Inside Blizzard

Blizzard Interviews Mike Murphy

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As part our series of Inside Blizzard interviews, we spoke with Mike Murphy, Database Engineer, IT - Infrastructure Engineering. Mike celebrated 20 years of service last year! Congrats Mike!

Can you tell us in your own words what your job is?

I work as a database engineer here at Blizzard. I help tune, upgrade and safeguard the databases powering Blizzard’s games. The job involves research and teamwork on our mission to improve the player experience.

What advice would you give people wanting to work at Blizzard?

I feel that you need to be a true fan of computer gaming. When I was growing up, I pretty much only wanted games as gifts. I still enjoy playing whenever I can.

How’d you find your way to Blizzard?

I was working a tech support job for desktop printers while going to school and found out that Blizzard was hiring for technical support reps as well. I was familiar with building my own gaming rigs at the time and regularly dragging my PC to LAN parities at friend’s houses.

You’ve worked here a really long time. What motivates you? What’s the best part of your job? 

One of the best parts of my job is continuing to learn new things all the time. Blizzard encourages its employees to improve themselves and provides assistance in many ways. Learning about the latest technologies and seeing if they can improve things in IT and Blizzard in general is a huge motivation for me.

What’s your most memorable Blizzard moment so far?  

I remember helping to unload the first physical copies of StarCraft off of the delivery truck into our internal sales department. I had a feeling that this game was going to do well.

What project are you the proudest of?

I’m most proud of working on vanilla World of Warcraft as a QA Lead and getting to provide feedback on aspects of the game, sometimes before anyone else.

Do you have any tales of company lore?

Our local network was not as robust as it is today. It was typical for employees to go for a short drive across campus to get the latest game build from the developers, instead of waiting several hours to copy over the build. It was also common to fax bug reports from building to building.

What’s your favorite Blizzard game? Favorite non-Blizzard game?

My favorite Blizzard games are all the games in the Diablo series. My favorite non-Blizzard game is Wizardry.

Who’s your favorite Blizzard hero/heroine?

My favorite Blizzard character is Jim Raynor. I can relate to his grit and willingness to stick to his beliefs.

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