In a shocking announcement yesterday, Greg Street, who is known by his screen name “Ghostcrawler”, revealed that he is leaving Blizzard Entertainment. According to Street’s personal facebook account, he will be pursuing a “great opportunity for something new and exciting.”
Below we have included a screenshot of Street’s original announcement from facebook:
Shortly after posting this facebook announcement, Street made his official announcement on the official World of Warcraft forums. As the Lead Systems Designer for Blizzard, he had a substantial impact on the features, class/spec design, and balance of World of Warcraft. His blue posts and tweets have always been a center of community love and hate. Personally, I always appreciated Greg’s bluntness and deep community interaction. When I think about blue posts or Blizzard, Greg Street is one of the first names that comes to mind. Blizzard, and World of Warcraft, will certainly be a different place without him. However, Greg assures us that he would not have left if he did not think that WoW was in very capable hands. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that the impact of his departure will not result in potential long-run changes to the game.
Whether you loved or hated him, it is undeniable that Greg Street has been a major figure in the World of Warcraft community and design for a number of years. We wish him the best and I cannot wait to play whatever he designs next. (Wildstar?)
UPDATE (12/2/13): Ghostcrawler’s twitter biography section has slightly changed to reflect his departure from Blizzard. More importantly, it gives his job title at his new job (redundancy rocks):
You’ll notice is says Lead Designer, which rules out some possibilities. Some people speculated he was leaving the video game industry and going back to something related to his PhD (Marine Biology). Thankfully, Street is still going to be designing video games (hopefully MMOs). Does this increase the likelihood that he has moved to Wildstar?
Healcraft 