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February 17 - February 20, 2025
“You want your players right from the start to feel heroic and powerful,” he said.
In other words, Warcraft II had to be easy to learn, yet difficult to master.
“It’s the reason we don’t have sex anymore!” —Actual quote from the wife of a tech support caller
“We wanted to do this so badly that we signed one of the worst contracts in the history of the universe,” said Brevik.
The downside to keeping the suits out of the company was that sometimes the suits knew what they were doing.
The idyllic days when everyone at the company had been close friends, playing games and going out to lunch together, seemed like a lifetime ago. Now, mutiny was on the horizon.
“You get the fans you go after,” said Mary Kenney, author of the book Gamer Girls: 25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry. “You can make games that appeal to women without having any women on your team, but you can’t make games that feel authentic, thoughtful, and reflective of women’s experiences without giving them the power to make or break creative decisions in production.”
“In today’s world, we would’ve been fired on the spot,” said Stinnett. “Back then the reaction was: ‘Don’t ever do that again. But that was really fucking funny.’” Professionalism would come later.
World of Warcraft sold more than 240,000 copies in a day, breaking every computer game sales record in existence.
If you were to try to pinpoint the exact date that World of Warcraft became a cultural phenomenon, one strong contender would be October 4, 2006, nearly two years after the game’s release.
By the end of 2008, eleven and a half million people were paying monthly to play World of Warcraft. In other words, the land of Azeroth had a larger population than countries like New Zealand, Norway, and Greece.1
Thousands of fans swarmed the arena to watch a short teaser trailer, which spotlighted a gruff Terran marine putting on his gear and proclaiming what everybody in the crowd was thinking now that it had been nearly a decade since the first StarCraft came out. “Hell,” he said. “It’s about time.”
