Bill Roper and the Blizzard Games South Korea Took to Heart

2024-02-13

For years, a major release from Blizzard was a considerable event in South Korea. That was particularly true at the turn of the century.

Diablo, Diablo II, and StarCraft reached players as internet access was spreading. Their arrival coincided with a change in where and how people played.

StarCraft was a fixture in PC bangs, the gaming cafés that were opening all over the country. It is hard to tell the history of those places without talking about Blizzard.

Bill Roper and the games people knew

Bill Roper worked on Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo in roles ranging from production to voice acting. The games were the work of large teams, and Roper’s career offers a way into how those teams worked.

Kim Jeong-nam and Kim Jeong-hyeon follow him through the years in which Blizzard’s games became familiar to Korean players.

Three games that mattered in South Korea

The authors organize the opening around three releases: Diablo, StarCraft, and Diablo II.

The first Diablo offered a model for action role-playing games. StarCraft helped give players a reason to use the growing network of PC bangs.

Diablo II introduced more players to the pace and rewards of hack-and-slash play at a time when online role-playing games were finding a wider audience.

The book considers that audience alongside the growth of South Korea’s Lineage. Both benefited from changes in how easily people could get online and find someone to play with.

Before the games Blizzard made

The authors look back to early computer games, including William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, which visitors could play at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958.

They also discuss Spacewar!, developed at MIT by Steve Russell and others in the early 1960s. What counts as the first game depends in part on which machines and settings you include.

Ralph Baer’s work led to the Magnavox Odyssey home console. Atari, co-founded by Nolan Bushnell, helped bring arcade games to a wider public with Pong, a game the book connects with Roper’s early interests.

From backgammon to Dungeons & Dragons

Roper enjoyed backgammon, a game with a long history. The authors also point to the influence of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons on many early video-game developers.

Roper joins Blizzard around the age of thirty

The authors are interested in the moment when something a person likes becomes a reason to devote much of their life to it.

For Roper, that interest was initially music. The book describes him driving trucks and performing at a jazz bar to pay for school. He came into the company that became Blizzard as a contractor.

The company Allen Adham helped start

Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime founded Silicon & Synapse with Frank Pearce. The book tells how Adham kept making the case to Morhaime for starting a games company together.

Adham also became a mentor to Roper. He showed him how a game came together, including how to guide a team and talk to people working on different parts of it.

The voice behind Warcraft

Roper auditioned to narrate a Warcraft demo. His voice went on to become familiar to players who knew nothing about his other work.

According to the book, he found little more than a flyer to work from in the recording room, so he came up with a script and performed it himself.

Blizzard and real-time strategy

Westwood’s Dune II helped establish a form of real-time strategy that Blizzard built on with Warcraft. Blizzard gave it a fantasy setting instead of a far-future one.

The book also notices details of control and presentation: units were easy to distinguish, and moving them around the map felt direct.

Warcraft II improved on the first game with higher resolution, changes to network play, and the ability to select up to nine units at a time. Its fog of war helped make scouting matter.

Seeing terrain once no longer told you everything happening there. Losing sight of an area left room for an opponent to move without being seen.

Westwood continued with Command & Conquer. Blizzard expanded into StarCraft and Diablo after Warcraft, giving the two companies different places to take the ideas they had developed.

Why StarCraft worked

StarCraft gets a chapter of its own, as it almost has to in an account of Blizzard’s place in South Korea.

The authors draw attention to four features.

  1. Three factions that play differently
  2. Careful balance among the factions
  3. The room for skilled control of individual units
  4. A story that gives the factions a reason to clash

Many strategy games could begin with two sides. StarCraft’s three factions had units and ways of fighting distinct enough to require different skills.

That made balance harder to achieve. A particular unit or approach might be strong in one situation and vulnerable in another, giving players choices about which advantage to pursue.

The authors compare the game with Total Annihilation and see a more limited unit AI in StarCraft. In competitive play, the effort of controlling units directly became a source of skill and enjoyment.

The Terran, Zerg, and Protoss also had stories people remembered. Novels and comics based on the game followed, a sign that some players wanted more than another match.

How former Blizzard developers helped create Guild Wars

ArenaNet was founded by former Blizzard developers and went on to make Guild Wars under NCsoft. It was a separate studio, distinct from Blizzard North.

Roper left Blizzard and helped found Flagship Studios, which developed Hellgate: London. The book sees something of Diablo in the way it combines action and the search for better equipment.

How Diablo became an action RPG

The finished Diablo was built around quick movement, combat, and finding equipment. That pace became one of the series’ signatures.

Early in development it could have gone a different way: the original design was turn-based.

The change to real-time combat emerged from work between Blizzard and the team at Condor, later Blizzard North. Roper was one of the people involved, alongside designers and programmers on both sides.

It became possible to clear a room and be drawn into the next one almost without a pause. That rhythm helped make Diablo widely influential.

Disappointment with Diablo III

Roper was gone by the time Diablo III appeared. Expectations were high, and some players missed the atmosphere of the earlier games.

I later found an interview in which Roper explained why the new game had felt so different to him.

He recalled being disappointed when he first saw it.

  • His criticism was that the brighter style associated with Blizzard’s Irvine team had displaced the darker look he associated with Blizzard North. He could appreciate individual designs while feeling they belonged in a different game.

I recognized that reaction. I played only briefly, but the palette, controls, and overall feel made it hard for me to settle into the same world I remembered.

The development culture the authors saw at Blizzard

The book describes a set of habits and priorities the authors associated with Blizzard at the time. The company later became part of Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft acquired.

Reading the account after those changes raises the question of which habits can survive as a studio becomes part of a much larger organization.

  1. Hire people who care deeply about games.
  2. Give people reasons to play together.
  3. Make important decisions as a team.
  4. Keep asking whether the game is fun.
  5. Make a game easy to learn and demanding to master.
  6. Release only work the studio can stand behind.
  7. Think about how games travel across markets and genres.
  8. Make time for colleagues to know one another, as the authors describe at Flagship.

References

Book details

Bill Roper, the Santa Claus of South Korea’s Game Industry

Authors
Kim Jeong-nam and Kim Jeong-hyeon
Published
April 28, 2008
ISBN13
9788955508772
View the book on YES24

We may earn a commission if you buy through an affiliate link in this article.

Search stories