If you spent any more than five minutes of your life clicking on demons and watching them explode into a mess of bloody guts, pick up a copy of this book and then drop what you are doing and consume it. -Bakuenryu!
Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I
List price: $9.99. Written by David L. Craddock. Cover by Amie C. E. Kline. Edited by Andrew Magrath, Amie C. E. Kline and Monica Cesario. ISBN: 978-0-9884099-0-3
Available now for iBooks, Kindle, Google Play, and Nook e-readers and apps.
- Click here to take the Stay Awhile and Listen - Book I eBook tour, which includes samples from the book, podcasts, and more.
Summary
Two companies. Two opposing cultures. One multi-billion-dollar video-game empire.
Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I invites readers to discover the origin of the two Blizzards—Blizzard North, a studio built by gamers, for gamers, and Blizzard Entertainment, a convergence of designers driven to rule their industry.
Composed from exhaustive research and hundreds of personal interviews, the Stay Awhile and Listen series divulges the fated meeting that brought the two Blizzards together, the clashes that tore them apart, and their transformation from grassroots democracy to corporate empire.
At the center of it all—Diablo, a hack-and-slash adventure through the darkest recesses of Hell that changed online gaming forever.
Critical Praise for Stay Awhile and Listen - Book I
- Stay Awhile and Listen flows almost like a documentary film. During the narrative parts, it's easy to imagine a group of young developers hunched in front of faintly glowing screens. During the quotations, you can picture the older and wiser industry veterans sitting in front of a camera and explaining those early days with smiles on their faces. -Slashdot.org
- "Craddock takes his time introducing each person, and by the time he explains their contribution, I felt like I knew them as human beings, not as developers — what they were like as kids, where they came from, and what their aspirations were." -Venture Beat
- Stay Awhile and Listen tells how passion, maxed-out credit cards, and sleepless nights spawned a gaming phenomenon and unearths the game design secrets that made Diablo an enduring classic. -Tristan Donovan, author of Replay: The History of Video Games
What Game Developers are Saying About Stay Awhile and Listen - Book I
- David Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen masterfully retells the tale of the game development Camelot created by the founders of Blizzard Entertainment. -Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series
- A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the storied history and development of Diablo and the early days of Blizzard Entertainment. -Dr. Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare
- Stay Awhile and Listen is a rare and intriguing look into the people and experiences behind some of my favorite video games of all time. -Randy Pitchford, co-founder of Gearbox Software
- Stay Awhile and Listen shows that there was a potent mixture of talent, opportunity, and personality that drove the meteoric rise of Blizzard Entertainment from its earliest days. I can't wait for the next installment. -Julian Gollop, creator of X-COM: UFO Defense
Stay Awhile and Listen - Book I also explores...
- Tight bonds between developers formed over thousands of hours spent crafting genre-defining entertainment
- How Diablo evolved from a turn-based, solo adventure to a lightning-fast online sensation
- The making of the original WarCraft and its bestselling sequel, WarCraft II
- Never-before-revealed details on unannounced Blizzard games
- Over 100 pages of behind-the-scenes stories covering how Blizzard's developers turned their favorite hobby into a paycheck, the game design decisions that rocketed Blizzard games to the top of the sales charts, and much more.