- There's three types of fun, fun for the player,

fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

- Is it PvP?

- It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.

- Well, I don't know what that means, but...

- Rust players know what that means. My whole career and my

family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.

And we're idiots. We're reading the forums, and the forums are just

flaming us all the time. Like, "There's lag on this server,"

and, "Can't log into that ser-" And that's, that was our perspective

of what was happening. And when I showed up at that show,

it... One of the most emotional things in my life. It was

nothing but an outpouring of love. I had

believed I would never work any place but Blizzard.

I loved it. It was a part of who I was,

And I felt I was a part of it, and I literally thought I would

retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, and that was it.

- How painful was it to say goodbye?

- It broke me.

- Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is

concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the

earth, but you were actually working on a game.

The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a

legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and

Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. He is

genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever

met. In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him,

including while playing video games, he was always kind,

thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a

legit gamer, through and through. Of course,

he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has

gotten a chance to work with over the years, and they are truly

incredible. Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever

made, games that to me personally have brought me

thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and

happiness, from Warcraft, to StarCraft, to Diablo,

WoW, Overwatch and more. So for that, a big thank you to

Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every

creative mind in the video game industry, giving their heart and soul

to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun,

inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun

intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game

designers ever. Full of memes, lulz,

wisdom, emotional rollercoaster moments, and of course, Blizzard

video game lore. Jeff left Blizzard in

2021, and has been secretly working on a new video game

called The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff. It is

incredibly beautiful. Set in the 1800s Gold

Rush era of California, it's an open world online multiplayer game,

part adventure and action, part

survival. Sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and

desperation, and sometimes just awe watching the

sun rise over a beautiful landscape. It's unlike any game that

Jeff has ever worked on, and it's a game that I genuinely

can't wait to play with all of you. You can wishlist it on

Steam. Join the alpha later in March, I think, and early access is on the way. This

is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our

sponsors in the description where you can also find links to

contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so

on. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Kaplan. You were first a legendary video

game player, in particular in EverQuest,

before you ever became a legendary video game designer on World of Warcraft and on

Overwatch, which I think is a wild journey to go through from gamer to

designer. But first, let's go way back. When did you first fall in

love with video games?

- I was lucky. I was born in that golden era of coin-op.

So, I literally remember the first time seeing

Pac-Man. I was with my Uncle Ronnie, and he just kept

feeding me quarters. I think he wanted to play, but was too scared to,

so he, you know, his little nephew, he would just give him quarters to play Pac-Man.

I remember being at my brother's graduation in

Philadelphia, and they had an Asteroids machine in the

lobby. That was one of the first coin-op machines I had played as

well. And my brother and I would... we would

try to get the high score, and we'd finally get it. But we had to go to

bed early 'cause we were little kids. And then in the morning somebody

else had like beat our high score. And then, you know, I

grew up in Southern California in the '80s. I was born in '72. So, you know, I was a

kid with that skateboard BMX culture where

we'd ride two towns over. We knew all the pizza

parlors and liquor stores and arcades, and we

just lived in that coin-op phase. That was, that

was where the love started. And then you started to

see things like Pong. You'd go over to a friend's house, they'd have

Pong, and it was just mind blowing, like, we're playing this thing on the

TV and it was so much fun. Atari was a big thing at that time as

well. But the big one for me was actually

Intellivision, because my dad was an executive

recruiter, and one of his clients was Mattel.

And he said, "Hey, I... They gave me this thing," and he would get

discounts or free games. And my brothers and I just loved Intellivision. Like,

we would just play it endlessly. And the comparison

was always like, "Is this game close to what's in the arcades?"

And it was just such a golden era. And I think

the big moment where it really blew open

and kind of hit the next level was when the NES came out. And that, like,

NES with Super Mario- was kind of gaming at the next level at that

point. And I have, like, warm, fuzzy memories

even thinking about it to this day. I remember we

played Super Mario for weeks, my brothers and I, and then

I had a friend come over, and he showed me all the secret stuff-

... in Super that I didn't know existed at the

time. And it's... it was like suddenly, the world opened up more and games could be

more. And then there was, like, a big PC gaming push that hit me. My

parents ran their own business. Like I said, my dad was an executive

recruiter, and they bought an IBM. And this is, like, when it was DOS before MS-DOS

existed. And I was so disappointed, because, like, other kids had the

Amiga or the Commodore-

... which, you know, they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time. And

my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I. She bought a Zork.

You know, it was just Infocom word games,

and where your imagination would take you. Like,

Zork holds a place in my heart I think few games will ever touch.

- It's a text-based game?

- Text-based game. You know, you just type in, "Go west. Open mailbox." You know?

And...

- Okay.

- But it's that power of imagination. It's why the book is always better than the

movie, you know?

- Yeah. So, you're starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate.

- Yes.

- You can step into this world and you can lose yourself in that world.

- Yeah. You're transported. You're living there.

- Was Zork popular?

- Zork was insanely popular. And then there was Zork II- ... and Zork III.

- A trilogy. Zork trilogy. I see it. Okay.

- A- and it was weird, and, like, the... Sometime in the '90s, there was this, there was this

era of what they called CD-ROM games. That's how they branded

them. And they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics.

And somehow, that just shattered everything, because the Zork you

knew in your head didn't exist anymore. Yeah, Zork was

fantastic. I think it might be open source

now, which I think is fabulous. But I highly recommend Zork. There was

also, in those days, on the PC that worked on our IBM, was Ultima-

... which was the Richard Garriott series.

And he was Lord British. We knew him as Lord British. He put himself in the

game. And you wanna talk about world- building. You

know, there was Yew Forest and there was all the characters. And

the first Ultima I played was Ultima II, 'cause Ultima I was before

my time. And that series, it was this RPG group based

PC game, and the worlds were just so

rich. Like, you could get on a rocket ship. You're playing in this fantasy

world, fighting demons, and yet somehow you could

get on a rocket ship. And then there was just all of this

sort of crazy stuff that would happen in

games that are based in the world. Like, there were bouncers in the towns,

and merchants, but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob

these people, or kill Lord British, you know?

That was something that was super hard. And when you're just a jackass

kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these

things over and over, and Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me.

- And, of course, that led to Ultima Online, which is a legendary game in

itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest.

- Yes.

- Sort of starting to build these worlds that are massively

multiplayer online video games. Can you take me to

that journey? Like, as you started to get online, MMO world.

What were influential? What were fun for you?

- Well, the big one for me was EverQuest. But,

Like you mentioned, Ultima Online sort of was the

predecessor. It came before EverQuest.

And it was, like, one of those unfortunate times in my life where I

was actually at grad school.

- You were busy.

- I was busy, and I missed Ultima Online. Like, I

would have had that experience. And when you hear the Ultima

Online stories, they're some of the craziest,

funniest... You know, I know somebody who, they learned

how to poison in the game, and then they would

poison apples, then leave them on the ground, and somebody else would be

adventuring, then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse.

Then they'd steal all their stuff and... You know, Ultima Online was kind

of... It was the earliest grief-based

experiment. Really, like, when you're treating the humans like ants in the ant farm.

That was kind of Ultima Online.

- Yeah.

- My first, like, what online gaming, what defined online gaming for me was Quake

and Doom and Duke Nukem. You know, it started with Doom

and they had a ... You could basically LAN. You could

network with your friends or you could connect with a modem and hook up with

somebody. And that was like a mind-blowing ... Just seeing

another entity in a video game and saying, "That's a

person on the other side of that."

That was magical, like, that that moment happened and that person

could be in another room or across town from

you. And Quake kind of took it to the next

level. Like, that's where everybody knew what they were

doing. The systems were more refined. And this Quake community formed with

all of these, you know, great websites, mods. The

community was divided into ... There were two castes of players. The low ping

bastards, the LPBs- ... and then the rest of us, you know.

And I remember rolling into Quake matches, you know, on a

dial-up modem with a 300 ping connection,

and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Um,

and just, just connecting with people. Like

I said, the websites. To this day, the only gaming

website I read— I don't read any of the news sites anymore, but I read Blue's News.

Which was like, like ... Someone actually teased me recently.

I linked him a story. I'm like, "Oh, did you hear this new thing's coming out?" And I sent

the link, and they're like, "Dude, this is from Blue's News. Like,

what time machine did you just step out of?" And guy named

Stephen Heaslip... I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong. I

apologize, but it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest.

They had those programmer plan updates, the .plan files. And guys

like Carmack would ... You know, they'd post about

what code they were writing or how they had optimized something,

or just their personal life. Like, you know, the Ferrari talk

would always happen— once they had achieved

success. And there was an id programmer named Brian Hook,

and he said, "I'm leaving id to go work

at Verant," which became Sony Online, "to work on

this game called EverQuest." And I was like, "How does anybody leave id,

the greatest institution in all of gaming ever,

to work on any other game?" I'm like, "This guy must be

crazy. Or whatever this EverQuest thing

is, I need to see it. I need to know what's going

on." And if he hadn't have made that post, I never would have checked out EverQuest.

- We'll talk about EverQuest, but since you mentioned Carmack and,

uh, Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack?

Why was he such an important and influential human in the history of gaming?

- Those early geniuses at id ... Like, I wouldn't be sitting here

talking to you right now if they hadn't had the breakthroughs that they

had at the time. Um, gaming engines were

evolving, but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolf

3D, that was the first... I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game.

You'd run around. You'd dress up as a German. You'd throw a grenade.

Um, to see it in 3D ... And it, it's funny. You look

back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it

seems almost childish. Like, "Oh, why, why

were you so excited about that?" And you were

transported. There ... It was the intimacy of first

person. You know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the

gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you're the hero fighting the Nazis.

And then the evolution. Like, when Doom came out, I'm

a huge Army of Darkness fan. Like, one of my favorite movies of all

time. And I was like, "This is Army of

Darkness, the video game." You know? Like, "Give me the boom

stick. Here we go." And the graphical

advances ... But it, it wasn't just how the game looked, it was how it played.

The smoothness kept getting better. The responsiveness the

sharpness of the gameplay. You have to credit

id in those days and Carmack and Romero. Um,

I ... As somebody who worked on an FPS, I ... That wouldn't have

existed without them. Credit where credit's due.

- And by the way, we should say you're ... As a gamer, your range is incredible. You

are a legit first-person shooter gamer, but you also

obviously love the more MMO world, rich, exploratory kinda game. So it's

fascinating. But yeah, there is ... On the technology stack that brought

something like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life,

there's a threshold which you pass of realism

where you can immerse yourself into that world. I had the same exact experience

with, uh, Wolfenstein 2D taking a step to 3D, and it was like

tears in my eyes. Like, "This is incredible."

Like, my memories of Wolfenstein 3D is it was like ultra

realistic. It's silly to say now. .

It was the feeling like you were there.Yeah, what an incredible

age. And some of that, the storytelling, a lot of that

is the- technology that brings that kind of 3D world to life.

