These days Blizzard Entertainment is such an established name on the gaming scene that it is hard to imagine the company being called something else. A great little piece over at PCGamer chronicles the long and twisted road the company took before it got its name.
Perhaps you know it was called Silicon & Synapse at first, but after that they worked under Chaos Studios for about six months as they felt the name was too confusing (some thought it had to do with silicone) and hard to spell. However, Chaos was taken and in order to keep the name they would have to pay a royalty ($100,000). And so they went for Ogre Studios, but then owner, Jan Davidson, President of Davidson & Associates, vetoed the name.
And so, Mike Morhaime and his fellow Blizzard founders picked up a dictionary and started looking for possible names. Blizzard stuck out, but apparently Midnight Studios was a late contender. Finding a word or term that passes through all the legal hoops was difficult then and even more so now.
"The thing is, it's so hard to pick a name that hasn't been used before," Morhaime told PCGamer. "You pick a name and give it to the legal department, and they start running all these checks, and they give you all these reasons why you can't use it." Another close contender from the dictionary hunt was Midnight Studios, but Blizzard eventually emerged as the clear winner. "Once we found Blizzard, we said that's it, that's the one... And Blizzard came up pretty clean, back then. Now it wouldn't, now it's ours!"