Team 5

Team 5 (also known as Blizzard Team 5) is the Blizzard Entertainment development team responsible for Hearthstone. Beginning as a "small and nimble" team of 15 members for much of the game's original development, the team has since grown to more than 70 members. Created specifically in order to develop Hearthstone, Team 5 is responsible for all ongoing game design.

Members

For most of the game's original development, the team comprised only 15 "hard-core ninjas", but by the game's mid-beta in November 2013 had begun to grow. The next few months saw the recruitment of several additional members, and the team has continued to grow since then. As of June 2015 the team numbered 44 members; by January 2016 this had grown to "about 50 people". As of September 2016 there are "70+" people on the team. After roughly doubling in size each year since the game's launch, Ben Brode stated in January 2017 that he expects the team to continue to grow, becoming "significantly larger" over the next couple of years.

Each member of the team as stated in the game's credits is depicted in their own credits card, shown during the credits reel.

Confirmed members

The only public listings of Team 5's members are found in the game's credits, which are updated infrequently and often lack more recent additions to the team. It is not therefore possible to state with certainty the current size of Team 5 or to comprehensively list its members. Below are the latest official listings of Team 5, as stated in 2019 in the game's credits, as well as some additional confirmed members.

Personnel titles are based on the latest known information, but due to infrequent official confirmation are potentially out of date.

Team 5 in November 2016

• Becca Abel - Technical Artist
• Chris Abramian
• Mark Agustin
• Jordan Albert
• Chris Allsopp
• Michael Altuna
• Dean Ayala - Game Designer (final design)
• Jon Bankard
• Jay Baxter
• Chris Belcher
• Brian Birmingham
• Laurent Bourcier
• Liv Breeden - Game Designer
• Martin Brochu - Software Engineer
• Andy Brock - Sound Engineer
• Bryan Chang - Producer
• Stephen Chang
• Jerry Cheng
• Elizabeth Cho - Associate Producer
• Cameron Chrisman
• Melissa Corning
• Jeremy Cranford
• Brad Crusco
• Rachelle Davis - Software Engineer
• Alec Dawson
• Jason DeFord
• Eric Del Priore
• Brett Dixon
• Brian Doyle
• Derek Dupras
• Josh Durica
• Dan Emmons - Designer
• Tim Erskine - Tavern Brawl Producer
• Brian Farr
• Walter Ferrell
• Bob Fitch - Engineering Director
• Robin Fredericksen
• Steven Gabriel
• Keaton Gill - Associate Game Designer
• Cora "Songbird" Georgiou - Associate Game Designer (Initial Design mid-August 2020)
• Edward "Gallon" Goodwin - Associate Game Designer (Final Design mid-August 2020)
• Matthew Grubb
• Aaron Gutierrez
• Kyle Harrison - Technical Artist
• Josh Harris
• Henry Ho
• Beomki Hong
• Isaac James
• Minshik Kim
• Nicholas Kinney
• Walter Kong
• Drew Korfe
• Keith Landes
• Jonas Laster
• Bree Lawlor
• Ben Lee - Game Director
• Haneul Lee
• Max Ma - Senior User Interface Designer
• Jason MacAllister
• John McIntyre - Game Designer
• Joe "joemag" Magdalena
• Jerry Mascho - Senior Concept Artist
• Ryan "Realz" Masterson - Associate Game Designer
• Kevin Matthews
• Max McCall - Designer
• Lorenzo Minaca - User Interface
• Cat Morgan
• Pat Nagle - Lead Live Content Designer
• Chadd Nervig - (Celestalon)
• Paul Nguyen
• Monique Ory
• JC Park
• David Pendergrast
• Mason Phillips
• Matt Place - Senior Game Designer
• Evan Polekoff
• Dan Priestly
• Puffin - Associate Game Designer
• Ricardo Robaina
• Derek Sakamoto - Senior UI Designer
• Camille Sanford
• Charlene Le Scanff - Concept Artist
• Giovanni Scarpati
• Christian Scharling
• Jason Shattuck
• Steve Shimizu
• Jeffrey Shyy
• Davide Spicuglia
• Alex Tsang
• Steve Walker
• He-Rim Woo
• John Yang - Senior Game Designer
• YoungWook Yang
• James Yen
• Christopher Yim - Mobile Software Engineer
• Seyil Yoon
• Kris Zierhut
• Xifang Zhang
• John Zwicker - 3D Modeller

