Allen Adham
Chairman
Blizzard Entertainment
Irvine, Calif.
Why is Allen Adham influential?
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Co-Founded Blizzard Entertainment.
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Led creation of Warcraft.
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Took strategy gaming online.
Blizzard Entertainment has been long associated with gaming excellence through pumping out award-winning real-time strategy and RPG games for the last 10 years. As Blizzard co-founder, Adham has witnessed the company's success unfold right from the start -- from very humble beginnings to the height of the industry.
Adham started coding games while studying at UCLA. The success of his first two games--Gunslinger and Demon's Forge--encouraged him to strike out with a new game company, Silicon & Synapse, which would eventually evolve into Blizzard Entertainment.
Along with his partner, Mike Morhaime, Adham and the small-but-growing staff released the now-classic Rock 'n Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings for the SNES, published by Interplay.
These two hits garnered much recognition from the gaming community, and provided a spark required for Adham to make the jump to the big time. One company name change later and Blizzard was born. The crucial moment in Adham's career was just around the corner with the development and release of Warcraft for the PC, which received critical acclaim and took the relatively young RTS genre to a new level.
Adham would follow up with the action RPG, Diablo, and the incredibly popular StarCraft. These franchises helped redefine strategy and fantasy computer games. Even though many developers have tried to knock Blizzard from the throne, the company has always come out on top in the end. Without Adham's influence, it's possible that strategy/RTS games would look quite different today.
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