Even if you have never been consumed by the battle over Azeroth between the Alliance and the Horde, you probably know about World of Warcraft. The colorful online role-playing game where the likes of orcs, blood elves, night elves and dwarves band together to complete quests and vanquish villains transcended the realm of video games to become a pop culture phenomenon.
After World of Warcraft was released by Blizzard Entertainment in November 2004, millions of people paid monthly subscriptions to join guilds with their real-life friends or in hopes of making new ones. Soon it was being featured on “South Park” and in political campaigns. Then came the requisite Hollywood adaptation. The game has also spilled into unexpected spaces like cryptocurrency and epidemiology.
Although no longer at the height of its influence, World of Warcraft — known by its fans as WoW — it is still going strong: Its latest expansion, The War Within, was released in August. In honor of World of Warcraft’s 20th anniversary this month, here are 20 ways that it shook things up.
WoW was a social network before social media.
Because World of Warcraft’s popularity eclipsed its genre predecessors, it was where many people got a taste of the future of online social networks. In the game’s first year, Facebook was burgeoning but restricted to universities; broadband internet was just being widely adopted in many homes.
Gamers were used to connecting to online servers or setting up in-person LANs to play first-person shooters or real-time strategy games with a handful of friends. But entering the bustling capitals of World of Warcraft, where hundreds of players would congregate, was another experience altogether.
Before he joined Blizzard in 2008, Ion Hazzikostas was a guild leader who spent long nights playing the game while he worked as a lawyer in Washington.
“Often we would just log in and use it as the coolest chat room in the world,” said Hazzikostas, who is now a senior game director for World of Warcraft. “It was literally: Who’s on right now? And let’s just hang out.”
He added, “The guild that I played with 20 years ago is still going strong.” — A.B.
Politicians have used WoW as a campaign tool.
As part of the Democratic Party’s attempt to reach young voters online this year, Vice President Kamala Harris’s Twitch account hosted a livestream of World of Warcraft beside a Tim Walz rally.
The crowd that gathered was small, at about 5,000 people. But it was a more positive view of World of Warcraft than Maine’s Republican Party took in 2012, when it attacked a State Senate candidate who had said online that her orc assassination rogue liked to “stab things.” (She won with about 53 percent of the vote and served one term.) — J.B.
A ‘South Park’ episode about WoW won an Emmy.
The irreverent animated comedy took on World of Warcraft in the 2006 episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” where Cartman and company aim to take down a vindictive and highly ranked player. The episode, which won an Emmy, explored the addictive quality of the game and was a meditation on media fixation before the distractions of smartphones and social media. In “South Park,” that obsession reduces players to pimply, overweight addicts who cannot leave their computers. — A.A.
There is a high-minded academia of WoW.
The game has provided a world of material for scholars, who have tackled war crimes, folklore theory, coordinated group behavior and religious conflict through trips to Azeroth. — A.A.
WoW showed that subscription services could pay off.
The gold standard for massively multiplayer online role-playing games in the early 2000s was EverQuest, which had nearly 550,000 players at the height of its popularity. Within a year of World of Warcraft’s release in 2004, the company had reached 5 million subscribers.
Six years later, World of Warcraft reached its highest point with 12 million subscribers, earning the company billions of dollars thanks to monthly fees and in-game purchases.
“It was a massive portion of Blizzard’s revenue and still is,” said the journalist Jason Schreier, the author of “Play Nice,” a recent book about the company, who warned that Blizzard’s increasing focus on a single game also had its drawbacks. “Having that in your back pocket allows you, at least in theory, to keep innovating. But in practice it also ends up vacuuming all your resources.” — Z.S.
WoW said orcs could be heroic.
When orcs appeared in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, they were brutish demons that served as little more than cannon fodder for the evil Sauron’s armies. The Peter Jackson movies in the 2000s reinforced that terrifying depiction.
But World of Warcraft rehabilitated the orc’s public image. Suddenly, these creatures were capable of heroism. Orcs banded together with other monstrous races, fighting for the right to exist in a world that feared them. — Z.S.
A meeeeeeeeme is booooooooorn.
While his party calculated how to execute a dungeon run in 2005, a player named Leeroy Jenkins doomed everyone by shouting his name and barging into a room that spawns dragons. It turned out that the reckless decision was staged. But the impact was real.
It was one of the first gaming memes to break into the cultural mainstream, creating a battle cry for boneheaded bravery that has been referenced in television shows and even in the House of Representatives. — A.B.
