BlizzCon D0 - Blizz HQ
BlizzCon Day 0 - Meeting Blizzard
I've had the fortunate opportunity to be representing GosuGamers in the Official Blizzard Fan Site program, all of which were invited and flown into BlizzCon the day before to participate in what is called the "RTS Community Summit". The represented sites were, apart from GosuGamers, TeamLiquid, SCLegacy, StarCraft.org, WCReplays, MeetYourMakers, Broodwar.de, Diabloiii.com, W3Roc and GameReplays.
We've all been touring the Blizzard head quarters, met the developers, got to test the game and had a discussion with Karune and other Blizzard representatives regarding the SC2 community and how the interaction with Blizzard can work the best.
Touring the head quarters were great. We signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) which means I'm not allowed to go into any of the details of what we saw apart from a few things. First thing I noticed was that their main head quarters didn't have any signs or banners or names on the outside of the building. We passed by a lot of head quarters of major companies like Intel, Cisco and PayPal. They all had very nice logos on the outside - Blizzard didn't. Why? Bomb threats. There were no logos because of security. There were bullet proof windows because of security. "We made World of WarCraft, remember? There are nine million players". And apparently some of those who didn't get the right sword, armor or you-name-it, decided to threaten to blow up the building.
That's just a detail out of the many things I saw yesterday and unfortunately one of the few I can say about the headquarters - but I thought it was an interesting detail. Other things were that there were Blizzard merchandize everywhere within the offices. Art on the walls, monitors displaying the ingame cinematics in a loop, unit statues, unit action figures, awards, WC3 banners, cups, prizes, more art, another Blizzard banner, some StarCraft posters from '98, everything put up in a very nice designed office that had a very Blizzardish feel to it.
We all received lots of things like a nice piece of art that Samwise, one of the main artists at Blizz, had made, who also signed it. We then got to see different departments and I also stumbled upon Jeff aka XG3, who started and designed SCLegacy, and Bunny who ran WCReplays, both of them now employees.
In either case, we had lunch with the developers, Dustin Browder, Pob Pardo and Chris whats-his-last-name-again (he is aka Pillars, old school gamer, does some design balance too, not Chris Sigaty, will look it up). That was really nice and we had great discussions about the game and what could be done. I dont really have the time to go into the details of everything here now, cause I'm about to write my report about the actual game that we got to play, but anyway, I'm having a really great time here. The trip was really good and I enjoyed it even though it was litterally a 24 hour trip just to get here. My luggage didnt get through to LA from New York but it got here today, Friday, and I borrowed some clothes from The1Crow since mine wasn't there yet. That's also why I didnt update you guys earlier - my laptop and camera was in the bag.
Anyway, I'm about to go down to the actual BlizzCon area now shortly and meet up with the other GosuCrew. BlizzCon is officially opening today so everyone else will get to play it today, except for us who tried it out yesterday :) More blogging later on! And also please post what you guys want me to look into the details of here, there are so many things I can report on I just have to filter on what. For more general ingame stuff check the news page as always. Later!
I've had the fortunate opportunity to be representing GosuGamers in the Official Blizzard Fan Site program, all of which were invited and flown into BlizzCon the day before to participate in what is called the "RTS Community Summit". The represented sites were, apart from GosuGamers, TeamLiquid, SCLegacy, StarCraft.org, WCReplays, MeetYourMakers, Broodwar.de, Diabloiii.com, W3Roc and GameReplays.
We've all been touring the Blizzard head quarters, met the developers, got to test the game and had a discussion with Karune and other Blizzard representatives regarding the SC2 community and how the interaction with Blizzard can work the best.
Touring the head quarters were great. We signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) which means I'm not allowed to go into any of the details of what we saw apart from a few things. First thing I noticed was that their main head quarters didn't have any signs or banners or names on the outside of the building. We passed by a lot of head quarters of major companies like Intel, Cisco and PayPal. They all had very nice logos on the outside - Blizzard didn't. Why? Bomb threats. There were no logos because of security. There were bullet proof windows because of security. "We made World of WarCraft, remember? There are nine million players". And apparently some of those who didn't get the right sword, armor or you-name-it, decided to threaten to blow up the building.
That's just a detail out of the many things I saw yesterday and unfortunately one of the few I can say about the headquarters - but I thought it was an interesting detail. Other things were that there were Blizzard merchandize everywhere within the offices. Art on the walls, monitors displaying the ingame cinematics in a loop, unit statues, unit action figures, awards, WC3 banners, cups, prizes, more art, another Blizzard banner, some StarCraft posters from '98, everything put up in a very nice designed office that had a very Blizzardish feel to it.
We all received lots of things like a nice piece of art that Samwise, one of the main artists at Blizz, had made, who also signed it. We then got to see different departments and I also stumbled upon Jeff aka XG3, who started and designed SCLegacy, and Bunny who ran WCReplays, both of them now employees.
In either case, we had lunch with the developers, Dustin Browder, Pob Pardo and Chris whats-his-last-name-again (he is aka Pillars, old school gamer, does some design balance too, not Chris Sigaty, will look it up). That was really nice and we had great discussions about the game and what could be done. I dont really have the time to go into the details of everything here now, cause I'm about to write my report about the actual game that we got to play, but anyway, I'm having a really great time here. The trip was really good and I enjoyed it even though it was litterally a 24 hour trip just to get here. My luggage didnt get through to LA from New York but it got here today, Friday, and I borrowed some clothes from The1Crow since mine wasn't there yet. That's also why I didnt update you guys earlier - my laptop and camera was in the bag.
Anyway, I'm about to go down to the actual BlizzCon area now shortly and meet up with the other GosuCrew. BlizzCon is officially opening today so everyone else will get to play it today, except for us who tried it out yesterday :) More blogging later on! And also please post what you guys want me to look into the details of here, there are so many things I can report on I just have to filter on what. For more general ingame stuff check the news page as always. Later!
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