Former members

• Ben Brode - Game Director. Left the company in April 2018.
• Hadidjah Chamberlin - FX Artist. Left the team in July 2020 to work on another Blizzard project.
• Jason Chayes - Production Director. Moved to an unannounced StarCraft project and later left the company after the project's cancellation in May 2019.
• Ryan Chew - Software Engineer. As of at least March 2016 is now working on Overwatch.
• Hamilton Chu - Executive Producer. Left the company in April 2018.
• Eric Dodds - Former Game Director. Moved to an unannounced StarCraft project and later left the company after the project's cancellation in May 2019.
• Mike Donais - Design/Balance. Left the team in January 2020 to work on an unannounced Blizzard project.
• Jomaro Kindred - Senior Concept Artist. Left in August 2018.
• Dave Kosak - Lead Mission Designer Left in October 2020.
• Brian Schwab - AI and gameplay engineer. Member from 2011 or earlier. Left some time shortly before August 2014.
• Michael Schweitzer - Senior Client Engineer. Left in mid-2018.
• Shay Pierce - Involved in prototyping and coding. Member since at least early 2009, appears to have left some time prior to March 2013.
• Ben Thompson - Lead Artist. Left the company in November 2019.
• Peter Whalen - Senior Game Designer. Left the team in January 2020 to work on an unannounced Blizzard project.
• Yong Woo - Lead Producer. Left in August 2018.

Non-Team 5 developers

Team 5 is assisted in its role as primary designers of the game by various other Blizzard employees. For a full list see Credits (list). A few notable members perform a particularly significant role in the game's development, and are listed below. Some of these employees may be part of Team 5, but without official confirmation.

• Jeramiah Johnson - Senior Cinematic Artist

Former

• Micky Neilson - Listed as Story Lead in the game's original credits. Left Blizzard in March 2016.
• Rob Pardo - Listed as Chief Executive in the game's original credits. Left Blizzard in July 2014.

Teams

Team 5 itself breaks down into several more specific teams, many of which in turn contain sub-teams or groups, each dedicated to a specific area or phase of the production process.

In February 2017 Dean Ayala explained how the design team breaks down:

Design team is around 15 people now. Live Content (Brawls, Firesides, Other Events), Initial Design (Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme), System Design (Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems), Final Design (Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design), and Mission Design (Mission Design, Card Design). We also have Ben that directs the ship and another sort of jack of all trades designer than works a lot on new player experience, matchmaking, and flavor things. That said, well all help each other out quite a bit and the real list of things each individual person does is more like 20 bullet points rather than 2. That's the general jist though.

Ayala explains that the majority of Team 5 members work primarily in other areas:

There are many other people of various disciplines like art, engineering, production, community, QA, customer support, marketing, business, etc that make an equally large impact on the game.

UI has the difficult task of trying to make everyone's ideas work on PC/Tablet/Phone in addition to a bunch of other additional art tasks they get pulled into.

For more information on the role each team plays in the design process, see Design and development of Hearthstone#Card creation.

Creation

The original 15 members of Team 5, being presented at Blizzcon 2013 by Eric Dodds and Ben Brode

"There were all these new platforms emerging that people were playing on. We loved those platforms as well. We wanted to figure out if we could make a team who could jump in and do those type of games. That was the impetus for starting up this group called Team 5." - Jason Chayes

Team 5 was created in 2008 specifically for the development of Hearthstone, with the intention of taking a different approach to game creation than that previously taken by Blizzard in developing its games, with 50+ person teams and multi-year development cycles. Team 5 was created with the intention of working on a smaller scale but at the same level of quality. The mandate for the team was to keep the team very small, and to "think of ways to develop a game that might be non-traditional within Blizzard's walls". The smaller team required its members to be "old-school" "garage programmers" and able to "wear a lot of different hats", with far less specialization than that typically found in larger teams.

