Stay Awhile and Listen

Author's Note: Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I - Narrative Edition contains no supplementary material. For additional content, refer to Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I Legendary Edition. - 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 1 invites readers to discover the origin of 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.

Orcs and Humans. Angels and Devils. North and South. Harmony and Discord.Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II - Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels continues the saga of the two Blizzards-Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the groundbreaking WarCraft series of strategy titles, and Blizzard North, architect of Diablo's digital hellscape-as both studios struggle to find their identity and forge a path forward.Threatened by competition in the space they popularized, Blizzard Entertainment looks to the stars to build a new franchise and evolve into a well-oiled machine. No longer the underdog, Blizzard North takes Diablo out of murky dungeons and across deserts, jungles, and snowy mountaintops.Success comes at a cost. Corporate greed threatens to overshadow artistic breakthroughs, new talent throws company cultures into flux, and a passion to be the best result in brutal work schedules, broken relationships, and creative burnout that incapacitates visionaries and leaves their teams directionless.Weaving together the making of bestselling products and the crucibles of the people who made them, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II tells the story of two teams that formed an unstoppable juggernaut even as they proved too combustible to co-exist.