Biography | John Hanke — The Haas Courtyard Where Graduation Day Sold an Online World

The Haas School of Business opened its Charles Moore courtyard in 1995 at 2220 Piedmont Avenue, a four-building mini-campus on the east edge of UC Berkeley.

John Hanke took his MBA here in 1996.

He had left the Foreign Service and crossed the country for the degree. The more durable work started in a classmate's startup.

Steve Sellers, also MBA 96, had founded Archetype Interactive to build Meridian 59, one of the first commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Hanke joined that team while still enrolled. Haas later described the firm as a startup that took root at the school.

On the day he graduated, Archetype sold to The 3DO Company. A Berkeley Sutardja Center account puts the figure on that offer at 10 million dollars.

The sale is the turning point. A foreign-service officer who had come west for an MBA left campus as a games executive.

He and Sellers next built The Big Network, a casual-games company acquired in 2000 by eUniverse for 17.1 million dollars.

The Haas buildings he used are the ones that opened in 1995 — Cheit Hall, the Student Services Building, the Gerson Bakar Faculty Building — not the later Chou Hall of 2018.

The courtyard is public enough for a visitor. The rooms where Meridian 59 was argued into existence are ordinary seminar space now.

What remains is the date: 1996, a graduation and a sale on the same calendar page.

Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Haas School of Business exterior). Portrait of Hanke: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (2016).