It's incredible. But before- we get too far

on that tangent you mentioned grad school. We should

mention that you have a master's degree in creative writing from

NYU, and you wanted to be a writer. You told me your main influences were

Kerouac, but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski,

Orwell. What drew you to storytelling in that

medium of writing? What aspect of the human

experience were you trying to put down on paper?

- Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired

and reading, and it's the, not only being transported to a different world or into

a different person, but also, you know,

the way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings

sometimes you didn't even know you had. And that was very appealing for me. And

the big challenge with it is, and I think this is

for anybody who creates anything, is putting yourself out there.

Um, to some degree, there's a lot of ego that

goes into that moment where you say, "Well, I've been reading, you know, 1984

or Green Hills of Stranglethorn, and I think it's amazing. And now I'm

gonna try to write something that somebody is gonna read."

Uh, that's a giant leap of faith. You know, that's a moment of putting yourself

out there completely, and there's gotta be some part of that

that's ego. There's some part of it that's masochistic.

Um, and I think for people who want to create and build

stuff, they can't help but to do it. You don't really have an

option. That's just how you're wired, and you're gonna do it

anyway. And, you know, I admire

people like Dickinson who can just write all the poems and leave them

in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else.

You know, that's one way to go about it.

- Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot of the stories he wrote, never

published, and he asked for all of them to be

destroyed. And then it's only because of his friend that ignored his request that we

even have many of his stories. It's like to be that kinda... I

mean, clearly, there's some masochism there, some tortured soul.

But then there's also the ego like you mentioned. I was entertained by this story of

James Joyce, When he was a young man,

18, 19, Declared that he's going to be the greatest writer of the

20th century. And he turned out in many, in the eyes of many

to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But there's, like,

millions of kids just like James Joyce, writers, they're

declaring exactly that, that turn out not to be. But that is in

some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases, you have to have that ego-

... to say, "I'm gonna..." Yeah, right. "I read 1984," "and I'm going to write

the next 1984."

- Yeah. And I do think ego is a big part of it.

it's one of the many lessons I've learned. Hearing your Kafka

story is funny, because fast-forwarding to how my writing career ended—

... I literally threw away everything, I mean, in a dumpster. I

used to keep copious notes, like journals, my

writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea.

I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes. And then I also kept

personal journals of just, you know, to keep the writing habit up of

just, you know, what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of

that. And then either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts, and

I threw it all in the dumpster.

- What was that decision? Do you remember that decision? What was that- what was that like

to just take that part of your life and just put it in a dumpster?

- Yeah. It was I think it was necessary. It was necessary. This is like

rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do.

You know? But at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated with

failure that I needed the moment. It was like throwing in the towel for

a boxer, you know? It's that moment of like, "I'm not gonna win this fight,

and you need to move on from it." And if there was

any element of that sitting around,

I'd be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.

- We should mention that you did give it a- a real

try. You've mentioned receiving over 170 rejection letters in

one year when submitting your stories. So there's a lot of rejection.

So it was a long chain of rejection. And then what was that like, the rejection?

- It was hard. Um, I had moved from New York.

Um, I did the most terrible dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time. I

had a really great group of writer friends from grad

school in New York, and I think writing is a very lonely,

solitary thing. But weirdly, writers kind of support each

other and just, "Who do you give the story to?" You know, you don't wanna give

it to your mom or dad, you know. You kinda wanna give it to somebody who's

gonna really punch you in the nose and tell you what's wrong with

it. And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.

- Did you take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter and drove across, uh-

- No.

- ... across the United States and then wrote a book about it? Or

just to take Kerouac as an example. Anyway, sorry. You went just-

- I might have been more successful had- ... I done that.

- Uh, so sorry. So you went back.

- So I moved back to California, and I did it for a girl.

And I think within two months of moving

back, we were broken up. So... And I knew it when I was standing in my

studio apartment when it was empty in New York and I was about to close the door for the

last time. I had that like, you know, little me on the shoulder saying,

"Dude, what are you doing?"

"This... You're making one of those epic life mistakes that is gonna come

back to haunt you." And I ended up alone in California, and I think it was a good

three years that I structured my

life where I was gonna write for eight hours a day, because

it's that writer's habit. Like you have to just force yourself,

"This is a job. This isn't a hobby. Whether I like it or

not, rain or shine, sick or healthy, I'm gonna write for

eight hours a day." And I did. Um, I was

fortunate. Like I said, my dad had his company and he hired

me as a research associate. So I was calling up

generating name lists for a recruiting company, and I would take...

Whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start at like 5:00 in the

morning. And I created all this space for me to

write, and I just... I had a dog named Jack-

... who was... He was a Jack Russell Terrier. And so everybody's like, "You're a

writer, you named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack." I'm like, "Because I named him

after Jack Kerouac." "It's poetic and epic," and-

- Yeah, of course

- ... I just looked like a dumbass, but- ... it was just me and this

dog. And I was writing, you know, all that time intensely. And this was mid to late

'90s, so even though internet existed, email

was very primitive and you had to send a manuscript off, like printed paper-

... to all... Like, I was trying to get short stories published in literary

magazines, and you had to send envelope with return self-address stamp. So it was

expensive, too. Like if you didn't have money, you were

just... There was a cost to it- ... to every single one of them.

- You had to pay for the rejection letter that you would eventually receive.

- Yeah. And the, like, big thing that you were hoping for

was that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter. Like, um-

- Keep going.

- Yeah. And you'd like cling onto this. Like, it was like, "Oh,

Glimmer Train said, you know, showing

promise." You know, and you just hang onto that for like a week, you know,

pretending like that was... But it was just

soul crushing. And I really stuck... And I became

more and more isolated. Part of that was

leaving that group of writing friends in New

York. I'm prone to just introversion anyway.

The type of person I am. Breaking up with the girlfriend at the time.

I just sort of fell into that world of like all I was doing was writing.

And it broke me. Like, I went into very deep and heavy depression. I drank too

much. I really had a problem with alcohol. And all those

things compounded into just deep, deep depression. And

I don't... There wasn't like a magic

rejection that broke me. That would have been epic if like-

... someone out there is like, "The dude who..." "I'm the dude who broke

Jeff that one day."

But I just had a moment where I said, "This is gonna destroy me."

And... Like, I don't want to be

discouraging to anybody, because I really do believe, like you hear it so

much, like, "You have to work for your dreams, never give up."

Like, we're trained this way. Like, "Never give up." The

universe... Actually, maybe not the universe. A group of editors

at literary magazines across the United States

was telling me it was time to give up as a writer, like I wasn't cut out for it.

And I stopped.

- Sometimes, you know, closing a door is required for another door to open.

That's one of the hardest things to do, is to walk away.

- Yeah. And I think, rightly so, our

parents, our coaches, our mentors train us not to give up.

And I think a lot of us take pride in that, "I'm never

gonna give up. I'm gonna do this come hell or high

water." And sometimes there's that

reality, especially when you're now in your mid-20s,

where you have that moment of like, "Am I really gonna be this? Like, am

I ever gonna sort of find the light here?" And, maybe, and it's so hard, it's

so hard to have this moment, "Maybe this isn't my calling in life,"

especially when you don't know what the next calling is gonna be.

- That's so painful. It's 'cause you've invested so much

of yourself, of who you are, of the dreams you've had, of this just

whole conception of yourself, and you're watching yourself slide

down in terms of becoming isolated, suffering more and

And then you just have to somehow figure out how to-

get out of that. And it is true. In that situation, the way to get out

is the dumpster. Is to cut it off. Is there

advice you can extract from that? There's a lot of young folks who are

in that same situation.

- Yeah. This is one of those hindsight things

where, you know, having gone through it and ended up okay on the other

side, which you don't know at the time, you know? When you're

a young person in your late teens or early 20s,

there's so much pressure on you. And I really think

adults don't help. You know? Every time you run

into the younger nephew or whoever and you start

to say things like, "Oh, what's your major? What are you gonna do with that?"

"What do you wanna be?" It's such bullshit to do to a human being. You know?

- You're so lost in the world. I mean, most of us are lost our

entire lives, but especially in your 20s, you know, like, you're

lost. So the questions like, yeah, "What are you, what are you doing? What's your

major? What's the career?" And so on, that's not the point,

man. I'm trying to find,

I'm trying to move through the world, I'm trying to run through the world to

find the thing that sparks my heart, to find the passion, to

find what I'm meant to be on this earth for.

And there are really, I mean, that is a real hero's journey of

searching as a young person. That's a real,

like, you know, all the adults, with their wisdom,

they've stopped searching often. They've

done the lazy, the comfortable thing. They found their thing. And so now they

look back, they don't remember how much suffering

and how, how much uncertainty that young people have to deal with.

- It's, there's confusion, there's pressure. Like, the

pressure we exert on younger people for having it figured out is, it's insane.

So the advice that I always give,

and it sounds so stupid, like this sounds really trite, but

focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The, the pressure that

society kind of puts on us is, you know,

"Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a

writer? Do you wanna be a game maker?" And I think we get lost in the trappings of,

like a vision of what that role is- ... and how to perform as a fake actor in that

role. Versus when you're off the clock and no one's asking you any questions-

... you know, you're not at Thanksgiving dinner and your uncle's pressuring you

into, you know, what your future's gonna be for the rest of your

life. When you go home, how do you spend your

time? Like, what makes you happy? What brings you fulfillment?

And through those paths, you're gonna find out

what you're gonna become, not what you wanna be. It's, "What do you wanna do?"

- What do you wanna do? The thing that brings you joy on a moment

by moment basis. Yeah. That's brilliantly put. And

speaking of which, that's where you took the pivot.

You switched to video games. How did that happen? Gradually? Suddenly?

- Gradually and suddenly. So when I had that

fateful moment where I just sort of gave up with writing,

I had these days where I'd structure eight-hour chunks

of just, this was writing time, you know? I'd sit solitary

typing. All that was gone. And, you know, I could still

support myself, which was nice. And then I had this free

time and I wasn't spending it with anybody, I was just alone. Me and the dog, Jack.

And I just poured it all into EverQuest.

You know, I, it was 1999 when that game came out. And I had a friend,

Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend. One of the few friends I had who

played computer games, 'cause there was a stigma to that.

You know? It wasn't, you didn't walk around telling people you played

games. They thought you wasted your time. And my friend,

Vic, had bought EverQuest. I'm like, "That's that game that that guy Brian

Hook went to work on. Is it good?" And he's like, "Yeah, you gotta play it." And the

moment I logged in, I was just transported. It was the world of Norrath. And

it wasn't just the world itself and how it looked, I thought the game was

gorgeous, it was the mechanics, you know, that I was this halfling

rogue that, you know, had to go out and

adventure in the world, and when I killed stuff, I got experience, and I needed

better loot to kill more stuff to get more experience. And

the sort of draw of progression in the game it was amazing. I, and I

just lived my life of, "I can't wait 'til the next time

I log in." There was a lot of escapism going. It wasn't all healthy. When all was

said and done, when I finally had quit EverQuest three days

later, you could type in the command /played to see

how much played time you had. I had, I think it was like 272 played days in three

years. So you start to do the math on like, how much time-

... in those three years I was living in that world. It was...It was kind of

insane.

