Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Games, is an American computer game developer and publisher headquartered in Irvine, California. In December 2007 it was announced that Vivendi Games would merge with Activision, using Blizzard's name for the resulting company, Activision Blizzard. Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February of 1991, a year after all three had received their bachelor's degree from UCLA. In the early days the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess. In 1993, the company developed games like Rock N' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name...