Earlier this year, American video game designer, Chris Metzen left video games company Blizzard Entertainment and retired from the whole business of video gaming at the age of 42 years old. Metzen worked for the company for 23 years and helped create many of Blizzard's famous game franchises, such as Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo.
According to Eurogamer.net, Metzen stated his reasons for leaving the industry on a podcast with Scott Johnson. "Leaving Blizzard was an incredibly difficult thing," he said during a special episode of The Instance podcast. "I'd been there since, essentially, I was a kid. I think I was 19 when I got hired and it was my whole life, it was my identity. And it was in many ways, all-consuming. It was just incredible, but there can be a cost sometimes to running that hard."
Metzen also explained in the podcast the effects of the development of Blizzard's first-ever released first-person shooter game, Overwatch, which was originally brought forth from a cancelled game known as Project Titan. The game was developed for seven years, in which Metzen felt burned out really hard, until it was cancelled.
"I think in my heart, I needed a change in my life," he said, according to Gamespot. "I wanted to slow down, I wanted to just not carry the weight of it all. But when you've been at a company like Blizzard for as long as I have, I think about Shawshank Redemption: I'm an institutional man now. I'm a Blizzard guy, through and through. I love that place. I love the people. It made me feel schizophrenic."
Even though Overwatch became a huge success, the game's development caused him severe stress that led him to experience panic attacks. "Before I finally retired, I think I had been having panic attacks all the time, but I didn't know what they were. Kat (Metzen's wife) and I would go on dates to go to a movie and almost all the time, I would start panicking in the middle of a movie. I had no idea what was going on." Another reason for retiring was for his newborn daughter. Chris Metzen was known as the face of Blizzard Entertainment, and also the senior vice president of story and franchise development before leaving the company.
