The Guild

This Wednesday The Guild was invited to tour Blizzard! Guided by our intrepid tour guides Kenny and Kasey, The Guild had a fantastic, geek extravaganza and thoroughly outstayed their welcome. Yay!

Jeff Lewis (Vork) volunteered to write the blog entry of our experience there. We hope you enjoy reading about it after the jump, and again, thank you Blizzard!!!

The Guild’s Blizzard tour
written by Jeff Lewis

I thought I’d seen it all. Gas prices at four dollars. A new Indiana Jones movie. Britney Spears at my gym. But I was wrong. I’ve seen Blizzard, as in the company that created World of Warcraft! Duh. This week, the cast had the opportunity to tour the facility that spawned not only WOW, but Star Craft one and the soon-to-be (kind of) released 2.

It all began with our tour guide, Kenny, a larger than life fellow with a 70’s Afro to match, who was easily corrupted by our sardonic and profane banter. Watch out, pimp daddies of the world, you’ve got competition now! Also on the tour were Kasey (Who rolled her eyes a lot at Kenny) and Paul “Big Daddy” Della Bitta who basically lurked (in a good way).

We started off by taking a walk through the hallowed Blizzard Hall of Fame. Filled with their awards (Even a bowling one?!?!), original artwork, real live swords (Never figured out how much they weighed though), and even their signed scripts of the South Park’ episode, “Make Love, Not Warcraft”. It was AWESOME!

From there, we traveled upstairs to view their offices. We met most of Blizzard’s 1500 employees, interrupted each and every one of them, and walked through their cafeteria-Five dollar burgers-Hello!- and even saw the room where employees leave their dishes after their done eating. It’s the “Tray Room”. Here’s a picture modeled by Felicia (Codex):

They eat on plates just like we do. It’s true! Then we traversed the gym. It was packed…. ..with one person. But it COULD have been packed with dozens because it was large! (Sadly, you could not play WOW on the treadmill, I gave them a note to work on that).

From there, we met more people and more people. I don’t know exactly what each of them does, but does it really matter? They work on games all day. ALL DAY, I say. Hey, that rhymes. Anyway.

We were then hustled into a somewhat dark room. We were frightened….until we saw…… sandwiches, chips, sodas and cookies. Lunch! And to top it all off, the president of Blizzard, Mike, sat down and ate with us! He had turkey. I had two Dr. Pepper’s. Two!

After our meal, we resumed our tour. Met more people with dream jobs. They allowed us to play a little StarCraft 2. Let me be the first to say (without violating anything hopefully)….It rocks!

From there, The Guild basically took over the place. And by that, I mean playing many many songs on Rock Band. With Felicia on guitar, Sandeep on drums and me singing, we could not be stopped……until they asked us to please stop. Or thought it, because they are polite folks.

Then, here’s the totally cool awesome thing! They gave us a bunch of stuff. T-shirts, hats, keychains, trading cards, games! And then, sadly, our tour was over. It went by so fast. Can we come back tomorrow please? Guys?

Anyway, the Blizzard people were SOOOO nice, friendly, generous, funny, warm and, obviously, geniuses. I mean, hey, they made WOW. They’ve got a great company with great people. I wish them only the best. Thanks, Blizzard!