Today, Blizzard Entertainment is well-known throughout the industry for massive, bestselling series such as Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft – but when it first began, it wasn’t even known as Blizzard.

Blizzard Entertainment was first founded as Silicon & Synapse on February 8, 1991 by three UCLA graduates: Allen Adham, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce. Silicon & Synapse developed and released their first title, a Super Nintendo racing game called RPM Racing, just nine months later.

Although Silicon & Synapse developed two more of their own games – a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer called The Lost Vikings (1992) and a battle-racing game with a soundtrack of licensed rock songs called Rock n’ Roll Racing (1993) – they focused much of their energy on making ports of other studios’ games for the Windows 3.x, Commodore 64, Macintosh, and Amiga. In 1993, Silicon & Synapse was named “Best Software Developer of the Year” by VideoGames Magazine, and at the very end of the year the company decided to change their name to Chaos Studios.

In April 1994, Chaos Studios was acquired by Davidson & Associates for $6.75 million – the first of many acquisitions and mergers the studio would see in the coming years. The following month the company changed its name again (in part because of a similarly-named company in New York which had a video game division), this time to Blizzard Entertainment.

The very first game released under the new Blizzard Entertainment name also marked the beginning of its biggest hit franchise. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, released for MS-DOS in November 1994, is a real time strategy game which pits the human inhabitants of the planet Azeroth against the invading orcs. The game – especially its multiplayer mode and innovations in gameplay and mission design – was well-received by gamers and reviewers alike, and went on to win several awards.