What: The California studio Blizzard Entertainment, producers of the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft videogame lines:
Why: Blizzard is the Paul Masson of game companies: They will sell no videogame before its time. Over and over again, they have disappointed their many parent companies—CUC, Havas, now Vivendi, soon Activision—in their desires for a game that would guarantee massive executive Christmas bonuses. Instead, Blizzard believes that money spends as good in February as it does in December—that is, the February three years later. And money they get, as Blizzard has produced nothing but gorgeous, involving games. By not straying too far from their three core lines, they've expanded the types of games their fans will enjoy—real-time strategy, roleplaying, massively multiplayer, and so on. All those hours you've put into your WoW character are reflective of all those hours Blizzard put into its game development.
Impact: With World of Warcraft being the largest time sink in the history of games, it's not a stretch to say that Blizzard is the most powerful game company on Earth. Certainly Hasbro and Mattel can claim more of a legacy, and Nintendo and Sony can claim the platform dominance, but Blizzard sets the marching standards for the game industry. If you're going to be great, you have to try to be as good as they are. Good luck with that.
Personal Connection: I had the pleasure to be Wizards of the Coast's creative director in charge of all its Blizzard-licensed tabletop games. My favorite story from that time came from Paul Sams, the company's chief operating officer. Paul got a call from the South Korean ministry of culture and sports, which wanted him to cross the Pacific for a meeting. Stunned, he got on a plane, and was welcomed by the country's vice president for culture. Paul had seen a spike in sales in South Korea, but didn't know why—until he toured some of the country's thousands of LAN parlors and discovered they were all playing Starcraft. And only Starcraft. It had become Korea's national sport. Now that's power.
Other contenders: Pixar, the CGI animation studio whose string of brilliance has redefined what a cartoon can become; the music repackager Rhino Records, which has kept the history of music alive better than any classic radio station; Days of Wonder, the smartest board game publisher around; HBO, producer of the best shows of the last decade.