Joerg: Bill, you’ve started working in the industry and for Blizzard in 1994 as the composer for Blackthorne.

Bill Roper: Yes, on the PC side.

Joerg: I remember reviewing Blackthorne for PC Player. Nobody knew about Blizzard, then. Since then, you’ve been working, mostly as the producer, on the WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises. That’s quite a career!

Bill Roper: It’s been good so far, I’ve been having a good time.

Joerg: So why on earth did you decide to leave Blizzard in 2003?

Bill Roper: We weren’t really looking to leave, to be honest, we were more interested in trying to find a way to work within the structure at Blizzard. There was a lot going on at that time, rumours about the sale of Blizzard. It was totally unclear what was going to occur, we were getting mixed signals. Our guys would come to us and say: “We’ve heard that we are gonna bought by Microsoft”. Or “we will be sold on the stock market”. We basically approached Vivendi and said: We need to know what’s going on! The problem was that we were getting nothing back, so finally, in an effort to show how serious we were about this, we send in letters of resignation: “We will resign if you do not include us in that process!”. And all we wanted to was to be able talk to someone in France! But they decided not to tell us.