- Well, that's over 6,000 hours- ... of gameplay.

Wow. So here going to Perplexity, EverQuest

is a long-running 3D fantasy, massively multiplayer online

role-playing game, MMORPG, set in the world of

Norrath, as you were saying. First released in March 1999,

it is an online role-playing game where thousands of players create

characters, group up, and explore a persistent shared world.

It's widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs,

helping define raid content, guild systems and 3D online

worlds. That's the other component of it. There's... It's all humans

and they group up- ... and they raid together in the game.

- Yep. In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 people or more

getting together to conquer something that you couldn't beat

otherwise. And to do successful

raiding, you usually needed to join what in EverQuest

everyone referred to as an Uber Guild. So I

had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I... Most of the

time leveling up I was unguilded or I was in like a

role-playing guild with rogues only. And it was when I got to Level 50 in EverQuest

was the top level, I got invited into this

guild called Legacy of Steel, which on our server

was the top. Every server had a top guild.

And I was on a server called The Nameless Server, and the top

guild was Legacy of Steel. And that, the thrill of

getting 30 people together to go see if you could beat, you know,

Nagafen, who was the fire dragon, or Vox, who was the frost dragon,

and needing perfect coordination to pull it off,

it was insane how fun. Like, you would literally scream out. You're

alone in your room at home-

... but you felt like you were there with these people and you would

audibly cheer out when you won, and you'd feel depressed when you lost, and

it was a game of high highs and low lows, and it did

everything right. It was amazing.

- So that was a big leap for you to go from the proud lone warrior

to a member of a guild, Uber Guild.

And then there's that epic story of you rising to the

top to become the leader of this Uber Guild.

- The leader... Yeah. So organizing people in an online game

like EverQuest is like herding cats-

... 'cause, you know, everyone has their own will. Some people are loot motivated,

some people want the guild to do well, some people are just lonely

and want people to hang out with. And

there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community. It was something I

suffered with, but a lot of people, you know, anytime you're

feeling sad or down, you're looking for escape.

And one of the great things video games brings us is escapism.

And escapism isn't always bad or negative-

... but when you sort of abuse it to escape your real

life problems, it's bad and negative.

- So there's a mix of pain and darkness that pain can manifest as-

... all part of this community.

- Yeah. And what's weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people

gives you comradery and relief and

makes you feel like you're not doing so bad in life,

but you can quickly enter a cycle of... But then you're withdrawing from life

and it makes you feel that way more to where you can only get the fix

from the game at that point. So it's...

Psychologically, there's a lot going on there.

- And so you had to work with all of that. You have to get a bunch of

people together to do a raid, who are all

human beings going through complicated psychological journeys of their

own. Some are talking shit, some are

just quietly lonely, just looking for some loot.

- In the late '90s, everyone was talking shit.

You know what I mean? Like, the gaming culture was just a different thing

back then. But it was a great

group. It was super fun. It was people from all walks of

life. And to coordinate these people, like you just had

to repeat everything like 200 times. Like, "Okay, we're gonna port from North

Ro. Everybody get to North Ro." And then you'd have to repeat that for

like six hours-

... to have any chance of like 20% of the people showing up in North

Ro. And I sort of like... At

first I joined the guild, I was just like the bright-eyed, bushy-

tail. Like, I was like one of the few rogues in the guild. I just wanted to

be helpful. I really admired the people running the

guild. Like, we had a great guild leader.

and it was just a really fun experience. And, you

know, the guild leader one day just disappeared.

Like, he quit and he was going through, you know, his own

thing, and that's what would happen in EverQuest. Like, people would just kinda

disappear all of a sudden. There wasn't a, "Hey, in about a month, I'm

gonna stop playing because I'm starting this new job."

People... people had to quit in some dramatic way, where they

just disappear, and basically, our guild leader stopped playing.

- Did you miss them when they disappeared? Like, we should say that most

of the people, maybe all of them, were anonymous. So you just-

...have a username, and you don't really say who you are in real life.

- Absolutely. In those days, there was a great stigma to

mentioning your, any real-life info. You just kind

of kept it all really close to your chest, and you never knew

who was male or female. You kind of assumed everybody was male.

- Safe assumption.

- And then it was a surprise if they were actually female.

Like my wife, for example, that's how I met her.

- You met her in EverQuest?

- I met her in EverQuest.

- That is a true love story, right there.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Wow.

- The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you

play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, "You threw years of your

life away." Like, "You can't win a game like that." And I'm like,

"I don't know, like, sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to

EverQuest, so I think I won the game."

- Yeah, yeah. You're like the, the, "Well, actually..." guy.

- Well, yeah, exactly.

- Your life will be on the Wikipedia page somewhere that says, "Well, here's an

example of somebody-" "... why video games are awesome."

Yeah, I mean, some of it... I should mention this as an aside. For me and many

people I know, yes, it's hundreds of hours, but some of the

happiest hours and days of my life. Like,

looking back, it all worked out. During it, you are

pretty low, and you think, "I... What am I doing with my life?" All that kind of

stuff. But, like, looking back, just the all-nighters you pull

playing a particular video game, allowing yourself to really fully be

immersed seeing the sun come up, and by the way, many of those games, for me, were

Blizzard games. It's just an incredible thing that video games have been

able to do. I think you know, it used to be, and still is somewhat the

case, that books do that kind of same thing. They-

...they take you on a journey. But video games, for a long

time, you're right, they had a stigma. Like,

I couldn't tell people. I felt like I was doing, like, heroin or something.

Like, I felt like I was doing this secret, dark thing. It's usually in

the... It's, it usually is in the dark. There's just a

secretive nature to it, like I'm doing something really dark and shady.

- It wasn't mainstream.

- It wasn't.

- It wasn't... There was a stigma to it. And one of the weirdest

parts of that is, you know, I mentioned, like, you could type in the

/played in EverQuest. Well, if you did the /played on how much TV people

watch, what would that look like? It would blow-

...6,000 hours out of the water, easily. Well,

it... 20 years ago it would have. You know? Not today.

- Now it's the phone, yeah. Yeah. But then it is hard to say goodbye to that world.

Those are also really painful times. How hard was it to say goodbye for you?

- To EverQuest? It was really hard. And there were times where you try to quit.

- Oh, you took a break sometimes?

- Yeah. You think you're quitting for good. You'd have those moments of, like, "I'm

doing this too much. I need to move on in life. I'm

gonna put it down and walk away, and hopefully not come back." And there were

times where you did come back. When I finally did

leave EverQuest, it was actually extremely easy,

because I was psychologically done with the game at the time. It was

not shortly, but not too long after a new expansion

had come out. At the time, it was Shadows of Luclin.

Which didn't speak to me like the expansions before. Like, the

one before that was called Scars of Velious, which was an amazing

expansion. And I had gotten the job at Blizzard, and I guess I'm just an

obsessive person. So all the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest, the

second, you know, the second my first minute started at

Blizzard, that was my new obsession.

- So speaking of which, you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got

the job at Blizzard. As we said, you were this legendary gamer, and now legendary

troll, on EverQuest. Username, Tigole. You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs,

Telling them in now famous... There's several rants.

There's a famous one where you tell many of them to do a

bunch of things, including to pull their heads out of their asses.

You were loved and respected because you gave a lot of specific

ways that the game could be improved. And that's an important thing to say. You weren't just

talking shit. You actually really loved and cared for the game, and

you gave them, in the language of the time advice on how to improve,

Their game. And it's funny,

because, like, you look back to those messages, it's inspiring to

me. It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people, because you're

really, legit, full-time talking shit. And

now, and you always have been, like, one of the

kindest, most loved human beings in the entire gaming

industry. Anyway, how did that lead to you getting a job at Blizzard?

- So when the first guild leader left, Legacy of Steel, the founder... He,

he was a guy named... His online name was Dread. That was his

name. He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while.

And eventually, somebody stepped up and took

his position as guild leader, and that person's name was Ariel-

... who was this blonde wood elf warrior, Female,

who always refused to wear a helmet because they thought their character was

so pretty, wanted to show their face all the time. So Ariel

was a great guild leader for us, and made me

like an assistant guild leader, raid leader, officer type in the guild. And over

time, Ariel got busier and busier, and, you know, would send me messages like,

"Hey, I'm not gonna be online, you know, tomorrow," or, "I'm not gonna be

online tonight. Can you run the raid? Can you run the raid?"

And running the raids was very natural for me. And it was my first experience with

leadership in my life, of like how do you motivate people? Like, what does

motivation look like? What does discipline look like? How do

you inspire people? When do you force people versus

encourage them, you know? So it was a learning

experience for me on the fly, and I had the safety net of the real

guild leader would log in eventually.

- I should mention, I'm just now reading

about, doing a bunch of research on Justinian

of the Roman Empire, and he rose from being a peasant to being

emperor, so I see a lot of parallels in your life journey, from

peasant to emperor, but go ahead, I'm sorry.

- At least EverQuest guild leader, that's- that's as much-

- Uber guild leader-

- ... as I could say.

- Uber guild leader.

- Uber guild leader. Best guild on the Nameless server.

So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier, and then one

day, they contacted me and we were having this like whisper

back and forth, and they said, "You- you're gonna have to take over the guild. I'm just too

busy." And then it came out later ... Well, let me back up a

second. I started fooling around ... Like around this time Half-Life 1 had come out,

and with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life 1, one of the

incredible things that those companies did back in the day was when they

shipped the game, they shipped the editor on the CD.

And if you were curious enough, you could like fire up that editor and

fool around with it. So I made a Duke Nukem

level, and you'd send it off to like those UK

programming magazines, and you know, you'd get excited because your

level was in, you know, some random

magazine. And then I started making like Half-Life levels. And

Ariel had stepped down as guild leader. I had become guild leader.

And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and

says, "Hey, you know, you were talking about those Half-Life

levels you made. I want to see those." I'm like, "Oh,

that's cool." Like, "I didn't know you played Half-Life." Like, "Yeah, maybe we can get

a server up and I can play them." And Ariel tells me,

"No, mail them to this address in Irvine." And-

because I— again, to rewind in the time machine for a

second, to send something like a Half-Life level over the internet would have-

... taken like 12 hours.

So you actually like burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.

So I put my Half-Life levels, I sent them to Ariel, and

he says, "You know, my name's Rob. I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment."

"Um, we're— I— I hear you're in Pasadena 'cause you mentioned

it." You know, I would write about, you know, the Rose Parade and

all these things on our website. You know, I kind of ... It was blogging

before blogging existed, so he knew I lived in Pasadena, and he's like, "Irvine's

only an hour away. Why don't you come down, see

Blizzard, and you can also meet..." and he

names like four people in the guild. And I'm like, "They all

work at Blizzard too?" He's like, "Yeah, we're all

Blizzard." And it was so weird because

during that era, I didn't have a lot of money. It was not

like ... Kind of nowadays it feels like everybody plays every game,

but you had to be selective. So like I never bought StarCraft

or Diablo or Warcraft. I was much more of the

Half-Life, Quake, Quake III guy around that

time, and I'd never played a Blizzard game, and I just

got invited to like go to Blizzard Entertainment.

