Blizzard's most senior software engineer David "Zoid" Kirsch has announced his retirement from the company and the games business.
The industry veteran has an enviable list of credits to his name, having worked for some of the biggest companies in the business and some of the biggest games of the last 20 years, including World of Warcraft at Blizzard, Dota 2 at Valve, and the Metroid Prime trilogy of games for Retro Studios.
Publicly announcing his retirement on Twitter, Zoid looked back on just a few of his career highlights in the Twitter thread. These include his Capture The Flag mod for Quake (which ended up landing him a job at id Software), playtesting Left4Dead after joining Valve, unveiling the all-conquering Dota 2 for the first time back in 2011, and a little anecdote about a video conference call where he was addressed by one Shigeru Miyamoto. Heard of him?
Back while working at Retro Studios on the original Metroid Prime (which released in 2002), he was on a conference call with a bunch of Nintendo designers, including Miyamoto. While looking at one of his miniboss designs, the Nintendo honcho called him "Zoid-o-san":
Yep, we think we'd find it pretty amazing if Shigeru Miyamoto called us by our nickname, too — and the respectful -san on the end would be the icing on the cute anecdotal cake.
While Zoid says he's retiring to focus on himself and his family, his final tweet in the thread suggests he might not be done with the games industry forever:
Happy retirement to Zoid from everyone at Nintendo Life! As for the rest of you, let us know below how you'd like to be addressed should you ever find yourself on a video call with a Nintendo legend. (Just remember this is a family site!)