The initial composition of the team included long-time Blizzard veterans and "new blood brought in specifically to help [Blizzard] create a type of game the developer had never done before: a card collecting game."

Team 5 was created in 2008, but for a long time was a very small group of less than 15 members, mostly focusing on prototyping. Full development appears to have started spring 2012. Team 5 was first announced along with Hearthstone itself at PAX East in March 2013, by which time it had grown to 15 members.

Team 5 was initially known as "Team Pegasus".

Notes

• While each team member has a specific focus, the designers "all work together on pretty much everything". The design team is "very collaborative", with designers exchanging input and feedback across different areas, ensuring the whole team is "on the same page".
• Every Thursday the team holds "a big team playtest", to provide feedback on the latest card set, changes or game feature, with "the whole team" playing and providing input.
• With regard to iterative design, and ongoing management of the game, Mike Donais explains, "[The] Hearthstone [team] has a philosophy of not having specific rules in general. We just want to be open-minded, see what happens, learn from feedback and our mistakes, and so on. So we’re going to keep deciding as we go, and listening to people."
• Knowledge of Warcraft lore is a prerequisite for many or possibly any position on the team. Advertisements for positions such as associate game designer list "Extensive knowledge of the lore and setting of World of Warcraft" as a requirement alongside card design skills and a passion for games.
• The Hearthstone art team is made up of "generalists", meaning they each have 2 or 3 different things that they do very well. The team members have a strong affinity for Hearthstone's "whimsical/charming" art style, and are proficient at creating assets that feel hand-painted.
• The success of Team 5 as a smaller development team appears to have led Blizzard to seek to emulate this success with the creation of more small teams. A Blizzard job listing for a Lead Producer stated, "With Hearthstone, Blizzard has revived its tradition of creating small and nimble game teams and we are following in those footsteps". The job listing may have been related to Blizzard's then-unannounced team shooter Overwatch.
• By the time an expansion is released, Team 5 are "already working a lot on future expansions", including "not only the next [expansion] but the one after that as well". Former Game Director Ben Brode states that the team always have "3-ish expansions in development", although it is likely this also includes adventures. According to Senior Producer Yong Woo, the developers are always "trying to get ahead of the curve". In April 2018, shortly after the release of The Witchwood, Ben Brode stated that the next set had passed through final design, the stage in development during which Team 5 focuses on refining the balance and clarity of the set's new cards. The set after that was currently in the final design process, and the set after was in the initial design phase, during which Team 5 comes up with the ideas for the set's general theme and for the cards and their mechanics. All in all, there are usually at least three sets that Team 5 know about but which players don't yet know about. Later in 2018, the expansion development process was described as a full year cycle with different people working on it for about 16 weeks per team. First, the initial design team spend about 16 weeks nailing down the mechanics, art, and voice overs for the set before passing it onto final design, who refine and tweak the set's mechanics to "make an awesome set that's fair and fun, has cool themes, and all that stuff". At the same time, artists work on creating the card art and golden card animations. When final design starts finishing up, the team records all of the voice lines for the cards while the sound department engineer the various sound effects and the effects artists create the in-game visual effects and animations. At this point, when final design is done and animation is in progress, the engineering team spend time "cleaning up [...] whatever horrible things we've done in design" to ensure that cards function on a technical level and don't cause server or client crashes. The set then heads towards the very end of the cycle, at which point the PR team starts working on how best to market the set and reveal all of the various cards before it is finally released and becomes available to players.
• As a general timeline, Initial Design for a set takes about 4 months, Final Design takes another 4 months, then there's 4 more months after that for programming/VFX/VO/publishing/etc and release.