WoW provided a case study on epidemics.
Players were frustrated when a harmful effect called Corrupted Blood spread uncontrollably in 2005. Epidemiologists were intrigued, analyzing the incident as a case study.
Corrupted Blood, which damaged players for several seconds before infecting others nearby, escalated because of a programming error that mistakenly extended the effect beyond the jungle area inhabited by Hakkar the Soulflayer. In theory, players should have died before carrying the infection too widely. But it went far beyond those borders when they used portals to travel to other regions, and was further amplified by pets and nonplayer characters.
In a preview of the real-world coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the World of Warcraft community attempted self-isolation and quarantines. But its efforts were not enough. Blizzard had to reset the server entirely. — J.B.
Celebrities are not immune to WoW fervor.
After the comedian, actor and gamer Robin Williams died in 2014, Blizzard honored him in World of Warcraft with a nonplayer character, a genie in a nod to Williams’s role in “Aladdin.” It was a permanent reminder that celebrities are gamers, too.
Several have spoken about their fandom on talk shows. Mila Kunis said that she was a pink-haired frost mage, and Ronda Rousey said that she and Vin Diesel would play every night after filming “Furious 7.” Jamie Lee Curtis detailed her plans to dress up as a World of Warcraft character to officiate her daughter’s wedding.
Henry Cavill missed the call telling him he was being cast as Superman because he was playing World of Warcraft.
“I had my priorities straight,” he told Conan O’Brien, adding, “It was an important part of a particular dungeon that I was going through.” — J.B.
Steve Bannon participated in WoW’s fringe economy.
Rather than completing quests, impatient World of Warcraft players could spend real money on companies that promised quick access to the game’s virtual gold.
In 2007, Steve Bannon — who would later became a political adviser to Donald J. Trump — joined a company that outsourced endless hours of gold farming to underpaid Chinese workers. He secured $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors, according to the reporter Joshua Green’s 2017 book, “Devil’s Bargain.”
Blizzard attempted to ban players who traded virtual gold for real gold, and Bannon’s company, Internet Gaming Entertainment, was eventually hit with a lawsuit, restructured and sold.
Green said the experience had a lasting effect on Bannon. It “provided a kind of conceptual framework,” he wrote, “that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians.” — Z.S.
Players opened their wallets for WoW pets.
What fantasy journey is complete without an animal friend? In World of Warcraft, players can purchase pets and mounts with real money or, in a slower process of quest completion and level progression, by earning in-game gold.
Pets like the one-eyed Parrlok are largely a cosmetic addition, the cute companions that tag along on a journey, while mounts are the mighty steeds that players ride to traverse great distances more quickly. A newer mount, the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur that cost $90, left servers processing hundreds of large golden dinosaurs at once.
Players are already paying monthly subscription fees. But the market demand for pets and mounts is undeniable, said Holly Longdale, the executive producer for World of Warcraft.
“If we had seen that nobody was interested in buying them, given that we may not have an alternative way to put them in the game, we wouldn’t do it,” she said.
That love only goes so far. Longdale denied a popular rumor that sales of the sparkly Celestial Steed mount made more money than StarCraft II. — A.A.
Successful games can make bad movies.
“Warcraft” — which was directed by Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie — was a critical flop in 2016, bombing in the United States but dodging commercial ruin thanks to the Chinese box office. It is part of the canon of bad video game movies, which began with the original “Super Mario Bros.” from 1993 and lives on through this year’s “Borderlands.” — A.A.
WoW jargon spread to the alt-right.
The origins of Kek, a fictional frog-like deity worshiped satirically online in alt-right circles, are complex and convoluted, involving a cartoon called Pepe the Frog and an actual ancient Egyptian god.
But the term “kek” itself is believed to have been popularized through World of Warcraft. When players from the game’s opposing factions try to communicate via public chat, their text is garbled. If Horde players type in “lol,” Alliance players see “kek” instead.
“The phrase caught on as a variation on ‘LOL’ in game chat rooms as well as at open forums dedicated to gaming, animation and popular culture, such as 4chan and Reddit — also dens of the alt-right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. — A.B.
‘I’m a Night Elf Mohawk.’
What do Aubrey Plaza, Jean-Claude Van Damme, William Shatner, Ozzy Osbourne, Chuck Norris, Verne Troyer and Steve Van Zandt have in common? They all featured in World of Warcraft television commercials. Mr. T’s ad was so popular that Blizzard created a temporary in-game grenade that gave players a mohawk.
