In World of Warcraft , a former Blizzard tester talks about a brown bear that was extremely deadly. In its original form, the bear was a killing machine and practically invincible. Even today, there are jokes at Blizzard about the “Death Bear from the Arathi Highlands,” which killed testers in seconds.
What was special about the bear? The Death Bear appeared when Blizzard was internally testing the first WoW expansion “The Burning Crusade.” The bear would kill the poor testers in droves.
The problem with the bear was: It could look at a player and that player would instantly die. Game Designer Joe Magdalena shared this first on Twitter and then with the U.S. site Kotaku.
The bear simply could not be defeated because it killed everyone in the blink of an eye:
The bear looked at you and you just died.
Joe Magdalena, Twitter
The WoW testers initially could not figure out why this bear was so deadly.
The Legend of the Death Bear
Why was the bear so deadly? Magdalena was a tester for Blizzard at the time. He recounts that when checking the combat logs, there were multiple entries saying “Brown Bear hits you for 1, Brown Bear hits you for 1, Brown Bear hits you for 2, Brown Bear hits you for 1” – but extremely often. These entries appeared hundreds of times in the logs.
The brown bear didn’t hit hard, but incredibly fast.
This was the problem: Magdalena says that the QA team checked the bear’s stats. The bear’s attack speed was 0.002 – it should have been 2.0. This meant that the bear was hitting every two thousandths of a second. This made it so deadly:
“A lot of development happens in spreadsheets and databases, and this was probably just a typo. A misplaced comma created an unspeakable horror.”
Joe Magdalena on Kotaku
Magdalena says that for a moment they considered leaving the bear in the game, but that was simply too unfair. No one had a chance to react to this bear at all. It could not stay in the game like that.
But by now, this legend of the “Death Bear” has apparently become part of Blizzard culture. While players talk about the 5 biggest villains from World of Warcraft, this bear has remained in the memories of the testers from back then.
Magdalena says that he currently works on Hearthstone – he could imagine using such a death bear as a gag for a dungeon run.
