‘Play Nice’ Author Talks Biggest Revelations From Activision Blizzard Tell-All Book: Bobby Kotick vs. Mike Morhaime, Strip Club Excursions and Prosecutor Chris Christie

Towards the beginning of video game journalist Jason Schreier’s new book, “Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment,” it’s revealed that “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary” author Andy Weir once worked at and was subsequently fired from Blizzard during the making of “Warcraft II.”

“So many people were shitty to me, I have to assume I brought it on myself in some way,” Weir says, explaining how he took a pre-planned trip during the final stretch of game programming in 1995 and was bullied for hid choice and soon fired for his poor performance as a programmer at the then-Mike Morhaime and Allen Adham-run game publisher.

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And that’s just the tip of the Blizzard-history iceberg revealed in Schreier’s book, which hit shelves Tuesday, as it details the company from its founding through its merger with Activision to its most recently acquisition by Microsoft.

“I really was pleased with is just how many little details and astonishing stories came out of the reporting process. There’s a lot of stuff in here that is previously unreported,” Schreier, who covers the gaming industry at Bloomberg, told Variety. “In the 1990s, Blizzard had to deal with a parent company that was investigated by the SEC for massive fraud, and whose CEO went to jail, and was prosecuted by Chris Christie, of all people. Then there is also the culture and the strip clubs and the hotel bans and the fist fights, like all those crazy times in the ’90s, ranging from that to the really wild stories about games like ‘Hearthstone’ and ‘Heroes of the Storm’ and the ways Blizzard did and did not create cultural phenomenons. The way they were able to capture lightning in a bottle, in some cases, and just totally missed the boat, to mix metaphors, in other cases, all the way up until today, and hearing some stories of people who, just last year, moved to Irvine to get jobs at Blizzard only to then be laid off. There’s just a ton of stuff in here. And it’s not all bad, I should say. There’s a lot of really interesting and provocative and heartwarming stuff about the creative process that I think will really resonate with people. I don’t think it’s a bleak book by any means, either.”

But by far the biggest revelation for Schreier was just how deep the internal struggle between Activision’s Bobby Kotick and Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime went as the companies grew and merged.

“It tells this really interesting story about business needs versus creative interests, and what happens when they have to work together, and what happens when they’re opposed, and all of the twists and turns that came with these two companies that really just seem like oil and water, in a lot of ways,” Schreier said. “These two companies that were really on extreme ends of a spectrum, just trying to find a way to make it work and really failing. That to me is the revelation. I know it’s not as sexy as like, oh my god, you won’t believe who kissed whom, but like the Bobby Kotick vs. Mike Morhaime, to me, is one of the most interesting details.”

Schreier began writing “Play Nice” prior to California filing a now infamous lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for sexual misconduct and before sales talks began with Microsoft, and his book evolved as those news beats continued throughout the formation of the story.

“The ending of this book was actually originally very different, because I finished my first rough draft around December of last year, January of this year,” Schreier said. “And shortly after I filed it to my editor, Microsoft laid off 1,900 people, a lot of them from Blizzard, and canceled a survival game. And there was and the president at the time, Mike Ybarra, who left and was replaced. And I was like, oh, man, like, I’m glad this hasn’t gone to the printing press yet. I don’t want to spoil the ending of the book, but people who read it will find that I found this perfect place to end this particular story, and it comes full circle with the beginning, and it works really, really nicely, I think.”

With continuing ups and downs at Activision and Blizzard and new parent company Microsoft, there’s plenty more material to work with, but Schreier is pretty confident he’s closed the book on this chapter of the company’s history.

“Typically when people do nonfiction projects, they might make a paperback version later that has an epilogue, or something like that. I could see something like that working,” Schreier said. “But to me, this story is told. This is a story of the rise and fall and future of Blizzard. And obviously the future isn’t here yet. But to me, it’s capturing this 33-year saga of Blizzard. And the ending is really an end of an era in many, many ways. Anything that happens after that to me is really interesting, and I’ll keep reporting on it in my day to day work, but I don’t think that it necessarily needs to be part of this book, because this book is telling a specific story.”