Robert Pardo

Robert Pardo is Blizzard Entertainment Vice President of Game Design. Leading a group of talented and highly experienced development teams, Pardo supervises the overall design and implementation of gameplay features for every Blizzard game, including World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Pardo has been contributing to the success of Blizzard's games since 1997, when he joined the company as a designer and strike-team member on the real-time strategy game StarCraft. When Blizzard decided to develop an expansion set for StarCraft, Pardo was named lead designer on that project (StarCraft: Brood War). Following the worldwide success of StarCraft games, Pardo went on to oversee the design of another Blizzard bestseller, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, as well as its expansion set, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Both products received high critical scores from players and game-industry publications alike, in addition to becoming Blizzard’s seventh and eighth titles to achieve more than a million copies in sales.

From there, Pardo moved into his current position as Vice President of Game Design. In this role, he has led the design for World of Warcraft and the expansion The Burning Crusade while continuing to supervise the progress of Blizzard’s PC and console titles in development.

Pardo earned a bachelor of arts degree in criminology, law, and society from the University of California--Irvine in 1996.

He left Blizzard in July 2014.