Jason Schreier

It's funny, yeah, hearing from Blizzard people reading the book, it's always interesting to hear their perspectives. And they vary greatly depending on the era of Blizzard in which they were in. And also, it's so funny because certain people just like to harp on such very specific parts of it. Mm-hmm.

I wish I could give a more specific example, but I don't want to burn anybody who reached out to me. But basically someone might reach out to me and be like, hey, this was my interpretation of this thing that happened 30 years ago, and this is why this little thing that you wrote... I don't know. It's hard to explain without getting too into specifics.

I wish I could give a more specific example, but I don't want to burn anybody who reached out to me. But basically someone might reach out to me and be like, hey, this was my interpretation of this thing that happened 30 years ago, and this is why this little thing that you wrote... I don't know. It's hard to explain without getting too into specifics.

But truth is very hard to capture, which is something that journalists have realized for 200 years now, which is that everybody has their different ideas of what happened and why and how it went down. But yeah, I'm very proud of the book.

But truth is very hard to capture, which is something that journalists have realized for 200 years now, which is that everybody has their different ideas of what happened and why and how it went down. But yeah, I'm very proud of the book.

Yeah, and sometimes when you're putting something down in text, tone is lost and the tone of the way something is said can really change the nature of it. So yeah, these are all things that you just have to be really cognizant of when you're doing, when you're telling a story like this and you have to be really careful about it.

Yeah, and sometimes when you're putting something down in text, tone is lost and the tone of the way something is said can really change the nature of it. So yeah, these are all things that you just have to be really cognizant of when you're doing, when you're telling a story like this and you have to be really careful about it.

Something that I do in my reporting and in my books and that was important for this book specifically is I don't recreate dialogue or scenes or like... add any layer of fiction to the story, which I think a lot of nonfiction narrative books do, but I think would really detract from the truth of a story like this.

Something that I do in my reporting and in my books and that was important for this book specifically is I don't recreate dialogue or scenes or like... add any layer of fiction to the story, which I think a lot of nonfiction narrative books do, but I think would really detract from the truth of a story like this.

Yeah, so let me answer both of those questions, both that and kind of the origin story of this book. So I started working on this book in the beginning of 2021, like in February or March of 2021, which was a couple years before the publication of my second book, Press Reset. Yeah.

Yeah, so let me answer both of those questions, both that and kind of the origin story of this book. So I started working on this book in the beginning of 2021, like in February or March of 2021, which was a couple years before the publication of my second book, Press Reset. Yeah.

And the seeds for this book were really planted in 2018, which is when I started to report on Kotaku about the Activision takeover at Blizzard and how Blizzard had once been this proudly, fiercely autonomous company. And even after the Activision-Blizzard merger in 2007, they still remained so until, like...

And the seeds for this book were really planted in 2018, which is when I started to report on Kotaku about the Activision takeover at Blizzard and how Blizzard had once been this proudly, fiercely autonomous company. And even after the Activision-Blizzard merger in 2007, they still remained so until, like...

Titan was canceled, and then Activision started to play a greater role in operations of Blizzard, eventually leading to Mike Morhaime's departure. And that was kind of the seeds of me thinking, oh, okay, there's a story here. This is a corporate takeover story. This is a company that was one of the most fascinating, one of the most beloved game companies out there, and it's kind of...

Titan was canceled, and then Activision started to play a greater role in operations of Blizzard, eventually leading to Mike Morhaime's departure. And that was kind of the seeds of me thinking, oh, okay, there's a story here. This is a corporate takeover story. This is a company that was one of the most fascinating, one of the most beloved game companies out there, and it's kind of...

a lot of that spirit is being lost because Activision runs things in a very different way. And so that was the origin story.

a lot of that spirit is being lost because Activision runs things in a very different way. And so that was the origin story.

And then it wasn't until five or six months after I started working on it that the lawsuits happened and Blizzard went through reckonings that eventually, like reckonings of sexual discrimination and harassment that eventually led to the Microsoft acquisition and all of the drama that happened in between. So all of that

And then it wasn't until five or six months after I started working on it that the lawsuits happened and Blizzard went through reckonings that eventually, like reckonings of sexual discrimination and harassment that eventually led to the Microsoft acquisition and all of the drama that happened in between. So all of that

drama was after I had already started to think about writing the book, started to work on the book. So that's the kind of origin story. And then as far as the scope of the project, I had actually started out thinking... that it was mostly going to be about those later years.