| Blizzard Entertainment is a highly successful PC game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in
1994, every game it has released has been a best-seller. It is headquartered in Irvine, California.
Overview
Blizzard Entertainment was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games
like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions) and then was acquired in 1994 by distributor Davidson &
Associates for under $10 million USD. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft.
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by CUC in 1996; CUC then merged with HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software in 1997. After Cendant experienced a massive
accounting scandal, its consumer software operations, including Blizzard, were sold to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the VU Games group of
Vivendi Universal.
Titles
As of 2004, Blizzard is currently overseeing development on a stealth action
game called StarCraft: Ghost, by Swingin' Ape.
Bnetd
A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol
used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free, GNU General Public Licensed battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official battle.net site to play Blizzard games.
In February of 2002, lawyers retained by
Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the
developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers
collectively known as "battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.
Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the
public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under
provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved,
for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the
case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net. [1] (http://blizzard.com/press/041008.shtml)
FreeCraft
On June 20, 2003, Blizzard obtained a
cease and desist order against an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called Freecraft. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with
different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used.
As well as a similar name, Freecraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the
Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers
regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus.
External links
Articles
The Bnetd case
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