- Was Blizzard already legendary, you know, with the Warcraft and

StarCraft? Is it... Is there... Is it... Was it building this

like great legend of this game company that seemingly doesn't miss?

- It was very much on its way to

enshrining itself as being one of the legendary game... Like, it was beloved—

... by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who

hadn't played, you know, War II or Diablo

II or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.

- So you weren't like freaking out, freaking out?

- No, I— I was freaking out in a different sense. I'm like, "Am

I gonna get mugged when I-" Like, "Who are ... Is this a scam?"

Because you didn't meet people off the internet.

So I drove down there. Um, I ended up... There was— there was Rob Pardo—

... who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft

III, and he was Ariel. You know, so okay, it

wasn't a woman after all. It wasn't this blonde wood

elf. You know, I don't know what you expect at that point.

It was Rob Pardo. To this day, a great friend of

mine named Scott Mercer was the enchanter in our

EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalomin. There was a guy named Roman Kenny who was like

this—Totally psychotic wizard who played in our guild. And I had lunch with these

guys, you know, we just went out to Irvine to like a restaurant.

And, you know, forgive me for the misuse of

the phrase, but it was like my coming out moment. And

we talked about games having that stigma and being embarrassed about

who you are and what you like. Like I, up until that point, I would

never tell- Mm-hmm ... friends, family, like, "I love

games. I'm playing this game EverQuest. It's so cool, we just killed a

dragon." And so you were hiding this part of your identity.

And I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine,

and we're talking about dragons and swords and, you know, raid tactics and talking

shit on all the people in the guild. And I,

literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first

time. I just felt like so comfortable, and that was an

eye-opening moment. And after that, after that

lunch happened, he invited me for a couple more lunches

down, you know, just... Uh, I just saw it as like, "Oh, now, I'm..." You know,

I made friends with these people online. Now, we know each other in real

life, and they happen to work for this game company. And at another one

of the lunches, they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us, whose

name in the game was Barfa, the Troll Warrior.

Mm-hmm. And Barfa, Barfa wasn't somebody who played with

us all the time, but kind of like Ariel got into the guild

kind of on the side. You know, it was one of those like inside invites of

like, "Who's Barfa?" "I don't know, but Barfa is in the guild now." And

there was at the time, it was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never

done it before. And we jumped down in this hole, and we're doing this whole

dungeon, and everything goes wrong, as it's prone to do in EverQuest.

And the whole guild escapes except for Barfa, whose

troll character's so big, he can't jump out of the exit.

Mm-hmm. And I had this potion that was like

a really expensive potion that was a teleport potion

that, you know, no one but someone in the uber guild could afford

at the time. And I hand the potion to Barfa, and I

say, "Here, use this. It'll teleport you out." And I'm a rogue, I can

just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own. So I saved Barfa, not really

knowing who Barfa was, and I did it with a very expensive

potion. Mm-hmm. Having lunch, Rob introduced me, "This is Allen Adham. He plays

Barfa." Mm-hmm. I'm like, "Oh, Barfa!" And we, you know, he has a...

"You saved me in The Hole that time." Well, it turns out Allen

was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the

head... He was sort of the head of everything at that time. It was

Allen, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce. And what I didn't realize what these

lunches were, like I just loved them because I felt like I was myself. I felt

true happiness being surrounded by these, you know, people who

were talkin' about video games and I felt comfortable around. And one day, Rob

logs into EverQuest. He wasn't playing much at the time, and he said, "I want

you tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site." Mm-hmm.

I'm like, "Okay, like, I'll check the Blizzard job

site." And they had announced World of Warcraft, and posted on the job site- Mm-hmm

... was the job for an associate quest designer.

And the funniest part of it was, I forget if it was

a requirement or a plus in the job description, but they're

like, "We really want somebody with a creative writing

degree." Hmm. And I'm like, "You guys set

this up for me." Like, they were just looking... And it was

that hindsight moment of like, actually, these guys were just

interviewing me- Yeah ... for six months. And they were actually friends,

and they were really cool about it too. And I just had the fuck it moment like that,

that job opened up.

I applied with all my heart, you know? Like, it, they had a bunch

of quest writing on it. And then I went through like a pretty hardcore

six-month recruiting process because they never

hired designers from out of the company. Traditionally,

designers were promoted from within Blizzard. Either they would

like transfer out of other disciplines, or they would come

from quality assurance, tech support. So hiring somebody off the street was kind of

a big deal for them, and they really put me through a

grilling. Um, I met with... It was the first time I met Chris Metzen- Mm-hmm ... who

is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on

the planet. And you instantly... They paired

me... They did this interview pairing. There were these two guys. It was Kevin

Jordan- Mm-hmm ... who was one of the original designers on WoW.

Really, he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions. He was one of the

earliest class designers, PvP designers.

But he's a really quiet guy. Mm-hmm. And they paired

him with Chris, and Chris just owns

the room, you know? Mm-hmm. Chris, you could just sit and listen to

him. He's so creative. He's so passionate. And the way he articulates

things, like you just instantly become a fan of Chris when you're

around Chris. And Chris, Kevin, and I go

to lunch at, at this Italian place that was across the street

from Blizzard, and I remember...Chris made a stop to buy cigarettes

, you know, on the way to the interview.

And then every other word out of Chris's mouth was like, "Fuck," and, "Shit."

And I'd come from this whole, like, corporate culture from my dad's

recruiting business, where I'd never imagined somebody would curse in an interview,

or stop to buy smokes. And again, it was like, "I'm around my people."

Like, I never smoked, but just, you know, being around people who didn't care about-

... what the corporate norms were was so

inspiring. And then my last interview was with,

uh, Alan and Rob, and a great programmer named

Bob Fitch. Like, I think he's one of the first five developers at Blizzard. Uh,

and they took me to an ARCO station that had a Jack in the Box. You know, how, like-

... sometimes they'll combo? It was like ARCO Jack in the Box. And that was my

final interview at Blizzard, was at the ARCO Jack in the

Box. And I remember thinking to myself,

"These guys just brought me to a Jack in the Box that's in an ARCO station.

I need to work here." Like, this is... "These are my people."

"This is where I belong." Like, it was the greatest thing ever.

And so, yeah, that's my crazy journey to Blizzard.

- Uh, started at the bottom and end up at the top in a Jack in the Box. Can you

speak to... 'Cause you mentioned some of the low points in the... in

depression. Through that journey, how did you find your way

out? So, can you just... A lot of people are

sitting in those low points right now listening to this. What kind of

wisdom can you draw about finding your way out, finding your people?

- There were a lot of really low points. Uh, I'll give you

the weirdest one. I started drinking a lot, and alcohol was something

that I really wrestled with until my early 30s. And one

of the things I'm most proud of today is sobriety and having

been sober for such a long time now. And

I remember I was- I was just ha- I would like buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and-

... like, drink the whole thing by myself, and then watch the

Oscars. I remember I was ... Of all things, I'm watching the

Oscars, which is just such a fake, bullshit environment.

But I was like... You know, I was really drunk and

all those people seemed so together and successful and

polished, and I just... It made me... It was

that contrast that made me feel like such a failure. And it all seems so

stupid and unimportant to me now. Um, I became... You know, I got in that constant

struggle of try not to drink, but drink to make it feel better. I was lucky,

My parents were very supportive of me, even

in my 20s, even after I, you know, quote-unquote left the house. I went into therapy

and that was very helpful. You know,

know, extremely helpful. And one thing I learned is that you

have to find the right therapist for you. It's not

just checking a checkbox of, "I went to therapy." It's about

finding somebody who sort of

helps you get out of whatever rut you're in, in a way that's healthy for you. And,

um, I tried antidepressants, but I hated... I just hated

taking pills and feeling like something was in

me, and making me feel different. I never responded to it. And then the hardest

thing, you know, which I've never mentioned to

anyone, and is hard for me to talk about, but eventually I went through ECT,

which is electroconvulsive therapy, shock therapy. And that

broke me out. And I would never endorse that as a miracle. That was... I was at such

a low point that people were very worried about me and my wellbeing-

... and what was gonna happen, and that was sort of an

extreme pull-the-rip-cord, like there's-nothing-else-to-lose moment.

And I think that was the difference maker. That, and starting at Blizzard.

- To find... I mean, there is a- there is a deep loneliness there when

before you met those guys at lunch, you're

alone, like in a really deep fundamental way.

Like, in the way you weren't in New York with the writing- with the writer's group,

right? And so that must've been an incredible experience just to see the guild.

- Yes. It was everything I nee- I... As such an introvert, you- you think that there

are extroverts and introverts, and introverts don't need

anybody, but weirdly, I think introverts almost need people more.

And we don't always know how to engage-

... in the right, healthy ways, and how to find people and how to connect

with people. And it was- it was great. Um,

one... The thing that had attracted me to creative writing was

the solitude of it, and the fact that you didn't have to

collaborate, and you could just write what you wanted to write and it

was all you. You would succeed on your own or you would fail

on your own, and that was very attractive to me. And the thought

of creative collaboration was actually off-putting. I'd spent all four years

of undergrad interning at Universal Pictures, 'cause I thought I wanted to be in

film, and it was such an unhealthy creative

collaboration in the film industry. It's a very,

you know, I look up unhealthily to the film industry

and admire it and, you know, grew up

with all these legends who had come from there. But it's like a caste system.

And I was on the bottom of the caste system as an intern, and I was

seeing how the other people who were low

caste in the film industry were treated, and it was just horrible,

you know. But games was different. Games was very flat. It didn't matter if you

were the CEO or the boss, like, the way Mike and Allen carried

themselves with, you know, me, who was an associate game designer, you felt like an

equal. And I think it... Not just the comradery, but the part that shouldn't be

overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic. That's what really pulled me out.

- Hard work on a thing you love.

- Yeah.

- I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic one of

us, quote, "one of us" post you made on April 18th,

2002. Because in some deep sense, you, I think,

remained one of us. The... I apologize to bring

up Justinian the emperor, but remained a kind of peasant

gamer, a true gamer, who happens to be also be

designing the games. And so this post kind of speaks

to that. It's fascinating to read, because that was at the very

beginning, right? You didn't know anything. You didn't know the

games you would end up creating. Title of the post, "If you want

something done right." He wrote, "This week, I

accepted a position as associate game designer with Blizzard

Entertainment. Specifically, I will be designing quests for World of

Warcraft, Blizzard's MMORPG based on the popular

Warcraft series. In addition to my duties as quest designer, I will

also be expected to contribute to helping design the end

game content for World of Warcraft. The reason I'm sharing this

information, besides the fact that I have a masochistic love of

reading rants and flames about myself, is because I know that the fans of

this site are hardcore MMORPG players. The readers

of the site have also come to know my personal opinions on

what constitutes a fun gaming experience versus what feels like

a complete waste of time or poorly designed encounter." Wow, you're

very eloquent in this post and without too much shit talking.

