Allen Adham (born Ayman Adham) is an American businessman and video game developer. He is best known for helping to start Blizzard Entertainment with Michael Morhaime.

Early life

Ayman Adham was born on September 6, 1966, in Los Angeles, California, to Egyptian parents from Cairo. His father was a civil engineer who worked on earthquake safety, and his mother was a scientist who studied insects. To start a preschool, his parents moved the family to Irvine, California, because it was the only town that would allow them to open a preschool without requiring prior experience in teaching young children.

During high school, Adham spent lunch breaks playing video games at arcades and created games on his Apple II computer at home. Through a friend, he was asked by Brian Fargo to test his games during the summer, first at the Boone Corporation and later at Interplay Entertainment. In his second year at the University of California, Los Angeles, Adham designed and programmed a game called Gunslinger, which was released by Datasoft. He took a two-year break from his studies to serve in the United States Army.

Blizzard

At UCLA, Adham became close friends with Michael Morhaime after discovering they both used the same computer password, "Joe." After graduating, Adham convinced Morhaime to decline a job offer from Western Digital and instead start a company called Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, which later became Blizzard Entertainment. They hired their friend Frank Pearce, another UCLA graduate, as their first employee and rented a small office in Irvine, California, to be near other technology companies. Adham used $10,000 from his college savings, Morhaime borrowed $10,000 interest-free from his grandmother, and Pearce chose to receive a salary instead of investing for company ownership.

In the early 1990s, Adham offered ten percent of the company to Fargo in exchange for Interplay Entertainment hiring Silicon & Synapse to port its games to other consoles, which provided the company with its first funding. Adham kept 60% of the company as its leader, while Morhaime held 30%. In 1991, Fargo agreed to let Interplay publish Blizzard's first original games, Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. During the company's early years, Adham hired employees based on their knowledge of video games, believing that players understood game development best.

After noticing players struggled with the beginning of The Lost Vikings, Adham required Blizzard games to be easy to learn but challenging to master. Frustrated with Interplay's weak marketing, Adham decided Blizzard would publish its own games with a brand style similar to Strategic Simulations' Gold Box games. Blizzard's first self-published game was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, which Adham modeled after the popular Dune II real-time strategy game. In a 2024 interview, Adham advised game developers to use ideas from other games instead of creating new prototypes from scratch.

In February 1994, Adham agreed to sell the studio, then called Chaos Studios, to Davidson & Associates for $6.75 million. Later, a copyright dispute forced the studio to change its name to Ogre Studios and then to Blizzard Entertainment. After Warcraft succeeded in 1994, Adham pushed staff to work long hours to release its sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, the next year. When a deal to create a Star Wars strategy game failed, employees inspired by the idea adapted the Warcraft series into StarCraft, though Lucasfilm Games denied contacting Blizzard. During StarCraft’s development, Adham hired Rob Pardo in 1997 as a quality assurance tester for his skill with real-time strategy games; Pardo later became Blizzard’s Chief Creative Officer.

At the 1994 CES trade show, Adham met David Brevik of Condor, who had managed the Justice League Task Force game for the Sega Genesis. In January 1995, Brevik pitched his original action role-playing game, Diablo, to Blizzard. Blizzard agreed to publish the game but later bought Condor, renaming it Blizzard North. Under Adham’s pressure, Brevik changed Diablo to use real-time combat, added multiplayer support through Blizzard’s Battle.net platform, and removed permadeath. During this time, Adham assigned Mike O'Brien to develop Battle.net for Blizzard’s multiplayer servers.

In late 1998, Adham tried to resign from Blizzard but was advised to take a sabbatical instead. He later returned as Chief Design Officer, while Morhaime became the company’s president. Adham approved Mike O'Brien’s plan to create Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but Morhaime removed O'Brien from the project after staff criticized the prototype for straying from the series’ roots. O'Brien resigned with other employees to form ArenaNet.

In June 2003, Blizzard North executives Bill Roper, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik emailed Vivendi Games, Blizzard’s parent company, threatening to resign unless financial protections and communication about Vivendi’s plans to sell Blizzard were provided. Vivendi accepted their resignations immediately. Adham and Morhaime did not join the threat, and in August 2005, Morhaime closed Blizzard North to move staff to Irvine.

Since the 1997 release of Ultima Online, Adham aimed to create a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). In 1999, when Blizzard’s cinematics department—founded by Adham for StarCraft—planned to make an MMORPG based on EverQuest, Adham ended his sabbatical to oversee the project, which became World of Warcraft. In January 2004, months before the game’s release, Adham left Blizzard due to burnout and handed oversight to Pardo. In 2006, Adham, Morhaime, and Pearce received the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s Professional Achievement Award for their work at Blizzard.

During his second break, Adham started a hedge fund, Tenfold Capital Management, managing $50 million in investments. However, poor financial returns led him to return to Blizzard in 2016 as head of project incubation. In that role, he oversaw Orbis, a planned competitor to Pokémon Go using Blizzard characters, and Odyssey, a survival game. Both projects faced delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Orbis struggling with scope creep and Odyssey debating which game engine to use. When Odyssey was canceled in January 2024, Adham left Blizzard again.