Blizzard's success: tapping into common folklore rather than creating entirely original universes. When you're competing for shelf space among hundreds of game boxes, you have seconds to capture attention. An orc, elf, or dragon immediately communicates what the game is about. A Space Marine fighting bugs does the same for science fiction.
Most people don't realise that StarCraft's Protoss are partially derived from the classic "Roswell aliens" - the big-eyed telepaths with no mouth. Blizzard didn't invent these concepts; they put their unique spin on universally recognisable archetypes.
This wasn't a case of laziness or a lack of creativity. It was brilliant marketing psychology. Lost Vikings and Blackthorne had cool, original IP, but they never broke through. Warcraft and StarCraft tapped into something more profound in our collective consciousness, then built worlds complex enough to sustain decades of storytelling.
Hiring Philosophy: Gamers First, Everything Else Second
One of the most revealing moments comes when Adham describes Blizzard's interview process. His go-to icebreaker question: "Tell me about some of the games you're playing these days." It sounds casual, but for him, it's the most critical question in the entire interview.
"If you want to make a game company, hiring gamers is probably a good idea," he says, acknowledging how obvious this sounds. Yet he notes that it's increasingly common to find people in game development studios who don't play games. They might be excellent engineers or artists, but without that gamer instinct, something gets lost.
The example he gives is perfect: they hired their office manager, Christina, not because of her administrative skills, but because she owned her own Super Nintendo. Not her brother's, not her boyfriend's - hers. And she played the games.
This obsession with hiring authentic gamers wasn't about gatekeeping; it was about preserving the thousands of small, inspired ideas that come from accidental conversations between people who genuinely love the medium. When your entire team is passionate about playing, innovation happens organically.
The Dark Side of Creative Success
Behind Blizzard's polished successes lies what Adham calls "a horror show." He describes a presentation he sometimes gives about their creative process, starting with a beautiful image of the Blizzard campus behind an elegant curtain. The following slide pulls back the curtain to reveal a horror clown with a knife and blood everywhere.
In the early days, they had about a 50/50 success rate with projects. They'd start with loose frameworks, then either pivot quickly when something better emerged or cancel outright when projects weren't fun. You can Google images of cancelled projects like Warcraft Adventures, an adventure game that got scrapped partly because the genre was dying and partly because writing comedy is challenging.
This willingness to kill projects, even after significant investment, became crucial to their long-term success. It's the same principle that led to Overwatch emerging from the ashes of the failed "Titan" project. Most companies would have tried to salvage something, anything, from years of development. Blizzard was willing to start over.
The Animal Crossing Revelation
One of my favourite insights comes from an unexpected source: Animal Crossing's influence on World of Warcraft. Adham was playing Nintendo's life simulation game during World of Warcraft's early development and became fascinated by its real-time clock system.
When he pitched implementing real-time day/night cycles in WoW, the entire 40-person team called it "the stupidest idea ever." He had to fight a 1v40 battle to get it implemented. The result? Team members later talked about watching the sunrise over Westfall with their newborn, calling it one of the prettiest moments they'd experienced in gaming.
This perfectly illustrates Adham's broader philosophy: inspiration comes from everywhere. Song titles, restaurant names, books, movies - creativity doesn't respect boundaries between mediums.
The Price of Passion
Perhaps the most human moment comes when Adham explains why he left Blizzard right before World of Warcraft launched. After 13 years of seven-day workweeks, simultaneously game-directing World of Warcraft while helping run the company, he was burned out and had met someone he wanted to marry.
He calls leaving "the biggest mistake of my life, not just financially but creatively." During his decade away, he started a quantitative hedge fund - a transition that might seem random but makes sense when you consider both involve building AI systems and analysing complex patterns.
When Mike Morhaime reached out about returning, the conversation centred on Adham's "superpower" - starting new things. His role became akin to that of a founder-in-residence, launching new teams and IPs, then handing them over to others for long-term development.
IMPORTANT NOTE: on the GRIT interview I’ve posted last week, Kotick says he was the one who asked him to come back, but you could also hear he didn’t really like Morhaime.
Evolution and Scale
When Adham returned to Blizzard, the most significant change wasn't in the games themselves but in the teams. When World of Warcraft launched, it had about 60 developers, with the majority of the five-year development cycle involving 30-40 people. By his return, teams were 300-400 people, and that was just the beginning.
The shift to live operations fundamentally changed game development. Instead of making a game, shipping it in a box, and moving the whole team to the next project, successful games now require continuous content creation, esports management, DLC development, and simultaneous work on sequels. Team sizes often quadruple after launch rather than shrinking.
This creates a fascinating tension with Blizzard's core design philosophy. How do you maintain the elegance of chess when your boss is asking for "chess 2.0"? Adham acknowledges this challenge: almost anything you add to chess makes it worse - more complex, less accessible. The trick is to expand without increasing surface area, and add depth without adding confusion.
Lessons for Modern Builders
Three principles emerge from Adham's journey that apply beyond gaming:
Know your audience obsessively. In ideal cases, you are your audience. If that's not possible, involve your community and user research from day one. Don't get seduced by cool technology or passion projects that serve your ego instead of your users.
Hire for passion, train for skills. Technical competence can be developed, but genuine enthusiasm for your product category is much harder to instil. The thousands of small innovations that compound over time come from people who use and love what they're building.
Be willing to kill your darlings. Half of Blizzard's early projects got cancelled, and this wasn't a failure - it was discipline. The willingness to start over when something isn't working, even after significant investment, separates great companies from mediocre ones.
As Adham looks toward whatever comes next, whether it's advising other companies or potentially starting something new, his core motivation hasn't changed since he was 14: making and playing video games is still the most fun thing he knows how to do.
For those of us building in gaming or adjacent industries, there's something profoundly encouraging about that consistency. The tools and team sizes may evolve, but the fundamental drive to create experiences that bring joy to millions of people remains the same.
Sometimes, the best business strategy is simply being unwilling to do anything else.
What resonated most with you from Adham's journey? How do you think Blizzard's principles apply to modern game development?
Hope you liked this episode as much as I did.
On my end, I’ll replay the WC3 campaign and WoW old world for the umpteenth time.
Until next time,
Rachid