"You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key

camps, obvious time sinks, devoid of any story or linear

narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled and

quest rewards which are out of sync with the amount of time and effort

required to complete them. I hope that my association with

World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that one of us

is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interest of the

player." And you go on to describe some of the high hopes you have for World of

Warcraft, which is really fun to read because you don't realize-

- Now-

- ... it's gonna be, like, one of the greatest games of all time

played by millions of human beings, just where those millions of human beings are

playing for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. It's crazy. It's funny that

this... one of us is writing at the dawn of a new

age. The final paragraph is, "So with all

that is going on with me, you'll have to excuse any

lapse in updates to the site here. I will try my hardest

to give you slack or something to read while you should be

working. But in the meantime, there's a whole world of

NPCs. They need to learn the words kaksagur and

mo'fucker, in quotes, and the like. Although

something tells me I'm already in trouble with the

boss." One of us, Jeff, one of us. That was

a beautiful, beautiful post. Did you in fact get in trouble with the boss?

- No. No. My boss was Allen.

And Allen was very understanding and he... they kind of knew

what they were getting into-

when they hired me. And that post actually embarrasses me

when I hear it now. There's so much ego in it-

... and I think that's... it's got that 20 year old-

... you know, "I don't know what I don't know."

- "I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games and-"

But there's brilliance behind that. There's a passion behind that.

Like, we're... when you're a gamer and you really put in the hours

in a game like EverQuest, you understand what makes for a compelling

experience. You don't, at that time, understand how much hard work is required

to create that experience and how much uncertainty there is,

how difficult it is, how many trade-offs there are. How your

designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of

people, millions of people, they are different from

the division you had for it. So all those elements you don't know, but you

have to have that ego in the beginning, right?

Do you even have the guts to try? Do you have the guts to put in all that work? So

what were the... what was it like? What were the vibes of

early Blizzard like? They've... at this point, Warcraft

I and II, Warcraft III is in production.

StarCraft. These are legendary games. I don't... I spent probably

over 1,000 hours in these games combined. I

played Warcraft I, II, III. I played StarCraft I and II.

I played WoW, of course. Diablo I, II, III,

IV. Play Diablo II with "Stay a while and listen," with Deckard Cain.

- Stay a while and listen.

- I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences just, they'll stay with me

forever. Anyway, so big thank you to those

early Blizzard folks. What was it like? What

was the team like? What were the developers like? What were the vibes like in those

early days?

- It was the dream. When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office

was on the University of California Irvine campus

at the time. They have this research and development park where,

if you're like a tech company, you can get office space there,

and Blizzard took up... When I joined, it was

three-fourths of the building was Blizzard, and there were... There was like a

building right next to it that had like Cisco and, you know, it was like

all kind of techy places. And it was so funny because you drive up and like

everything was very serious and corporate, and then outside of the

Blizzard offices, everybody is wearing black T-shirts and

shorts and throwing frisbees and playing Hacky Sack

and on scooters and skateboards, and you're like, "Okay, that's

where, that's where Blizzard is." So it was that

environment. I remember walking in the door and thinking like, "It

feels like I'm walking into a dorm room-"

"... 'cause it was just posters on the wall." And there were

actually, like people would have futons because they'd be sleeping

because we would work so much back then. But the vibe was... It was very small. Like

Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002,

was fewer than 200 people, and that included... There was a

whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North.

So Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible

for StarCraft and Warcraft, and there

were two development teams at Blizzard. It was called Team

One and Team Two at Blizzard South. Um,

Team One was revered. These are the RTS guys.

They made, you know, StarCraft, Warcraft II, and

they were, at that time, they're working on Warcraft III.

Team Two was kind of the red-headed stepchild.

Like apparently, before I joined, they had tried to spin off

a second team multiple times and failed, and then they

finally decided they were gonna make World of Warcraft.

There was a game called Nomad. I don't

know what that game was exactly, but that was what Team

Two was working on at first. That got scrapped,

and Allen stor- steered the team towards World of Warcraft. And there's amazing

designer named Eric Dodds. He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of

Hearthstone. Him and Ben, Ben Brode basically were the

core designers behind that. But Eric and Kevin Jordan

were these two key designers working on World of Warcraft

for Team Two, and then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.

And John Cash, the first day that I showed up

to work on Team Two, they said, "You have to go get your login

from John Cash." I'm like, "John... The John Cash from id?"

And, you, you know, John Cash has a skin. You could be

John Cash in Quake III. So, and then he saw me, and he, he was a huge EverQuest

player, and you're like... He was like, "You're the guy who runs

Legacy of Steel." I'm like, "You're John Cash." We had, we had that

moment where we kind of fanboyed out on each other.

And it was just... The vibe was so cool there.

Like, there were very few producers. So a game team, there are

five core disciplines that make a video game. You've got

engineers or programmers who are writing the code. You've

got the art team that's making all the visuals for the

game, and that spans everything from like 3D modeling, characters,

environments, to also animation, tech art, you

know, making it all work. You've got game

design, which some companies don't have design. The

artists and the engineers do it. Valve famously has

very few designers because everybody there is a

designer. But in companies where design is

a discipline, which it very much is so at Blizzard, game

designers are sort of the creating the game experience

people, you know, setting up all the systems and content in a

way that gets the player to navigate through the game.

- So that's part of a story, part of this quest design, part of it is like how you move

through the game world.

- Yes. So game designers, there's a

spectrum, like same with art, same with engineering,

of roles within game design. Some are

more heavy on the systems side. So like any game that you've played where loot

drops- Diablo IV, World of Warcraft, you know,

Escape from Tarkov, whatever. If there's loot

dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully what drops where and at what

percentages. That would be like a systems designer.

A content designer is somebody who's gonna make

quests or write storylines, or there might even

be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on a story. But designers, you

know, run the gamut, and then you've got these jack-of-all-trade designers

that can do it all.

Um, so that's the design group. There's production, which is project management, and

production is different at every game company you go to. So if you talk to someone

from EA or Blizzard, production might be

very different. They might be the boss. They might actually be a

designer or they might be more of a project manager. And then one of my favorite

disciplines on a game team that's often overlooked is sound and-

... you know, audio, which is comprised of the sound designers and composers.

And there are two things, I think there are two things that no one realizes

how much they bring to a game until they're missing, and that's audio and

lighting. Because most of the time, we're

playing without these things, and it just feels a little

off and wrong. And when you have a great lighting

artist or you have a great composer or sound

designer, like, it... the experience. You're just tapping into these

senses that you wouldn't otherwise. But that's who comprises the game team.

- Is the lighting, you know, all the different

kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team?

- Yeah. Lighting, you're gonna have lighting under the art team, but

they're gonna be best friends with the graphics programmer.

And, you know, like I mentioned with design, there's this wide

spectrum on the engineering team, you have some guys who are like,

Architectural geniuses who are coming up

with, you know, the server client model or the networking or

whatever. Others are more, like, gameplay focus. On

Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just doing nothing but

audio hooks for the audio team. And on every game team, you're gonna

have graphics programmers who

will work with people like the lighting artists or the environmental

artists, character artists on shaders, and

basically any way to make the game. They'll always ask, "What's your vision?

What are you trying to get it to look like?" They'll want an illustration of what should the

world look like, and they'll be the ones who say, "I know how to write

code to- that will let you do that." So you

partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist, and

that's... That's actually the creative tension behind

games and what makes game teams so unique, is if we were

to line them up on some crazy spectrum, on one end, you're gonna have the artists

who... They're creative, dare I say emotional-

... you know, they are artistes on that end. And on

the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant

programmers whose minds just work very differently from the most creative art-

Like artists could be sitting, you have a meeting with them and they'll just sit illustrating.

If there's any piece of paper, they're drawing on it. Um,

and programmers, you know, they're just so

brilliant and organized in their thinking and everything is so

logical. And then in the middle are people like the sound

designers, the- the game designers, and the producers. They're kind

of a little bit in- in all those fields, but

it's the brilliance of taking people who are so

vastly different in their interests and talents, but

aiming them at that shared goal or that shared vision of

the game that, like, really makes something special.

- And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft, but you've

also are well known for working on quite small teams to create these

incredibly huge games. What is the- the power of a small team

in this kind of context where a lot... there's that creative

tension? Is it- is it because a small team avoids maybe the

compartmentalization, like the modular where the

artists now have their own wing building where they never

talk to the engineers, that kind of thing?

- Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. The bigger the team, the

more you become a cog in the machine.

And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.

If we're a small team, let's say we're gonna make a game

and it's at sort of the incubation period of a game

and there's only 10 of us, all 10 of us are in the room for

every decision. You know, I'm not a server networking guy, but

I'm in the room for that discussion. I'm not an illustrator,

but I'm gonna sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks

like. As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized.

It's exactly like you said. And

there's a weird thing that happens that's just kind of a human nature

thing. The less you interact with somebody, the more you

sort of become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.

You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism

rather than trust and belief in them. And

I find on smaller teams where we all know each other's names,

I know what everybody's working on every day, they know what I'm working

on, everybody can talk to each other, there's none of that

stereotyping of a discipline.

On big unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, "Well, the artists

just don't get it."

"They don't understand what we're trying to make." And when you back up and you think about

the statement that you just said, it's like... Such an asshole

statement. Like, really, all the artists don't get it? Like,

that's... A, that's not true. B, that's sort of

demeaning to them. Like, they signed up for the... This is their life's work, too.

This game is gonna be as much theirs as it is

mine. So who am I to say a statement like that?

- Yeah. It's harmful to a discipline to think that you

understand the world. Most silly other folks

don't, and you have nothing to learn from them, really, and,

They're deluded in some in some kind of way. That's so powerful.

- Fast-forwarding a little bit, when we formed Team Four and... Which went on to

make Titan and ultimately fail, and then that got rebooted

as the Overwatch team, the idea that I tried to get through to the

team was to make an assumption. And really, like, Blizzard is one of the top game

developers in the world, and we were very fortunate when

I was there, and I imagine it's this way today, that we

could recruit whatever talent we wanted. It... The best of

the best wanted to come work at Blizzard.

And if you sort of go through the paces of that and

say, "Okay, when we recruit somebody..." Let's say

we're recruiting an artist to make props. Boxes, chairs, whatever. That is

the best prop artist in the industry. That's who's gonna show up on our

doorstep, so when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop

artist in the industry instead of starting from a

place of doubt and cynicism. So, when that person speaks up and says, "I think..."

Like, with Overwatch, for example, "I think we should do this." You know, "We should

do X instead of Y." Instead of saying,

"Well, I'm a believer in Y, why are you against my

idea X?" You should take a moment, have a deep breath, and

say, "Man, the best prop artist in the industry

is suggesting something. Why don't I listen to it?"

