Michael Morhaime

Michael "Mike" Morhaime (born November 3, 1967) is president and a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment (founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse), a video game developer located in Irvine, California, owned by Activision Blizzard. Morhaime served as Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. He served on the Vivendi Games executive committee since January 1999, when Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. became a subsidiary of Vivendi Games. He graduated from Granada Hills High School in 1985. He is also an alumnus of Triangle Fraternity and received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1990 from UCLA. He is a member of ETC, a metal band formed of and by Blizzard Employees, where he plays bass guitar. His avatar is a male Troll, Mai'Kyl. 2Early Life In sixth grade, Morhaime, along with his brother and sister, purchased a video game console called the Bally Professional Arcade, first released in 1978. Morhaime discovered that the console was programmable and he figured out how to write simple games on it, building off of example programming code he found in a gaming newsletter. As an electrical engineering student at UCLA, Morhaime focused more on hardware than on softwar