Irvine’s Blizzard Entertainment Inc. is sitting on a potential goldmine—a collection of artwork from its massively popular online video games.
For now, Blizzard, the biggest maker of online games and the largest software company in Orange County, is collecting art from its games and trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with it.
“I know there is a huge interest,” said Tim Campbell, Blizzard’s official curator and a member of its creative development team. “We definitely have a big fan base, and people love the art.”
Blizzard’s blockbuster “World of Warcraft” game counts some 11 million players who pay a monthly fee to battle others over the Internet.
The game is built around a fantasy world of orcs, elves and trolls. It’s a billion-dollar business for Blizzard, part of Vivendi SA’s Activision Blizzard Inc., based in Santa Monica.
In 2006, Blizzard tapped Campbell, a Walt Disney Co. veteran, to store and organize a growing archive of digital files as well as sculptures, animation, pencil sketches and oil paintings.
“For the past three years we have really been trying to create a system where all the art is safe, accessible and reusable,” Campbell said.
Blizzard’s art database has some 110,000 items and grows each day.
Company Uses
For now, most of Blizzard’s art is used for its own purposes.
“My job is in preserving and providing access to the art for use across the whole company and for sharing information between games,” Campbell said.
The art is used in a variety of ways: to inspire creativity among workers, for promotional materials, for licensed swag and to decorate Blizzard’s Irvine campus.
The only original Blizzard art that’s been released to the public was through a handful of charity events in which signed artwork was auctioned off.
Blizzard declined to say how much the original art was auctioned off for.
Some art is licensed and made into limited-edition collectables, including coffee table books, stuffed animals, trading cards, card games, calendars, action figures, miniature figurines and other items.
“You can’t go to your local drug store and buy a piece of Blizzard art. It’s just not there,” Campbell said. “We are really conscious of the special nature of what we are doing and the value it has to us internally and the value it has to our players. When we give them something, they know it’s special.”
Blizzard’s licensing and creative development teams are choosy about what kind of art is used on mass-market swag.
“The licensed stuff is limited edition, high-quality and very true to the look of the games,” Campbell said. “It’s not made of cheap plastic or something you will throw away in a year. When we do make a product out of our artwork, we want people to go, ‘I have something special.’”
“World of Warcraft” has an artistic style that’s colorful and bold.
“It’s larger than life—there are spikes and skulls and a lot of red,” Campbell said. “They decided to go with this really cool, identifiable and painterly style.”
Another game, “StarCraft II,” is what’s known in the industry as a “real-time strategy game” in which three groups face off in a fictional world.
“It has a science fiction look,” Campbell said.
Another game, “Diablo,” takes place in the underworld, where the protagonist battles Diablo, the Lord of Terror in hell. Its look has elements of “both horror and fantasy,” Campbell said.
There’s some debate as to what constitutes “art” in the uncharted waters of online video games. Blizzard’s repository of art is mostly digital files, which can be replicated for sale over and over again.
But there also are more rare pieces, including rough sketches done on the fly during Blizzard’s early years.
“All of these things are useful as reference or inspiration for other artists who are going to come along, wanting to know how something was arrived at or wanting to emulate it,” Campbell said. “Absolutely, the art on napkins counts.”
Whether digital or physical, it’s all fine art to Blizzard, according to Campbell.
“We are addressing the aesthetic value, the cultural value and the significance of this to the community,” he said. “Those are the components that don’t change from looking at traditional artwork.”