Celebrities are now just as likely to sell obscure mobile games as insurance. But when the first World of Warcraft spots aired in 2007, celebrity cameos in video game ads were not common.
“Some people think doing a Revlon hair commercial is really cool,” Plaza told Vulture in 2012. “To me, that’s embarrassing, but World of Warcraft: not embarrassing, very cool.” — A.B.
Cryptocurrency developers were inspired by WoW.
Some opponents of cryptocurrencies have accused developers of turning finance into a game. But the reverse is also true. Take the origin story of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Its blockchain founder, Vitalik Buterin, was a devoted World of Warcraft player when a game update in 2010 weakened his warlock and reduced the damage output of his character’s Siphon Life spell.
“I cried myself to sleep and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring,” Buterin later wrote in a blog post. “I soon decided to quit.”
Three years after logging off, Buterin had immersed himself in cryptocurrencies.
In 2022, he and two collaborators proposed a blockchain concept they nicknamed “soulbound tokens,” which was meant to build an online credential system where issuers could permanently burn tokens if recipients violated their trust. The idea came from World of Warcraft’s soulbound items — nontransferable items that can be rewarded for completing hard quests or killing very powerful enemies. — Z.S.
Many women found WoW welcoming.
Women have embraced World of Warcraft since its early days. A 2009 Nielsen report on video game players found that World of Warcraft was the most popular core title with female gamers between the ages of 25 and 54.
Many games structured around player-versus-player conflicts stoke negativity in the form of “trash talk.” World of Warcraft is not immune to bad behavior but is more generally a player-versus-environment game in which parties work toward common goals. Groups of like-minded players can form guilds to collaborate on dungeons or role-playing, helping to insulate them from players with a more aggressive play style.
“People opt into that,” said Holly Longdale, the executive producer for World of Warcraft. “You don’t have to partake. That’s what creates these opportunities for safety and comfort.” — A.A.
WoW merged our modern worlds.
Long before QR codes barged onto restaurant menus, Blizzard connected the tangible and the virtual in the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, which ran from 2006 to 2013. Scratch-off codes on loot cards could be redeemed for online rewards. — J.B.
WoW is a place to love and to grieve.
World of Warcraft’s guild system enables players to team up against bosses that can produce powerful gear when defeated. Joining your guild regularly after work or school can build relationships that extend far beyond Azeroth, where many people met their real-life romantic partners.
A striking example of the bonds that can form is chronicled in “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” a documentary released on Netflix in October.
The parents of Mats Steen assumed he had few friends because he mostly stayed inside while fighting a degenerative muscle disease. When they posted on his blog that he had died at age 25, they were shocked by the outpouring of support from his World of Warcraft guild. Several of the people he had spent his life with online traveled to his funeral in Norway. — J.B.
WoW became a virtual stage for artists.
It was exciting for Angela Washko, an artist interested in social practice, to get immersed in a virtual world that incentivized deep player connections when she discovered World of Warcraft around 2005.
But there were darker corners of the game, where strangers would make misogynistic insults if she used voice chat. “They would immediately spam me with messages like ‘Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich,’” she said.
In 2012, Washko started a four-year project with the academic name “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft.” As a virtual performance, she traveled to major towns in the game for discussions. Washko said the work was a little ahead of its time, before the widespread acknowledgment that virtual life and reality were merging together.
“The council became a way,” she said, “to discuss why the politics of everyday life that were happening outside of the screen had become reinforced and even heightened in the relatively ungoverned space of the game.” — Z.S.
WoW harnessed the power of nostalgia.
Ever miss the good ol’ days? Lots of World of Warcraft players did — so Blizzard brought them back.
In 2019, after years of clamoring from fans, the company released World of Warcraft Classic, a version of the game that stripped away years of expansions, gameplay patches and revamped graphics.
“If you think about other types of media, we typically remaster, we give the HD version, we give the color version,” said Nick Bowman, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University who has studied nostalgia in video games. “We rarely go back and say, ‘Here’s the original 1920s “Metropolis,” we didn’t touch it up, and we didn’t fix it.’”
Nostalgia for older games is growing more powerful as the average gamer gets older. Because players spend so much time in immersive games like World of Warcraft, they forge bonds and create memories that run deep. World of Warcraft “is about as close to a metaverse as we’ve ever had,” Bowman said.
“Twenty years means that there are people who have two hometowns — the hometown they physically live in, and Orgrimmar,” he added, referring to the in-game capital of the Horde. — A.B.
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