Update: Blizzard co-founder and former CEO/President Mike Morhaime replied to PCG shortly after the announcement.

"Feargus (Urquhart) and I worked together many years ago when he was a producer at Interplay," Morhaime wrote. Blizzard did a lot of work for Interplay in its early days." I ported 'Rock 'n' Roll Racing' to the Sega Genesis, and Feargus was my producer. We stayed in touch and still go out to lunch often."

"I worked on all the patches for the first few years after 'StarCraft' was released. In addition to fixing bugs, I was the one running the build scripts to create the patches and uploading them to Battle.net... I hadn't done much programming since 'Warcraft III,' but after a few years, I was asked if I would look into a graphical bug in my code. I remember being contacted by the team to look into a graphical bug in my code. The bug was that certain building animations were not playing correctly. I always enjoyed working directly on our games. That was probably what I was talking to Feargus about.

"I am very proud that he continued to support our game for years after its release."

Original article PC Gamer recently sat down with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart at the Summer Game Showcase in Los Angeles, and in a wide-ranging interview, he discussed game preservation and making older titles playable for as long as possible In a wide-ranging interview, he spoke briefly about game preservation and what studios can do to make older titles playable for as long as possible.

In chatting about the recent Pillars of Eternity patch (and the sad fact that Obsidian is not working on an Unreal Engine 5 version of Alpha Protocol), Urquhart recalled an anecdote about Blizzard in the 2000s Obsidian was born out of the closure of Black Isle Studios and, like Blizzard, is based in Irvine, California.

The stories about the various Unreal Engines "remind me that Warcraft 2 patches and Warcraft 3 patches were still being released," Urquhart said.

Mike Morhaime was one of the three co-founders of Blizzard Entertainment and served as its president and CEO until his departure in 2018. In other words, he was probably the most senior person at the company working on a patch of strategy games released in the late 1990s, years after World of Warcraft became the biggest game in the world.

"I mean, it's been years since he stopped doing that," laughs Urquhart. He says, 'I'm working on Starcraft.' Because at the time of that lunch, we had just implemented the ability to move characters from one server to another. So that would have been 2005-2006?

"StarCraft 1 was released in 1998 or something like that. Yeah, so Mike must have been working on StarCraft patches for at least six or eight years," laughs Urquhart.

The creation of StarCraft is a story in itself, but what is always clear is that these games were a labor of love for Blizzard. Sadly, development of "StarCraft 2" ended several years ago, and there is no word on what the future (if any) holds for the world's leading RTS series; according to Mike Ybarra, it may even be revived as a separate genre! (No thanks).