Blizzard HQ

So this Wednesday I had the great honor to go visit Blizzard HQ in Irvine, California, thanks to a great guy named John and his friend Simon. I met these two about a month ago when hanging out with Cella on the tail end of his visit to Blizzard and demo of HoTS. They had some good stories to tell (especially the ones from when Simon showed John around Korea) and oh did I mention.. they work for Blizzard. So Tricia (megumixbear), my good high school friend and 2v2 partner Raymond, and his cousin Sean, headed down to Irvine mid afternoon to have John so us how awesome Blizzard campus is.

    We drove in, checked in at the guard station where they scanned our ID's and made sure we were on the visitor list and then parked in the ultra convenient visitor parking, just feet away from the iconic WoW orc statue. We snapped a few pictures of the statue and then walked into reception where a pretty receptionist had us sign in/ agree to an NDA. Right as you walk in you can tell its blizzard. There's a huge blizzard logo on the wall back lit with vibrant blue light... it felt like the first time I plopped in my Warcraft II cd and the Blizzard logo and lighting popped up on the screen to start the install. To our right was a hyper realistic, life size model of Nova, complete with real hair and a sick looking ghost rifle.

 To the left was a blizzard museum essentially, a look at the history of blizzard, the various games, and the many award they've received for both excellent game design and for being one of the best places to work at (which we would soon see was completely justified). Right next to the artwork and figurines in the museum was the theater room, with 20 or so rows of some really comfortable chairs and a nice big screen for the projector. John explained that it gets completely packed when they do company Starcraft tournaments but that it is also used by many of the Campus's various clubs  (yes blizzard is a campus and man they have some cool clubs). 

John also took us to blizzard's awesomely furnished library which had awesome books and and pretty much every console and PC game you could think of. Oh and did I mention there are break rooms all over the place with arcade games? After the library we went through the cafeteria which was Megumi's favorite attraction when she saw that apple juice was only 25 cents and that trail mix was just 50 cents.

Throughout the campus there were tons of statues/figurines of various blizzard characters. The employees were also really friendly and we saw a lot of gamer/starcraft/warcraft t-shirts on people we passed by. We were shown the blizzard campus gym and got a glimpse of their outdoor volleyball court.

One of the major highlights of my trip was actually meeting David Kim, who was nice enough to come say hi to us for a few minutes and chat. The other highlight was getting shown around the actual office space of the employees by Simon. It was amazingly spacious and fantastically decorated. Each team is in charge of having a sort of 'theme' and given a budget to design their personal area however they wish. There were multitudes of   Warcraft figurines, Diablo posters, and Starcraft banners. There were also a lot of swords of various styles, hanging on the walls. John explained that if you have worked 5 years at Blizzard you get your own sword as a sort of commemoration. They also give you a shield if you are a 10 year veteran and a special ring if you've been an employee for 15 years. I didn't take pictures since I didn't want to bother the employees but if you ever get lucky enough to visit Blizzard, have someone actually take you to their work space.


This amazing day eventually came to an end but it was capped with quite the dinner at an authentic Japanese udon place that Megumi suggested.  All in all a great field trip in ESPORTS. ^_^

Megumi and John