- I actually do it for myself, like this kinda

thought framework or thought experiment. Whenever I'm

talking to a new person, especially if I feel, myself, a little bit tinge of

that feeling. Usually, it happens with, like, a really young person, like an

undergraduate student or someone like this. I pretend that they are the smartest

person in the world in my head, and then not... Like, it puts me in the mode of,

like, assuming I have

a lot to learn from them, and it helps. You actually, like, really

listen. I literally think they're the smartest, wisest human on Earth. It helps me.

- I had that, like, I think... You know, I'm no expert.

I'm a game designer, so, like, as much psychology as I know is how to

manipulate people into having fun, hopefully.

Like, I don't know, I don't have an important job. But psychologically speaking-

- That's fun.

- ... I... One thing I think a lot about is ego, and I think about insecurity. And

insecurity, we all have. Like, all of us as human beings

have insecurity. It just manifests itself in different ways.

And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also

changes. So, like, some people, for example, use their insecurity to

rip other people apart. Some people destroy themselves through their

own insecurity. Some people destroy everybody with their

insecurity. But I had that moment as a young lead, when I first was made a lead on,

like, World of Warcraft, where I felt it was very important to be right

and to, you know, be shepherding the correct idea. And I actually got pulled

aside. Like, Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple people who weren't game

designers, and

it's always tricky as a game designer because constantly everybody is throwing

ideas out in- on a game team. Like, there's no shortage of ideas

ever. And we were in some meeting about something,

and these people kind of threw out these ideas. And I

wasn't mean to them, but I very kind of systematically, like an insecure, you know,

ego-driven new lead would do, I kind

of, "Let me tell you why that's wrong, and let me tell you what we're

gonna do instead." And after the

meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me aside, and he said, "You're a very smart

designer, but you shouldn't do what you just did to those people. You should always

listen to what people have to say and try to make their ideas work." And I just...

Over and over, I was like, "Okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let's try

to make it work." And it went from this kind of thing that I didn't believe into

to actually, like, a core part of who I am

today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director. And some of the best

ideas have come from developing other peoples' ideas-

... where your first reaction is like, "No, that's wrong," and then just kind of

sticking with it and going, "But how could we make it work?" And the most gratifying

part when it succeeds is they get all the credit,

and you've sort of elevated this person who

Whose idea wouldn't have been championed, whose idea

by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know, early 2000s would have just said

no. Now their idea is the thing everybody in World

of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving, and they get all the credit.

- I should give context to the listener who doesn't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan,

That you're one of the most humble

and always give credit to the team for everything and anything. And so

everything we talk about today, I know you're probably

resisting constantly giving credit to the team on everything.

So you're the famous, "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team," right? So just as

a small aside, thank you for your humility through

through your career, and thank you for always celebrating the team. But

let's talk about WoW. Let's talk about World of

Warcraft. Tell me what the early days of developing WoW was

like. Maybe we should talk about what World of

Warcraft, WoW is, going to Perplexity here.

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online RPG where you create a

character, level it up doing quests and dungeons, and progress your

gear and power in an open fantasy world called

Azeroth. At a basic level, you move, use abilities from your

action bar, follow quests, and gradually learn a combat

rotation that fits your class. And there's all kinds of

characters and roles and classes. You pick a race, appearance, starting zone,

small racial bonuses. In a class, how you fight, what your role is in

groups. Can you continue, fill in some of the gaps, what is World of Warcraft?

- World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything,

is a world. Like, it's a world that you can live in

with real other people, and everybody's kinda living out their

fantasy. Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft, and

really, like, Allen Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard, calls

Chris "the heart and soul of Blizzard."

And it's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game, you're making

Chris' imagination at some point.

And Chris famously said, "The lead character of World

of Warcraft is the world." And I always believed

that. So you're trying to create this place that's exciting and

dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable and gorgeous, and, you know, it

should feel massive, and it really is.

It, it's, you know, can take a half an hour to get from one end of the world to the

other. But it's this world you're living in. The world is divided into two warring

factions. There's the Horde and the Alliance, and that

was a very important, very controversial decision that was made by Allen

Adham, was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.

- And that in the early days, there was a really strong division.

- Strong division.

- Like... You pick a side and then you hang around with only people of your kind.

- Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you. Like, the amount of people who

walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo.

- That's awesome.

- Like, it's epic. It's like it's become who they are.

Like, if you were to say, like, "Hey, Lex, come play World of

Warcraft with me. We're Alliance on Tichondrius," you'd be like-

- Right

- ... "Dude-"

- Lose my number.

- "... Alliance?"

- Yeah.

- Like, "Okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore."

But the Horde-Alliance decision was really controversial because

in EverQuest, it was mixed race.

They had all the races kind of like WoW did, but they could

all group with each other. And Pardo and I came from EverQuest, where we

felt like this was a horrible decision Allen was making.

And we argued, Allen, Rob, Bob,

Fitch, and I would have lunch every single day, and we would just talk about

WoW and the core design of WoW. Rob wasn't even on WoW at that time.

He was finishing Warcraft III. And we

would fight over the Horde-Alliance split, if it was a good idea or not. And

Allen had... He came from more of the Dark Age of

Camelot community, which was another massive

multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.

And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions, and

he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren't a

loner in the world. And whether you liked it or not, you

had people on your side. And Rob and I just

argued and argued against it, and then sometime before beta, Allen retired.

He went on to run a hedge fund, of all things.

Like, got super into poker, got super into finance, left, and retires,

like, I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda

nuts. And Rob takes over as lead designer in Allen's stead, and to Rob's credit,

the first thing he did was go... Speaking to what we were

speaking about earlier, he said, "Allen's a smart

guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for-"

"... Horde Alliance, we gotta do it." And,

uh, Rob and I sort of changed our point of view

and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in. And

so, you know, the early days of WoW was... It was a great team. It was a mix of

these veterans that we all looked up to.

You know, we had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Dabiri was, you

know, legendary Blizzard developer.

Bill Petris was the art director, and then we had Metzen, who was

sort of like... Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be.

Uh, I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother. And

then there were a lot of us who had never done it before,

or they had also pulled a lot of people from other

teams and other game types. Like, for

example, the guys building the dungeons, they hired out of the Quake community.

And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO designer

on the staff at that time, it was, you know, Kevin

and Eric and Alan were sort of the only

designers, they started building Quake dungeons-

... as, like, Quake levels as the dungeons. At one point, WoW

was even made in QERadiant, which was the Quake engine.

And then they later, you know, retooled to where they were using

a proprietary engine. So we were like this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears-

... is how I would describe the WoW team, of this mix of

veterans and then people like me. Like, I'm

just some fucking idiot, you know- ... who played a lot of EverQuest.

And I end up at Blizzard.

- Designing quests.

- Yeah. Like, okay, we're gonna design World of Warcraft now. And

I've said this later with hindsight, I think a

huge part of WoW's success with, especially with the early WoW team, Team Two in its

earliest formation, was that we didn't

know what we were doing. You kind of... Like, it's

that... Titan was the example for me. Titan was

the attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft at Blizzard.

And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that

team. And it's because everybody was too much of an

expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.

World of Warcraft was a bunch of people, like a very

successful, sure of itself company who had made StarCraft, Diablo

Warcraft, with a bunch of yayhoos basically- ... who was like, "Yeah, we can compete

with Sony Online." At the time, they were making EverQuest II. Like, if we go

back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been

announced. And EverQuest fans, we were just

drooling for EverQuest II. It wasn't, "Oh, cool, World of

Warcraft." It was EQ2 was gonna take, you know, the chalice and run with it. And

then, of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies,

and they had a brilliant designer on that, a guy named Raph Koster, who had come

from that Ultima Online, and he's just a really

smart game designer. If you ever watch one of his lectures, like, he lectured a

lot at GDC, and, you know, we're like, "Oh my God, they're making EverQuest

II and Star Wars Galaxies, and they have the Star Wars intellectual property."

"We're fucked."

Like, "How are we gonna compete?" And everybody had seen the success of EQ,

EverQuest, and everybody was gonna make an MMO,

and it was just a question of who was gonna win.

- So you're feeling this immense pressure. You have this small team

of just this hodgepodge of this unlikely team that kind of looks fast forwarding

to Overwatch, the heroes in Overwatch, but

working extremely hard. Now, you told me about crazy, crazy work hours, and not

because you were forced to, but because you wanted to,

because your heart was in it, because you're like, "This is

everything." Like, you loved it.

- Yeah. The- the games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of

overtime. It's just called crunch. Like do you crunch

or not? These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned

upon. If we were to work overtime, somebody'd write an article about

it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime. Um, back then,

we worked insane, and I mean insane hours. The

longest shift I ever worked straight was 30

hours. That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft III. This was in my... I think,

um, War III shipped on July 3rd, 2002 so this would have been,

like, late June, early July. Probably late

June. And I had nothing to do with War III.

I should just say that. Like, in the credits, I'm additional-

additional help or additional testing or something like that. Um,

when I showed up in May of 2002, it was all hands on deck World of Warcraft for E3.

We got through E3, and then all hands on deck, the

whole company, get War III out the door.

- For shipping Warcraft III.

- For shipping Warcraft III, and because I had not been

involved with the game at all, and I was a brand new

wet-behind-the-ears game designer, they're like, "You're just gonna help

test whatever we tell you to test." So we're trying to gold master,

and there's a crash that happens rarely. If you run one of the cinematics, like you

have to be watching the cinematic after one of the

levels, and then there was a crash that happened. And

so a programmer put in some logging to catch

it, and then they needed somebody to just over and

over again, "I need the crash to happen so I can fix the

bug." And I sat there for 30 hours and just watched the cinematic for 30 hours-

... straight. And it was the funniest thing, like it was almost surreal

watching everybody leave at the... which was a trickle

out. Like, everybody kind of trickles out, like, at-

... different hours, you know? The family guys go much earlier than the

single guys. And then watching everybody

show up again in... the next morning, and they're all, like, dressed

different, and they look all refreshed. And I'm just like in the same position.

You know, like eyes are beet red.

- To the soundtrack of the cinematic and yeah.

- Yeah. But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched... The date slipped, so

you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing the team up

and saying, "We're gonna crunch early so we don't

have to crunch later in the project."

And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us. Like, I

really genuinely believe that he believed in that.

But with games anything can happen, and they're

just... We slip uncontrollably all the

time. And we slipped, and it sort of created just this death march endless death

march that... Like to this

day, members of the WoW team will remember, like, Newport Rib.

If I say that, they'll have, like, twitches because, like,

they would cater the dinner. They'd bring it in at, like, 6:00 or 7:00 at night.

And they'd... Everybody was eating Newport Rib

or Panda Express. It was like the worst diet ever. I actually

like Newport Rib, no shade- ... on them. But you can only eat so much of it.

And the carpets are stained and, like, dudes are falling asleep on the couches.

