In 2007, "South Park" won an Emmy for an episode called "Make Love, Not WarCraft." If ever there was a sign of the broad-reaching impact of "World of WarCraft" on pop culture, that was it. Of course, having 12 million active subscribers worldwide doesn't hurt. But the company behind the game, Blizzard Entertainment, wasn't always a multinational juggernaut. Twenty years ago, Blizzard (then called Silicon & Synapse) was just made up of three recent UCLA grads with a love of video games. We sat down to talk to two of those three co-founders, Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce, about the long, strange, awesomely nerdy journey of Blizzard Entertainment from then to now.

The idea to start a video game company came from Allen Adham (the third co-founder), who met Morhaime and Pearce while they were attending UCLA. "Fortune shined on me that I happened to cross paths with Alan," said Pearce, "because Alan knew from the start that he wanted to create a company to make video games." Neither Morhaime nor Pearce had experience making games then, but Adham was confident. "Don't worry, it's not rocket science," Morhaime remembers him saying.

The company began as many new game developers do. "We started out doing conversions of games for other publishers," Morhaime explained. "We'd take a game for the PC and make it run on a Macintosh or an Amiga. It was a great learning experience for us."

Not satisfied with just making ports, the team quickly branched out into making original titles. Their first original title was called "RPM Racing," released in 1991. It wasn't until their second title, though, that people really started to take notice.

"The Lost Vikings," released in 1992, was born out of a love for another well-known franchise, "Lemmings." Morhaime recalled how the idea came about. "Everybody in the office was playing 'Lemmings,' and we thought, 'wouldn't it be cool if we did a "Lemmings" game, except you had these little Vikings running around that had these abilities.' " The end result was a clever mix of platforming and puzzle-solving, with a healthy dash of humor and charm. The game spawned a sequel ("Norse By Norsewest: Return of the Lost Vikings") and still has a strong cult following today.

In 1994, however, Blizzard created what would become one of the most important franchises in video game history: "WarCraft." As with "The Lost Vikings," Pearce recalled that the first "WarCraft" game was inspired by another title. "We had a lot of guys in the office playing a game from Westwood Studios called 'Dune 2,' which was a real-time strategy game set in that universe. We just felt like ... 'wouldn't it be cool if this was in a 'Dungeons and Dragons' setting? Wouldn't it be cool if, instead of playing against a computer opponent, you played against a human opponent?' That was our compass heading."

The success of the first game, "WarCraft: Orcs vs. Humans," was undeniable. A sequel quickly followed, bringing with it the ability to play online, which was a big request by fans.

Meanwhile, two other Blizzard franchises were in their infancy. Blizzard started working on "StarCraft," a sci-fi take on the "WarCraft" model. They also acquired a developer named Condor (renaming it Blizzard North), which was working on a game called "Diablo." The two franchises would go on to sell millions upon millions of copies.

And then came the big one. In 2001, Blizzard announced that they were working on an online game called "World of WarCraft." They had never worked on a massively multiplayer online game before but according to Morhaime, "We thought we had something that we could add to the genre. At the time we started working on 'World of WarCraft,' I think there was a limiting belief in the games industry and maybe outside the games industry, that MMOs would only appeal to the most hard-core of hard-core players, and therefore you didn't really need to do anything to make the game accessible to the wider audience. They would just never play the game. We didn't believe that."

When asked if they were concerned about taking on a project with such a huge scope, the two co-founders smirked. Said Pearce, "We weren't targeting an audience of ... more than 12 million people. We had very modest projections of what we were anticipating supporting. I think if you had told us at the time that, hey, you're going to be supporting 12 million players globally, I think we would've felt much more concerned about it at the time." Adding with a chuckle, "Mike would've probably shot it all down right away."

The surprise demand for the game actually required that Blizzard stop selling it in stores for a time, as they couldn't support the number of players logging on. "It took us about a year to catch up," said Morhaime.

Since then, Blizzard has support for the game down to a science, thanks to a staff of around 5,000 people. They've released two expansions for "World of WarCraft," the latter of which, "Cataclysm," sold 4.7 million copies in just a month. They also released "StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty" last year, which hit 3 million sold in a month. The long-awaited "Diablo 3" is in the midst of development, and, waiting in the wings, Blizzard has a new, unannounced MMO, which the co-founders remain tight-lipped on.

The future looks promising, but with all this progress, will they ever pull the plug on "World of WarCraft" and just move on to something else? Pearce doesn't see that happening anytime soon. "As long as we have a big, long laundry list of things we want to get into the game, we're happy to continue supporting it. I would be less concerned about when players lose interest and more concerned about when the development team runs out of ideas. We've got a lot of talented, creative people, so hopefully that will never happen."

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