Our Blizzard Theme Week articles

The complete history of Blizzard games on PC

Read more: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth review

The story of Battle.net

How Blizzard got its name

The inside story of Warcraft Adventures: Blizzard's lost point-and-click adventure

Climbing Starcraft 2's cut-throat multiplayer ladders

What we want from World of Warcraft in 2017

How Blizzard coped with World of Warcraft's blood plague and other disasters

The Diablo games and expansions, ranked from worst to best

What we want from Overwatch in 2017

At the end of December, the grandfather of the action-RPG turns 20 years old. One more year, and the Lord of Terror will be old enough to drink in the United States! But now is a good time to celebrate anniversaries, because as Diablo turns 20, Blizzard Entertainment also turns 25—2016 marks two and a half decades since Allen Adham, Michael Morhaime and Frank Pearce, fresh out of UCLA, started a small company called Silicon & Synapse to port games to the Super Nintendo for big publishers like Interplay. Soon they were making their own games like The Lost Vikings, and within a few years they blew they'd released a PC game so successful they never looked back.

Blizzard's games—more specifically, that incredibly successful PC game, called Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness—got me into PC gaming. I pored over the manual religiously, re-reading the lore, utterly transported by Chris Metzen's grisly B&W sketches. I may have written a short and very bad fantasy novel in middle school, shamelessly ripping off the Warcraft lore before I'd ever heard the words "fan fiction." Today Overwatch is filling the same role for more than 15 million Blizzard fans new and old . Considering Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo are still some of the biggest names in PC gaming, it's hard to believe Blizzard's latest is, somehow, even bigger.