Matthew Versluys
Growing up in Australia, I discovered my passion one coin at a time in the arcades. There were so many games that inspired me. Early on I was captivated by the fantasy of being a galactic bounty hunter in Xain’d Sleena, a WWII fighter ace in 1942 or the legendary warrior Rygar, which in retrospect would have made more sense had I been old enough to have seen Conan the Barbarian before playing it.
My favorite of that era was Black Dragon, or Black Tiger as it was known in the US. After much practice I could regularly vanquish the final dragon.
Besides playing games, I would often try to recreate them on which ever computer system I could get my hands on. In high school, I obtained access to a compiler and began programming in earnest.
By the time I reached university, I found myself writing video games as much as I was playing them.
After graduating I started looking for work as a software engineer, not imagining that I’d be able to work in the games industry and then I came across a job listing for a local developer who was being published by Activision. Having a degree certainly helped, but placing first in the Tetris division of a programming contest is what landed me the job. So I joined a band of similarly minded developers working on Dark Reign during the hey day of real time strategy games.
There, I handled multi-player and networking for the game, little knowing that the experience would lead me to a career working on Battle.net.
It started tentatively, okay, terrifyingly, keeping the service alive as players combated the lord of terror in Diablo II. The responsibility of deploying changes that could impact so many players was daunting at first. Next was Warcraft III, an opportunity to be embedded with the team whilst I added adding matchmaking, tournaments and clans to the service.
Then came World of Warcraft. We were not prepared. Scaling the authentication and billing systems was a worthy challenge. StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone and finally Overwatch saw the service, the technology and the team evolve into what it is today.
There were many periods of excitement, some rough patches to be sure, but the service and the team endured them all. The real privilege was the journey, working with talented and passionate people throughout the organization, and especially the engineering staff of Battle.net whom I led for 16 memorable years.
I tried to get Blizzard to call it “Matt’s Battle.net” for a number of years, but they didn’t go for. Blizzard eventually decided to call it “Blizzard Battle.net” to avoid any potential confusion.
Bonfire Studios was the opportunity to begin anew, to explore new ways to connect players, side by side with a squad of incredibly talented developers.
Oh, you read all that to find out why my favorite food is beets? Alas, beets aren’t my favorite food, sometimes its nice to embrace my inner cibopath.
