Co-founder Allen Adham returns to Blizzard in new role after 12 years away

After 12 years away, Allen Adham — one of Blizzard’s three founders who chose to step away from the company shortly before crunch for World of Warcraft began in 2004 — is returning to the company to take the newly created role of executive producer of incubation.

Officially, his title is senior vice president, but this unofficial role in incubation is described as making sure new projects can get off the ground at Blizzard, something Adham has described as "the best job at Blizzard.". In an interview with Polygon, Adham admits that he’s excited to return: "I’m free to say it now. In hindsight, leaving Blizzard was probably the biggest mistake I made in my life. What I should have done was just take a sabbatical. I’ve been eager to come back for a decade now."

Adham was the original design lead on World of Warcraft, but left the company in 2004 to focus on his family life, and while he may have worked for Blizzard before, it’s a different company. In the time he’s been away, the company has gone from 400 employees to over 4000 at last count.

Still, Adham has been credited as the driving force behind the founding of Silicon and Synapse, the original company founded by Mike Morhaime, Frank Pierce and Adham, with Polygon reporting that Adham approached the pair while they were all on a UCLA computer science program together. As the company started to pick up some steam, they changed the name to Blizzard Entertainment, with Morhaime saying: ""Allen is the genesis of Blizzard, He’s the one who recruited Frank and I to even think about doing any of this."

You can read the rest of the interview and what this means for the company on Polygon’s website.