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The Making of World of Warcraft
2009-10-22 00:00:00
Page 1 of 5. Page 2
Eleven million players. Two expansions. $1.2 billion a year in revenue. 16GB of your hard disk. Billions of hours played. Acres of news-print. A Sam Raimi-directed movie in the works. A billion-dollar grey market in gold and items. An episode of South Park. Therapists creating in-game characters for addiction counselling. Eleven million players.
The sheer magnitude of World of Warcraft is staggering. There's nothing else like it in videogaming, a fact which makes perfect sense to its players - but is frankly baffling to non-players, and those who don't understand the appeal of the online worlds presented by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs, or simply MMOs). Perhaps because WOW is so huge, so impossible to ignore, it polarises opinions.
Yet all of this can sometimes serve to obscure the most important thing about World of Warcraft. Strip away the hype, the numbers, the media coverage and the debate, and what you're left with is simply a superb game. A game crafted with skill, love and obsessive perfectionism by an exceptionally talented team at the company that built it, Blizzard Entertainment.
If we want to talk about that game - rather than the baggage it has accumulated over the years - it makes sense to go all the way back to the beginning.
World of Warcraft first popped ...
2009-10-22 00:00:00
Page 1 of 5. Page 2
Eleven million players. Two expansions. $1.2 billion a year in revenue. 16GB of your hard disk. Billions of hours played. Acres of news-print. A Sam Raimi-directed movie in the works. A billion-dollar grey market in gold and items. An episode of South Park. Therapists creating in-game characters for addiction counselling. Eleven million players.
The sheer magnitude of World of Warcraft is staggering. There's nothing else like it in videogaming, a fact which makes perfect sense to its players - but is frankly baffling to non-players, and those who don't understand the appeal of the online worlds presented by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs, or simply MMOs). Perhaps because WOW is so huge, so impossible to ignore, it polarises opinions.
Yet all of this can sometimes serve to obscure the most important thing about World of Warcraft. Strip away the hype, the numbers, the media coverage and the debate, and what you're left with is simply a superb game. A game crafted with skill, love and obsessive perfectionism by an exceptionally talented team at the company that built it, Blizzard Entertainment.
If we want to talk about that game - rather than the baggage it has accumulated over the years - it makes sense to go all the way back to the beginning.
World of Warcraft first popped ...