The original developers of WoW take a look at Classic. They are nostalgic and share many anecdotes from 15 years ago.
In less than a week, the release of World of Warcraft Classic will finally take place. But before players can dive back into Azeroth, Blizzard gathered some of the original developers in one room and had them play together for a few hours. The result is quite heartwarming and shows how important the beginnings of World of Warcraft were to the developers as well.
WoW Classic is already so popular that the servers will be overcrowded.
Who is featured in the video? The video shows five of the original developers who worked on the vanilla version of World of Warcraft, namely:
- Aaron Keller (3D Artist)
- Alex Afrasiabi (Game Designer, or Supporting Quest Designer)
- Jeff Kaplan (Game Designer, or Quest Designer)
- Pat Nagle (Game Designer, or Quest Designer)
- Tom Chilton (Game Designer)
Developers don’t take themselves too seriously: The entire post is full of nostalgia and also a lot of self-irony. For example, Alex Afrasiabi dramatically states: “You never forget what you added to a game first. You simply don’t forget it.”
Just one camera cut later, Tom Chilton says he absolutely no longer remembers what he did first back then.
At another point, a developer reveals that “it was all very passionate back then, so you could even compensate for the inexperience of some people” – while at the same moment a close-up of Jeff Kaplan is shown.
Back then, the developers had no plan: Especially Jeff Kaplan speaks quite openly about the fact that back then in development, there was no big plan on how everything should ultimately look. Sometimes, you just woke up in the morning, had an idea, and were so excited that you worked on it the whole day. Much of it happened intuitively back then, and the big picture only came together very late.
Or as Pat Nagle puts it:
They just wanted to create an MMORPG that they themselves wanted to play. And that’s exactly why I wanted to be part of it.
WoW Classic brings everyone “home”: In the end, Alex Afrasiabi once again takes the floor and compares playing WoW Classic again to the feeling of coming home after a long time. He says:
There’s something special about returning home. Such things happen very rarely in our lives. It’s something very special. WoW Classic gives players the chance to return home.
Do you have a similarly emotional attachment to World of Warcraft in its original form? Do you also feel like you are “home” again after a long time? Or do you feel completely differently?
