What's in a Name: Blizzard Entertainment
It's been about a month since we've done one of these, but we thought it would be worth bringing WIAN out of retirement for one of the biggest developers on the planet. Here's the (astoundingly dry) story behind Blizzard's name:
Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce: You know, it is a complicated process. You look through the dictionary and make a list of big long words, and you start narrowing it down. [Laughs.] You get feedback from the people working at the organization, and then you get feedback from the legal department after they have done some trademark searches. And after that big
extensive process, "Blizzard" is where we landed. Blizzard Entertainment.
We specifically selected to append "Entertainment" as compared to anything else, because we always felt like we wanted to have the option to do more than games. I mean games are our foundation, but we always felt like, you know, if we were creating our own franchises, we would want to someday seem them on the big screen or see them in novelizations or comic books, or whatever. And so, we were conscious of the name when we selected it to call it Blizzard Entertainment, because we knew we wanted to have the option to do more than games in the future.
Joystiq: So you don't have a secret meaning of your own behind "Blizzard?"
Pearce: No. One of the first things that [fellow co-founder] Allen Adhem does as part of the process is literally start perusing the dictionary.
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