And it was an unhealthy work environment. It

gets pinned on... 'Cause at a lot of places it is executive driven.

And it is mandated from the top, but the hours that I

worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself. I just wanted to.

I remember, you know, coming in on Memorial

Day, like, with sand from the beach on my

feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day, and

working through Christmas, and those were things I wanted to

do. I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.

- Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because yeah, okay, you could say that's unhealthy,

but I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s,

but actually throughout their career, that have been at companies that do crunch

for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love, and it's some of the most fulfilling

years of their life, months and years of their life. And they

also it's not just fulfilling, they

grow from it, they learn from it, and it... You know,

and when they... Especially when they talk back about it, about that

time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when

you're going through it, sometimes it's extremely difficult, you

don't know. And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it's supposed to be a month

or two, and then it turns out to be a half a year, and then maybe it

turns out to be something like a Titan type game where you never actually ship

it, and it's heartbreaking and the pain, it's all... But then you look back

and you realize how incredible that journey was.

- I think, like, my reflections on it many years later, and having gone

through, like, pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled, I

think where crunch is problematic and people are

good to be vocal about being opposed to it, is when it's forced and

unnecessary. There's a lot of like, "Hey, if

anybody on the team stays, we all stay"-

- Yeah.

- ... kind of, which I think is not necessary. I don't think executives who take

off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late.

I think that's wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I'm

not telling other people to do it, my life's work is my passion

and I want to do it as much as possible. I find

myself, I don't think I've ever worked less than 10

hours in a day. Like that... 10 hours is like a normal-ish day to me.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- And I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it. It brings

me pleasure and fulfillment. And all of that

said, from a place of caution, especially in this era

when people are very touchy about it.

I don't try to impose that on anybody else. I don't want anybody to

feel like they're obligated to, but please understand

it's what makes me who I am, that work ethic.

I enjoy it. I actually... Some of my fondest memories are from those WoW crunches.

- And then looking back and reading some of these stories, it's pretty cool because me, as a

fan, on the receiving end of some of those video games, you

bring joy to millions of people. It's awesome.

Let me ask you about quests, but first, quick bathroom break if it's okay.

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back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan.

Okay, we're back. So I think it's fair to say that before

WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest, consisted

of, maybe that's simplifying it a bit, but standing in one spot and killing monsters

for hours. You helped develop with WoW, I would say a revolutionary

idea of quest-driven leveling, where there's a

story-driven, quest-driven guide through the world, and

it so happens that as part of doing that, you're also leveling the character.

So the leveling is both fun and is the engine that

drives the story that then also immerses you into the

world and pulls you in more and more and more and more. So

take me through this process of developing that idea of quest-driven design.

- Sure. Yeah, there were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all kind of

contributed in their own unique ways. Allen Adham was the lead designer on

WoW. When we first sort of decided we were gonna have a

quest-based game, we used to joke that, like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it.

It did have quests, they just... They weren't really in front

of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a

website. And Allen knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of,

of World of Warcraft. And so he hired me. That was my entry level

position at Blizzard. And on the same day, he hired

a guy named Pat Nagle, which was hilarious to me, because

Pat was the... He had this funny title

of HR and Facilities at Blizzard, because it was such a

small company. So, like, if you sent an application in,

Pat would deal with the application, or if the toilet

overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it. And

so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat, and then on my first day,

they put Pat and I in an office together, and he's like,

"Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer." And

so Pat... And he was the most wonderful guy. We had so much

fun. So Pat and I kind of designed the quest

system. It was Allen's idea to have it in the

first place. And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric

Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all. And the idea was at

first, we actually on a whiteboard in Allen's

office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest

had to date. And EverQuest had had, you know, I think four

or three expansions at that point in time,

and we're like, "Wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest

has." It's gonna be a lot of quests, and it's kind of up to me and Pat to do

it all. And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number. And

Pat and I started working on, like, the design of the system and how it would

interact, and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface... You know,

like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that.

And we split up the world into like two

zones. He was gonna take Elwynn Forest, which was the

starting area for the humans, and I was gonna take Westfall, which was

the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans. Pat and I would meet with Chris

Metzen, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just

has stories in his head and visions. Chris is, like,

artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire, and

he sort of described what he wanted going on in those

zones. You know, you want the gameplay to follow the

flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas. So we finished Elwynn and

Westfall, and we did, like, a team play test. And our

assumption was because the way EverQuest

worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level based game.

You go out. You kill a creature. You get experience points.

You level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is

they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures,

and you'd usually find the best experience

efficiency cycle you could find, so, like, fast

respawn kind of easy things to kill, and that's how you would progress through

EverQuest. And I remember Alan kind of telling

us, like, "Hey, the quests... When Pat and Jeff

write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures

are." You'll do a quest, and then you'll spend a few hours

killing creatures in that area afterwards, and that's how he imagined it would work.

So we kind of set up the world that way. You know, Pat probably did

a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwynn. I'd do a dozen,

20 quests in Westfall, and we'd do this team play

test. And we had a bunch of people on the team who never

played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know,

StarCraft fans, et cetera. And they'd play World of

Warcraft. I think we played for, like, an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn

Forest. And the overwhelming feedback from our team...

And these are people who really didn't play EverQuest, they're

like, "My God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests, like, right

away." And we're like, "Wait a second. You expect to just have quests just keep

going?" And they're like, "Yeah, we expect to have

quests just keep going the whole way. And we kinda had

an oh shit moment right after that Elwynn Forest play test, where we

realized, like, we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna

need. And we changed, we developed this philosophy

that's kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in

general at this point. And I've heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the

industry, which is you design along the path of least resistance.

So basically what that means, like, in

EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your

character to hit max level is to find the easiest creatures and

kill them over and over again in place, which to some

people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours 'cause I think that's

fun. But we decided in World of

Warcraft, we said, why don't we make the path of least

resistance, so in this case, the way to get the

best experience the fastest not to be

killing creatures in one place, but will overload the

experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the

world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable

us to tell these awesome storylines. It sort of did a

lot for the game, and I think it was like a fundamental

change in the genre. Like, if you look at the things

that... EverQuest was very popular and very

successful, and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of

players. And WoW blew the doors open and was tens of

millions of players. And I think the fundamental

difference there was that WoW allowed you to play as a single player.

And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game,

massive is having the other people there.

And they're so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and

dead. But the concept that we have to force you to

interact with them to do anything is very

off-putting to a lot of people. And the fact that people could

come into WoW and just kind of the game design, the game design way of

describing it is directed gameplay. And some games have extremely tight

directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to

play a single player game like Last of Us, you

know, you'll have those moments where they'll be like, you'll come up to a log and then

press Triangle to duck or else, or whatever the duck button is—

... left stick to duck to go under. And that's like the ultimate

in directed gameplay. Like, they're telling you exactly what to

do. On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like

vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very

divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate

it. The ones who hate it are like, "I don't know what I'm supposed to

do." Like, "You drop me in this world. I'm supposed to dig or

something." And that's the type of player

that needs directed gameplay or they're gonna cycle

out. Not all players need it. And what

WoW did, that it doesn't seem like an innovation, it doesn't seem

like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt

optional, but really wasn't.

- I mean, I think it's absolutely revolutionary. It

basically changed gaming. It changed the way we

see games. And it was so successful in part

because it became a mechanism by which you could spend hundreds of hours, thousands

of hours in the game. I mean, it's kind of a, like,

obviously... It's one of those... All these great ideas are always like this,

right? In retrospect, you're like, "Well, obviously if you make the path of

least resistance quest-driven gameplay, then it's

gonna be the reason that most people play." But it is true that... I'm with

you on... I both like the quests and cow level.

I guess you have to design for everybody. That's the tricky thing. Like, how do you

fine-tune this? If you think of it as a loop of like accept

quest, kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding,

level up, that loop. Like, how do you fine-tune that so it's maximum fun

or fun for the maximum number of people? Is it... How- how difficult is that?

- It's extremely difficult. And not everybody's good

at doing that. We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness

of how we tick. So we're all different types of

gamers, but if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I

am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of

gamer I wish I was or the type of gamer I want you

to think I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.

By playing lots of games, you cannot be an exceptional game designer

without playing the shit out of as much as you

can and understanding on a deep level. And the weirdest part about it is

you're not just looking for the greatest hits. You learn just as

much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game. And also—like, a

lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong, or lacked the correct

interface, or they didn't put the right visceral polish on

it. There's an executional aspect to

all of it. When I'm playing, I'm not only, like, thinking

about what makes this fun, I'm thinking about what makes this

not fun. But I'm also watching everyone around me. My wife plays games, my kids

play games. And understanding, like, well, what do

they do and how are they different to me? Why are they finding enjoyment in

this? Why are they not? What's frustrating? What did they miss?

- And being raw honest with exactly what you're saying. I mean,

I, if I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am, why do I

enjoy cow level? And why, above that, why do I enjoy loot? Why- why is

loot so fun? Like, what- what does- what is it about

opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff? I mean, I, that

might be like at the core of what I enjoy about gaming. That, and

walking around a beautiful world with nice music.

- As a game designer, I am, at best, a quack psychologist. You know?

We can motivate you to do some weird things.

The two driving motivators are extrinsic and

intrinsic. And all of us, at different times in

our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, we can

shift from being intrinsically motivated to being

extrinsically motivated. Obviously, loot is a

big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is

too simplistic. Like, for example, on the loot boxes of Overwatch, there's

a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a

businessperson or whatever. Like, not a commercial person. But beyond that,

we also had a really good team who said the

visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes-

... the graphics, like the way things spill out and animate, all of that is as

satisfying as well. And you're trying to... Like, there's the lizard

brain part of it. Of like, how does it... Like, I see

chest. I know I'm gonna... It's gonna feel good. It's gonna feel good.

And then there's the spreadsheety part of it. Of, what does it

have? Is it an upgrade? And I think

great game designers know how to tap into both of those things.

You know, tap into the intrinsic and

extrinsic. There's... Like, when I was studying

writing, you would study the elements of fiction.

And, you know, these are just like basic things like plot and

character development and setting and theme and

whatever. And there's no, like, textbook that

exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me

yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.

What are the things that create fun for players? And they're not the

same. Like, it really... Every human being is different. Like, progression is fun.

Sense of progression that I'm investing. I'm putting an

investment into this game, and then the game is

recognizing my investment. That things like leveling, things like the

amount of gold you have, those are all investment

based. There's mastery. There's just pure raw skill. Creativity is

one. And hand-in-hand with creativity is

customization. And some of those can be aesthetic.

Like, look at my customized character, and I have the black

curly hair, and I put an earring in my

character and I'm customizing in that way. The other is

customizing my build. I'm gonna come up with a

whirlwind barbarian and I'm the first to do it. These are all elements of fun

that designers can tap into, and in fact are frequently

tapping into. But they're never defined

anywhere, and I find that players drift. Like, I'm the

type of player who's not really loot motivated. I'm more

motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer. And often that takes me on a

detour of being loot motivated, because there

might be a dragon or a demon somewhere that I can't beat without this level of armor

and sword. So now I'm loot motivated for some period

of time, to get back to being content motivated. Or if I'm having trouble

defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look

at the skills and abilities that my character's using, and I have

to go into creativity mode. "Oh, he has that one AE where

he..." Area of effect. "...where he puts a curse on me."

