Making of Warcraft

Patrick Wyatt, a famous game developer who tuned his craft at Blizzard, wrote a blog post on the making of Warcraft.  He gives us a view into the different roles of people working at a game company, the artists, the software developers, and the managers.  His blog is in two parts.  The second part has more choice tidbits on the dynamics of people in the company.

This section captures the frenzied culture stemming from working on multiple projects at the same time:

We worked together, played together, partied together, slept 10 to a hotel room for trade shows together, and in cases even lived together: I shared a house with three other Blizzard-folks which was the first of many similar dorm rooms scattered throughout Orange County, California.

Blizzard was working on at least four other games when I started on the Warcraft project, and as the company numbered only 20 everyone was mega-busy keeping those projects on track. It wasn’t uncommon for artists, programmers and designers to be working on two or sometimes three projects at a time, and of course our sole musician/sound-engineer, Glenn Stafford, worked on everything.

After Patrick's blog, I felt that I wanted more information on the culture of video game companies.  I ordered David Kushner's 2004 book called, The Masters of Doom.