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"I think we learned some important design lessons that have become sort of part of the Blizzard culture now. Michael Morhaime, in a Blizzard Insider interview :

… We decided to make it a little more friendly for the Super Nintendo, so we dropped it down to five characters, then to four, then to three.” Some that would raise up ladders, some that would throw torches, all that sort of thing. “When I started on Lost Vikings, there were about 100 vikings you could control. Samwise Didier, art director of Blizzard, in Blizzard 20th anniversary video The bright colors and exaggerated proportions would let its characters fit right in with the Warcraft series, and the contrast of ye olden swords and shields with a sci-fi setting is oddly prophetic of Blizzard’s future ventures. But even this early on, you can see traces of that distinct Blizzard style peek through. Its sequel in 1997 was the last platformer the studio ever made, and I only realized the connection when the game’s bumblingly heroic trio was resurrected for Heroes of the Storm. “We were a lot faster with it.” But having a larger company help fund their engine development boosted the still relatively small team, at that point only a dozen or so people total.Įven if the studio wasn’t under a different name at the time, it would be easy to forget that Blizzard made The Lost Vikings. “I think in the amount of time we did all those games, maybe they did one or two,” Morhaime said. But Morhaime recalled to us that Blizzard got much more use out of it than Interplay. The game’s levels were created using a program called CED, a cell editor made by CEO Mike Morhaime that Blizzard used to lay out levels, which later went on to be the basis of the Warcraft and StarCraft map editor.īlizzard was also hired by Interplay Productions to create a scripting engine for developing platformers, which it then used for nearly all of its SNES games. Blizzard was still called Silicon & Synapse for its first three games, and it wasn’t until Warcraft: Orcs & Humans that the company really went all-in on developing for the PC, though Lost vikings helped lay the groundwork for that. The Lost Vikings wasn’t the start of Blizzard as a company, but it was the first game Blizzard released on PC. System requirements: DOS 3.1, Intel 80386SX CPU, 640KB RAM