Trivia

• Team 5 and other Blizzard employees do not receive a full complement of cards for their personal use, but must purchase packs or otherwise collect their cards like other players. However, employees do receive some of their bonus money in "Blizzard bucks", which can be spent on products such as card packs.
• Some members of the game's design team play exclusively free to play. Others have free to play accounts they play in addition to their main accounts.
• Team 5 communicate and collaborate using a variety of media, including meetings, calls, emails, and even internal wiki documents.
• The team sometimes hold PechaKuchas, fast-paced slide presentations intended to help the developers get to know each other a little better. Ben Brode explains, "Somebody gets up and does a 15 or 20 minute presentation about their life, or where they came from, show some baby pictures and tell some stories; it's super fun and brings the whole team closer together."

Gallery

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  Team 5 in November 2015

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  "Our group pic of the #Hearthstone Dev team might have gone better if we HADN'T launched on mobile."

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  A team meeting in the new 'tea room', January 2015

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  Team 5 in November 2014

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  The team gather round to watch Yong Woo play

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  Team 5 and friends in April 2014

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  The original 15 members of Team 5, plus a few extra guests

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  Team 5's original announcement at PAX East 2013

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  Team 5 in 2011: "Once upon a time Team 5 was 10 dudes and a QA homie."

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  An embryonic Team 5 on a trip in early 2009

Videos

• The Angry Chicken #100: “May the Chicken be with You” (2015-09-01) - Team 5 tribute reel. (2015-09-01)
• UI position recruitment video (Ben Brode, Derek Sakamoto, Max Ma) (2016-06-10)

Known changes

• Unknown date prior to March 2017: Charlene Le Scanff has joined Team 5. (Likely late 2016.)
• (2017-02-13): Puffin has joined Team 5.
• November 2016: Lorenzo Minaca is unofficially announced as a new member of the team. Dave Kosak joins the team.
• May 2016: Martin Brochu has joined the team.
• Unknown date between January 2016 and November 2016: Matt Place has joined Team 5.
• July 2015: Peter Whalen has joined Team 5.
• Unknown date between June 2015 and April 2016: Dan Emmons has joined Team 5.
• Unknown date between June 2015 and March 2016: Ryan Chew is now working on Overwatch.
• Patch 2.7.0.9166 (2015-06-15): Several additional members are now listed in the game's credits. Some of these are known to have joined the team previously, while others were previously unknown: Beomki Hong, Brian Birmingham, Cameron Chrisman, Christopher Yim, Dean Ayala, Elizabeth Cho, Eric Del Priore, Henry Ho, He-Rim Woo, JC Park, Jeremy Cranford, Jerry Mascho, Jomaro Kindred, Jon Bankard, Jonas Laster, Keith Landes, Max Ma, Max McCall, Robin Fredericksen, Ryan Chew, Seyil Yoon, Tim Erskine, Walter Kong and Ryan Masterson. Hamilton Chu is now listed as a member of Team 5, previously listed separately as an Executive Producer (section now removed).
• Unknown date, between May and December 2014: He-Rim Woo has joined the team.
• (2014-08-27): Ryan "Realz" Masterson has announced he is joining Team 5 as an Associate Game Designer.
• (2014-06-??): Max Ma has joined the team as Senior User Interface Designer.
• (2014-06-16): August Dean Ayala has joined Team 5.
• (2014-06-10): Jomaro Kindred has joined Team 5.
• (2014-05-07): Max McCall has been announced as the newest member of the team.
• Patch 1.0.0.4944 (Open beta, 2014-03-11): Becca Abel, Bryan Chang, Mike Donais, Jason MacAllister, Ricardo Robaina and Christopher Yim are now also listed as part of Team 5.

See also

• Category:Blizzard employees - a list of major Blizzard employees involved in producing Hearthstone