According to Mike Morhaime, Startcraft II, Starcraft Ghost and World of Warcraft were all being developed at the same time.  But when WoW started picking up steam, something had to give.

“We have to choose, we can’t do everything,” he said during a panel last week at the Design Innovate Create Explore summit. “Our vision for what’s possible directs that. We like complex games and we like casual games.”

Those choices sometimes lead to killing a game in progress.

“They were working on StarCraft Ghost the same time we were working on World of Warcraft and StarCraft II,” Morhaime said, “World of Warcraft exploded and we needed to make some resource decisions. It just wasn’t an environment in which a project like (StarCraft Ghost ) could succeed.”

Fortunately, not all of Morhaime’s decisions are followed.

The head of Blizzard said that he initially fought the push for a context sensitive interface for one of their games, because they were done with it and ready to ship.

“The entire programming staff said absolutely not, and I said absolutely not,” he said. “Adam went around me and went to a programmer and had him add it on his own.

“It luckily worked and it was very elegant. In retrospect it would have been a disaster if I had won that argument.”