Jeff Strain designed the campaign editor for Starcraft, a 1998 release from Blizzard.

"I went down to the IS department and checked out a notebook [before racing home]," he remembers rather sheepishly, only to later admit, "You know, I got five or six hours [of programming done at the hospital] before the contractions really started."

"Are you working on [Starcraft] during the birth of our daughter?" - Annie Strain to her husband Jeff

Waking up from a drug-induced rest before the birth, Annie looked over at her husband and found him tapping away on the keyboard. "Are you working on that damn game during the birth of our daughter?" she shouted.

Strain's fingers stopped dead on the keyboard. He glanced up from the monitor to retort: "It's not 'that damn game' Annie. It's Starcraft!"

"For our parents' generation and up, [making games] is barely a job," jokes Blizzard North co-founder Max Schaefer.

Three years later, Strain admits to "still paying penance for that remark." But tales such as his are common lore at Blizzard, a company where employees often have a hard time explaining their true obsession of making games to friends and family. "Look, part of the problem is that we are making games," explains Blizzard North cofounder Max Schaefer. "For our parents' generation and up, that's barely a job!"

The thing of it is, employees at Blizzard don't see game development as a job - each project is a way of life. Amid a sea of developers who treat development as a 9-to-5 proposition, the team members at Blizzard get sucked into the undertow of work that becomes their lives, for better or worse. But when you're a company founded on the principle of only making triple-A blockbusters, enormous sacrifices and ceaseless passion are par for the course. So far, it seems to be working.
 

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