Nothing was more illustrative of Blizzard’s cultural changes than BlizzCon, where the alcohol flowed and fans perceived employees as rock stars. Sometimes this was harmless. “It was hard to walk through there without fans hugging you and wanting to take a picture,” said designer Greg Street. Other times, it was surreal. “There’s a picture of me and Dave Grohl signing boobs together,” said artist Joeyray Hall. “If a girl puts boobs in your face and says sign them, you sign them.” And every so often, situations would get so out of control that Blizzard would have to tell employees to stop sleeping with fans.

Michele Morrow, an actress and writer, was attending BlizzCon in 2013 when she got a glimpse of the convention’s uglier side. The night before the show, Morrow was out to dinner with Dave Kosak, a top designer on World of Warcraft, and his wife Crystal when a drunken man stumbled over. “He was super wasted, and he was hitting on me with wild abandon, saying ridiculous, embarrassing things,” Morrow recalled. This was particularly uncomfortable because the man was Kosak’s boss.

Alex Afrasiabi, who had started as a quest designer during the early days of World of Warcraft, had always played a starring role in Blizzard’s whisper network. Even though he’d joined the company with no industry experience—Blizzard found him because he led a successful EverQuest guild—he proved to be a capable designer and rose through the ranks to become the creative director of several World of Warcraft expansions. He was handsome, charismatic, and brilliant at using the game’s tools to implement new content. He also had a reputation for drinking heavily, insulting subordinates, and engaging in questionable behavior with female employees. Now he was drunkenly proposing to Morrow and promising her career opportunities. “He told me if I married him, I’d have the keys to Blizzard, whatever the fuck that means,” she said. After some back-and-forth, Kosak stood up and guided Afrasiabi away from the table.

The next night, Morrow and the Kosaks were preparing to head to Afrasiabi’s hotel room, at which Blizzard staff would convene during BlizzCon evenings to get away from the chaos of the Hilton bar. They called it the “Cosby suite” due to an inside joke that had started some time earlier, when the carpet in one of their hotel rooms looked like legendary comedian Bill Cosby’s sweater. On a group chat with several other World of Warcraft designers including Afrasiabi, Kosak wrote that he was “gathering the hot chixx for the Coz,” referring to his wife and Morrow, who were standing with him. When they arrived at the suite, Morrow again had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from a drunken Afrasiabi, but the night was otherwise uneventful.

A year later, in October 2014, a stand-up routine by comedian Hannibal Burress resurfaced oldremoved accusations against Bill Cosby that led to widespread press, new allegations, and criminal proceedings. “I guess we won’t be calling it the Cosby suite anymore,” Kosak recalled joking to his wife.

But the name resurfaced in 2021 when the California lawsuit declared that “Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the Crosby suite after allegedremoved Bill Crosby.” This was not true, and the misspelling added to the overall sense of carelessness, but the allegation went viral. A subsequent article on the gaming website Kotaku shared a photo from Afrasiabi’s Facebook showing a group of eight smiling Blizzard employees on a bed, gathered around a framed picture of Bill Cosby—a photo that had seemed harmless when it was taken that evening in 2013 but was horrifying eight years later. The article, which also published a screenshot of the group texts, reported that Cosby had been accused ofremoved in the early 2000s but did not mention that the allegations only became widespread knowledge a year after the photo was taken, nor did it specify that the “hot chixx” text was referring to Kosak’s wife and friend. “It was just surreal,” said Morrow. “Everyone was being unknowingly offended for me as the subject of this text when Dave is the one who protected me and did exactly what any man should do when their boss is being a creep.”

Kosak had left Blizzard in the fall of 2020 to become a creative director at a small company called Deviation Games. When the Kotaku article hit, several of his colleagues complained to management and said they no longer wanted to work with him, according to a person familiar with what happened. The studio hired an attorney to conduct a four-month investigation and although it turned up nothing else, Deviation fired Kosak. In an interview for this book, Kosak declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure but said he had faced professional repercussions due to the Kotaku article. “When negotiating for jobs I still hear about how I have ‘a PR problem,’” he said. “Nobody actually accused me of any wrongdoing. But my value as a person—at least in the corporate world—has gone down.”

Paul Cazarez, who spent fourteen years at Blizzard before leaving in 2019, was also depicted in the Kotaku article posing alongside the framed photo of Bill Cosby. He said that his employer, ZeniMax Online Studios, put him on leave in the summer of 2021 after the article went live and then let him go a few weeks later without explanation. He said he had tried to explain that none of them knew about the Cosby allegations at the time but he was told that a teammate felt uncomfortable working with him. Later, when applying for new jobs, he ran into awkward situations—like recruiters canceling interviews an hour before they were scheduled, as if they had just been googling his name. “When I talk to friends and family, it’s baffling to them,” Cazarez said. “A photo has caused this much disruption in your career—in everybody’s career.”

The “Cosby suite” became a catchall term representing everything that was wrong with Blizzard, much to the frustration of people who had been there. “I can’t speak for everyone else’s experiences, but when I was in that room, there was nothing nefarious except for Alex,” said Morrow. Yet at the same time, women at Blizzard felt like the lawsuit was correct about one important element of the story: Afrasiabi was allowed to remain in a position of power despite his misconduct.