It has now been revealed that Blizzard employees have bullied author Andy Weir out of the company. That was about 30 years ago, around the time of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Weir was a programmer in his mid-20s at the time and dreamed of working for Blizzard. But after his ignominious end he became a SF author and wrote The Martian, a huge hit.
Where does the story come from? The story comes from Jason Schreier’s new book “Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment”. The later bestselling author is quoted in conversation with Schreier:
Andy Weir complained in the early 90s that he had to work unpaid overtime as a programmer. After he complained, other Blizzard employees told him that he “didn’t fit into Blizzard’s culture.” From then on he was ignored or humiliated.
Weir says so many people were mean to him that he felt it was his fault. He also admits that he made some mistakes, but in his opinion, hardly anyone cared about him and trained him properly. After a year at Blizzard, he was fired.
Weir says: He was devastated because working for Blizzard was his dream job. Weir had started studying computer science but dropped out. At Blizzard he worked on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
Andy Weir is known from this work:
German trailer for The Martian – Save Mark Watney
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Programmer becomes a SF author and is praised for his scientific rigor
What happened next for him? As a SF author, Weir proved that he has enormous potential. In 2011, many years after his time at Blizzard, he published the SF novel “The Martian,” which was later made into a successful film starring Matt Damon and received an Oscar nomination.
The film has been repeatedly praised for its extremely high level of scientific accuracy. An employee with such skills could certainly have been used at Blizzard if the skills had been recognized.
Weir is not a “one-hit wonder”, but has written other successful SF novels that sold well, such as Project Hail Mary.
Money and a bad working atmosphere were constant topics at Blizzard
Is this typical of Blizzard? As gamedeveloper reports from Schreier’s book, “Blizzard pays poorly and demands overtime” is probably a constant theme in the company’s glorious history.
It is said that there have always been problems with Blizzard’s pay structure. In many cases the basic salary was low, but there were high bonuses. But these bonuses were always at risk if something didn’t go as planned.
In 2005, some of the people who worked on WoW only received small bonuses of $2,000. In 1998 at StarCraft, developers were told they wouldn’t get any bonuses because the game was finished late.
In any case, things sometimes seem to get wild at Blizzard: We’re talking about some of the studio bosses constantly contradicting each other, which cost everyone in the team hours of work and nerves. During the development of StarCraft II, the bosses Metzen and Pardo once argued violently for an hour while the whole team watched them.
Metzen said: It had to be pink. Pardo immediately said it had to be blue and only an idiot would make it pink. It was painful to watch.
In addition, the people at Blizzard are such tough gamers that excessively long gaming sessions in Ultima Online delayed work on Diablo 2.
The full extent of the problems at Blizzard and a lack of seriousness in leadership became clear in 2021 when a sexism scandal shook the image of the glorious studio Blizzard: “Cocaine in the toilet, sex in the lounge” – scandal surrounding WoW developer Blizzard escalated