Posts with tag california

As we reported the other week, Blizzard COO Paul Sams is now co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers (who are stepping up lately), and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hit up Mr. Sams for a quick interview about being at the intersection of Azeroth and Steeler Nation. Turns out the man who collects everything Blizzard has also been a Steelers fan since he was four years old, even though he's from California. And we were right with all of the speculation: he got connected with the Steelers management through Legendary Pictures producer Thomas Tull, and when the chance came to own part of the franchise, he jumped.

They also talk about expanding out to Carnagie Mellon University -- Blizzard has a thriving educational program in Irvine, but Sams says that they are looking to expand that, so Pittsburgh is a possibility. And finally, he says that the Warcraft movie is being scripted at the moment -- Sam Raimi will do Spider-man 4, and then it's all Azeroth for him. In the meantime, let's see about getting some of this Steelers news in the game -- even if we can't get an epic football to toss around, surely we'll at least see a Tauren somewhere named "Bill COW-her," right?

Now this is the sort of thing YouTube was made for. Aram Bartholl, a German artist "famous for his exploration of the relationship between the digital and physical world," did a WoW-inspired project at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA yesterday afternoon. It looks like it was a repetition of the project in the video above, which took place in Germany Belgium (sorry!) in 2008.

Essentially, he has participants construct big floaty name tags, like the names that show up over your characters' heads. The people then walk around the city with the tags floating over them, held by additional participants. The overall effect is pretty cool. If anyone was in Laguna yesterday, I want pictures and/or video, please.

Hauru on Area 52 sends us this WoW-related license plate -- he says that he and his girlfriend were at BlizzCon last year (he can apparently be seen in our badge pickup gallery, but did you come to the WoW Insider Meetup?) and bought a Blizzard license plate frame. But when he got home, he realized he didn't have an epic enough license plate, so a quick trip to the DMV later, that situation was remedied. Very nice, we like it.

We've added Hauru's pic into our license plate gallery, which you can browse through below. Seen a great World of Warcraft-related piece of car art or license plate? Send it in to our tips line, and you might see it posted here soon.

Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, California were temporarily evacuated today when a 5.4 magnitude earthquake struck the Chino Hills area in southern California. Chino Hills is about 30 miles from Irvine.

According to the information on the login screen, in-game and phone support were momentarily unavailable, however everything is now back to business as usual. No servers or other game services have been affected by the earthquake. All the technology is operating smoothly.

Our own Dan O'Halloran was in private chat with us all when the earthquake struck. He reported that while it was a good shaking, it was "nothing to go home about." Perhaps if we're lucky the earthquake shook a few more Beta keys out of Blizzard. We can only hope.

Take a look after the break for the full in-game news released by Blizzard.