And, you know, "If I had this counterability to the curse, I

could beat the boss to get the loot, to get to the next boss." These are all cycles

that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.

- And ultimately enjoying and discovering what the world gives you.

Has to offer to you. And you're... You have a lot of hats

as a gamer, so you love the RPG, MMORPG world, but you're also a big shooter guy.

Can you explain to me what fun in a shooter context is? And

we'll talk about Overwatch as a specific kind of fun. Maybe...

But you're also a huge fan of the ultra-realistic shooters. Call of

Duty. What is the definition of fun there?

- There's a lot of skill and mastery. Off the

cuff, flippant comment would be clicking heads, you

know? I'm just trying to click heads.

- Okay.

- There's an intimacy also to the first

person camera. And now, not all shooters are first

person. There is a large trend these days to third person. I really think PUBG and

Fortnite sort of opened that third person shooter

door. And you're seeing games like ARC Raiders are third person. But to me,

nothing is as pure as first person. Like you're

... literally living in the world as that being. You can look

at your hands, and it's that pure visceral test of skill of, "Can you click

on the thing fast enough?" And when it's PvP-based, you know that's coming at you.

- Could you lay out for people who don't necessarily know what PvP and

PvE is? And single player

- Absolutely

- ... multiplayer, massively online multiplayer?

- So PvP is player versus player, so that means a

combative, you know... If Lex and I are up against each

other, we're attacking each other. We call that PvP. You can get killed by

another player. Uh, player versus environment is anytime you're shooting

computer controlled opponents. So if it's a game

about dragons, the dragon is the E, the environment in PvE.

- And we should say that PvP and PvE, the P might be multiple

players. It could be five versus five, six versus

six for PvP. And for PvE, it could be, like, raids where it's multiple people,

large groups of people going against the AI.

- Yep. So single player, that's a game that you

play totally by yourself. Like, you don't play with anybody else. You

can't play with anybody else. It's not networked to

play with other people. For example, I'm playing a game called Story of

Seasons right now on the Switch, which I just

play by myself. I have my farm. You know, there's a town. I'm

meeting people in the town, and no one can come and join me and

interact with that. So it's a very controlled

experience. Single player games are very

difficult, or they can be very difficult and expensive

in terms of production to create. Like, if you think of a

game, like Uncharted or Last of Us

that's made by Naughty Dog, like, those are kind of the

preeminent best single player games you could talk

about. They're very handcrafted. Every experience is made just for

you. One up from that is what I call co-op. And these terms

become interchangeable, so I'm using some semantics here.

But co-op is any cooperative experience that we

can play together, but we're sharing an exact

same experience very intentionally. And it's

me sharing that experience only with other people that I

know. So a great example of a cooperative

game, maybe one of the best of all times, was Left 4

Dead, which is a game where you and three other

people go in and you fight, like, hordes of zombies,

and you try to progress through to the end safe room.

it's a very cooperative experience. A game like

Diablo IV, you can play cooperatively with other people. Now, one up from that

is multiplayer, and that's when you're engaging with

strangers who are in the same world that you might not have the

same cooperative goals as. You might have very opposed goals to them. You might PvP

them, or they might just be random strangers that you

pass in a town or city and never see again. And then massively multiplayer, which

is what the MMO online sort of stands

for, massively multiplayer online game, that's when you're

breaking into thousands of players. And the

worlds become really, really big at that point.

- By the way, we should say that the co-op could be

remote connection, but there's also what would you

call it, couch co-op where you have two people. Some games are

really designed well for the experience of two humans sitting together and playing the game

together.

Which is a really tricky thing to design for, but if it's done well, it's a,

It's a really fulfilling experience. Like, with a

friend, with a loved one, you can, like, play a game together. And Diablo

IV, I should say, is an example of a game that does that really well. They do

couch co-op. Like, two people can play Diablo sitting together

and there's a real intimate experience in that.

- Yeah, couch co- it's funny, 'cause it actually, like, predates the couch even.

Some of those old arcade games-

... like, would have two joysticks on them and then you could play-

... with somebody else. Or there's you know, famous game Gauntlet-

... had four joysticks and four people playing together. And

then anybody who grew up in that early console era,

like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one. We would sit and we'd play

NHL 93- ... on the couch. And anybody who lost, you'd lose the controller.

And you could play that with up to four people playing, or we... I

remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal

Kombat. And we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega

Genesis, and it was the house rules were, you know, whoever

lost, so whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddy's

apartment and there's five people there, you're constantly

cycling everybody in and out. But there's just a

magic to multiplayer, of engaging and sharing in the experience-

... with other people. Um, that's why I've

always... I've never made a single player game. Uh, I have great admiration

for them. I don't know if I could do it. The challenge...

The reason I love multiplayer so much, the way I

describe being a game director or game designer on

a multiplayer game, it's like imagine if you were gonna

be a movie director, and you were gonna have all these actors and set designers and

props and, you know, writers and scripts and all of

this stuff, and your goal was to get a certain movie

made. But we're gonna ask you, the director, to just... You're gonna leave the room.

You can set it all up ahead of time, and

then you're not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it.

And now you need the actors to have an experience, and it's

just kind of the wildest, funnest experiment. Like-

- From a designer/creator perspective, 'cause you don't know what the players will

create, so that's fun to see. You lay out the chessboard, you lay

out the world, and then you get to watch what they create together. That's true.

- I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in

games, and that really hurts me because, like, I actually love story in

games, and I counter that I'm the anti-shitty story

guy. And what I mean by that is like, A, the most

magical stories that I've ever heard come out of video games are player stories

about, you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion

and then I met him in real life. Like, that's better than any video game writing

that I've heard in a long while. The player story is so much more interesting.

You know? "Lex, why do you like the cow level so much?"

"Tell me about some goofy time-"

"... like a loot goblin drew you into the most danger."

"And... But there was another player there, and then..." You know, like,

those are the stories that I think are more interesting from

games. There are some exceptional writers in video games and some exceptional games

at story. You know, I've mentioned Naughty Dog,

like they're kind of on another level. But Valve has

amazing writing. The writing behind Half-Life 2, Marc Laidlaw, the writing behind

Portal-

... and Portal 2. I think it was Erik Wolpaw, who is hilarious, just amazing,

and Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite

games of all time, and that's a game where you can see the expertise and mastery

of the game design and the narrative design, and the fact

that you can have those player stories of

just the goofy shit. Like, I remember... 'Cause the

controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC

player who's playing on console. Like, I always get confused

about, like, taking out my gun and putting it away, and

what's, you know, the L1 and L2. Like, as a

PC gamer, I'm just like, "Let me bind this stuff to where I want

it." And so like you know, a guy in town rides by and

he's like, "Howdy, partner." And I go to, like, give him the Arthur

Morgan, you know, "Hey, what's up?" back, and I just whip out my

sawed-off shotgun and, like, blow his fucking head off. And then the whole

town is like... Suddenly I'm, like, under... I'm

wanted and I'm being chased, and then there's a train that,

like, takes out the posse, and-

- Yes.

- It's like those stories, and the fact that Red Dead can have, you know, this,

like, touching, heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his

journey, but you can also have, you know, the player story of blowing

off the poor guy that's just trying to-

- And that's the combination.

And then Rockstar does a really good job with you know, even in Grand Theft Auto with

the radio, it can be kind of a side aspect to the game, that great writing there can

create- help create the world-

... with, with humor, with color, with depth, with heartbreak, all that kind of

stuff.

- There was a moment in Red Dead where it... There's the Daniel Lanois song-

..."That's the Way It Is". I just... I love Daniel

Lanois, so the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and like, was able to

get that song out of him. And

there's this moment where you're, like, riding back and they start that song, and-

- Yeah.

- Everything up to then had been gorgeous, like, more of a

score. There's Woody Jackson, who's, like, a really amazing game

composer. He had done the score for that, and so

nothing had been, like, lyrical with words. And then they play

the Daniel Lanois song, and there's, like, the quotes are coming back-

... from, like, Dutch and Arthur Morgan, and

I'm just like, "Goddam, this is, like... This is

art." You know, this is like I know it's supposed to be entertainment, I know it's a

business, but the top of the pyramid is art, and- ... it just hit me emotionally.

- Yeah, there's certain games where, you know... I mean, that moment, you just

imagine the number of people who shed a tear during that moment, and that's

just a reflection of how much you're invested into this world, into

these characters, and it's a beautiful thing. Uh,

I have to ask you about this image that you sent me. It's super cool, so

I'd love it if we could nerd out about it a little bit, the zone flow for

the original World of Warcraft. There's a bunch of zones. It'd

be awesome if you kinda talk through how, like, this world is

built. Take me to that time when you were designing this, before anyone

else got a chance to play it.

- All WoW stuff. It would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world.

And, you know, it was so fun hanging out with Chris

because we had whiteboards all over the place, and, you

know, "Hey, Chris, we should make Eastern Kingdoms.

What do you think it should be?" And he would just tell you the

story of each of these as he's just drawing. And Chris is

a really talented artist, so the map would be gorgeous. I

have lots of, like, photographs of Chris maps,

That he would just kind of whiteboard up. He's like, you know,

"Here's the Dwarven Lands, there's Wetlands with Khaz Modan

up there, and that's where this, you know, tribe of dwarves

were from. And then they, you know, humans are going to be down,

With Elwynn Forest. And then Westfall, there's, you know,

this group called the Defias Brotherhood and they have a place called

Deadmines." So I would talk to Chris

because you want to capture the spirit, like, as a game

designer, you want to capture the experience that's in

people's heads. So, like, take Burning Steppes, for example.

Supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and

dragons and, you know, all this kind of stuff. That

doesn't feel like where you want to start. It feels like where you want to

end, so you kind of work the world flow in a way that puts that at the

end. But there was also kind of some magic to the

original starting areas, where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path

between... The dwarf hometown was called Ironforge, the

human hometown was called Stormwind.

And we allowed you to fly for free. So, like, these little

newbies who were, you know, level five or

something, if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I'm like,

"Oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come. You know, I'll come to Ironforge and we'll

hook up and I'll just fly out to you," which is the magic of World of

Warcraft. You have to fly over Burning Steppes and

Searing Gorge, and you look down and you're like, "Holy

shit, that looks scary and dangerous." And it plants that seed of things to come.

- Uh, so you've designed some incredible quests. Is there any that

stand out that you're proud of ashamed of? I mean, you are

famously have designed the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest.

One of the most infamous quests in the history of WoW,

of gaming, where you had to collect a bunch of pages, or...

Green Hills of Stranglethorn, maybe, can you,

comment on that one or any quest that just springs to mind?

- Green Hills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional