When your dream job becomes a nightmare

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Photograph by Lauren Justice

Activision Blizzard was their dream job. The workplace was a nightmare.

Imagine showing up at your dream job on the first day—and finding a row of fireball whiskey shots lined up at your desk, your manager’s way of welcoming you.

That actually happened to Nicki Broderick, an Activision Blizzard employee, on her first day of work in 2011. She had never done a shot before in her life, but downed them with her manager. Later she says she was instructed not to refuse any drinks on a celebratory evening out with colleagues from a company that had partnered with Blizzard on an e-sports event, lest the vendor be offended.

“They made me drink until I was blackout drunk,” Broderick tells Fortune. “I don’t even know how I got back to my hotel that night.”

Broderick’s experience was extreme, but hardly unique. More than two dozen women told Fortune that for most of Blizzard's three-decade history they felt they were treated differently from men. In fact, they say, the demeaning and bullying behavior often began the moment a woman arrived. During new employee onboarding, men would walk by to, as some put it, “check out the crop”—meaning, of women. When a woman arrived for her first day of work, “there would literally be a group of men around her so you couldn’t even see her,” says a female current longtime employee. In the quality assurance department, according to multiple employees, including Broderick, for a time there was a spreadsheet to rank new hires on a "hotness" scale from 1 to 10—listing a woman’s best features and whether she was available or not.

Blizzard, the 31-year-old video game powerhouse known for World of Warcraft and Overwatch, is a division of Activision Blizzard, which ranks No. 373 on the Fortune 500. In 2008, Activision acquired Blizzard's parent company, and the video game maker became a unit of Activision. Still, Blizzard long retained its own distinctive culture—one that many former and current employees describe as toxic. Activision has denied “all allegations of wrongdoing” in two suits filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Over a period of several months, Fortune interviewed 29 current and former Blizzard employees about their experience. Taken together they paint a dark and complicated picture of how Blizzard, a vibrant and outrageously successful gaming startup that for its first three years employed not a single woman, became part of a Fortune 500 company that routinely allowed women to be harassed, belittled, and discriminated against.

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