Blizzard Closes North Offices

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday August 2, 2005 @09:59AM from the roper's-lair-closed-for-business dept.

An anonymous reader writes "GameSpot reports that Blizzard, the company responsible for StarCraft, Diablo, and most recently World of Warcraft, will be closing the offices of Blizzard North, the division of the company that traditionally housed Diablo series development. The article mentions that employees will either be offered severance or moved down to the Blizzard HQ to work on an unnamed project, and speculates that Diablo 3 could be the project. Is it just coincidence that Blizzard released the 1.11 patch for Diablo II on August 1st and closed the studio on the same day?"

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not surprising. by fireduck · 2005-08-02 10:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

Blizzard North pretty much lost all of their top talent in 2003 when the original Condor founders and Roper left (as well as a number of other lead personnel). Combine that with the absence of a game announcement by them in several years, and it really seemed just a matter of time before something drastic happened.

As someone who lives in Irvine, near Blizzard, I wonder how many new people I'll start seeing at the fast food joints wearing their Blizzard t-shirts. (Spot the Blizzard employee. Yes, that's the kind of fun we have here in sterile, conformist Irvine.)