In sixth grade, Morhaime, along with his brother and sister, purchased a video game console called the Bally Professional Arcade, first released in 1978. Morhaime discovered that the console was programmable and he figured out how to write simple games on it, building off of example programming code he found in a gaming newsletter. As an electrical engineering student at UCLA, Morhaime focused more on hardware than on software. "I procrastinated a lot", he admitted. Things changed after he got an internship at a San Jose microchip company. In his internship, he learned about circuit design, and when he returned to school he was ahead of his computer architecture class. "I used to be the guy that sat in the back", he said, but after his stint in Silicon Valley, he said, "I started sitting up front". It was in that time period that Morhaime met the two other people with whom he would create Silicon & Synapse, the company that would be renamed later as Blizzard. The initial founders - Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce - rented a small office in Irvine, California, where the proximity to other companies was hoped to be advantageous to them.
Blizzard Entertainment
In 1995, Blizzard released Warcraft II, its first number one selling game. "It's probably the game that put Blizzard on the map", Morhaime said. Besides its large number of sales, "it was the first game you could play over the Internet with a good experience", which was a novelty at the time, as well as being a defining selling point for its later titles. Blizzard's greatest success came with a hard but not unwelcome lesson. In planning for the release of World of Warcraft in late 2004, Morhaime thought that the market for the much larger and more interactive new game - the first in their history to require players to pay a monthly subscription fee - would grow slowly and would be an unpopular surprise to the gaming community. "We felt it was very likely the fee would be a deterrent for people, and that WoW would not sell as quickly as some of our previous games", he said. All of Blizzard's production and marketing decisions were based on that assumption. To Blizzard's surprise WoW sold extremely quickly, leaving the underprepared Blizzard unable to keep merchants supplied with the game for a short time. "For the whole first year, we scrambled to keep up with demand", he said. "It probably took years off of our lives." World of Warcraft had approximately 11 million subscribers as of 2010. On October 3, 2018, Morhaime announced he was stepping down as the company president and CEO, instead becoming an advisor to the company. Morhaime was replaced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer on World of Warcraft. His advisory role concluded on April 7, 2019.
In 2012, Morhaime made a cameo appearance on The Guild, a web series about the lives of a gamers' online experiences with an MMORPG that draws references to World of Warcraft. He is known for his work with the gaming community, but also worked on.
