Blizzard and the Warhammer Fiasco
Blizzard started its life in 1991 with just a handful of employees and a different name. It completed a few projects before reorganizing under the name of Chaos Studios (Chaos and Warhammer go hand in hand...) They realized the name was already taken and switched to Blizzard Entertainment. Their first game as a new developer was the smash hit Warcraft: Orks and Humans, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Originally, Blizzard contacted Games Workshop to make a Warhammer real time strategy game. GW supposedly gave them the go ahead and Blizzard began to make the game. Somewhere between half way to eighty percent of the way done with the game, GW pulled the license from Blizzard. Blizzard had a game almost completed without a name! They decided to rename the game, characters, and adjust the story to their own IP which they called Warcraft. This is not speculation, but the real deal. It is not that Blizzard happened to come up with similar characters, they just changed the names in their first game!
