‘A phenomenon’: how World of Warcraft smashed out of geekdom and conquered gaming | World of Warcraft

In 2004, Holly Longdale was a game designer on EverQuest, then the champion of a new genre of video game that allowed for multiplayer role-playing on a huge scale. In these online fantasy worlds, players could quest together rather than alone, adding a fascinating new social – and competitive – dimension to the static, offline role-playing that Holly’s generation had grown up with. But whenever she could, Longdale would sneak in a few hours playing EverQuest’s main competitor instead. That game was World of Warcraft (WoW).

“There were so many moments in WoW I was envious of,” she says, “and completely lost in. I remember running through Ashenvale as a Night Elf Hunter and the music and the ambience – there was a mood you couldn’t deny. Then I saw another player running in the opposite direction, a Druid who buffed me on their way by. That was when I knew I was going to be in this for the long-haul.” Twenty years later, Longdale is now WoW’s VP and executive producer at its developer, Blizzard, as well as one of millions who embraced the game as part of their lives.

For two decades, World of Warcraft has been emblematic of nerd culture, referenced everywhere from South Park to The Big Bang Theory to Family Guy. WoW became a useful shorthand not just for a certain type of gamer, but any and all geeky, nerdy and dorky subcultures. In the 00s, it was advertised by the likes of Ozzy Osborne, Chuck Norris and Mr T, with his infamous Night Elf Mohawk. It counts Henry Cavill, Mila Kunis and Vin Diesel among its fans, while a movie adaptation in 2016 grossed $439m, without being particularly good. In 2021, Blizzard revealed that players had collectively clocked up a total playtime of nearly 9m years.

There were certainly other role-playing games prior to WoW’s release in 2004. But 3D graphics were still in their infancy. The likes of Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest had large, mostly barren worlds that relied on reams of in-game text for exposition, and clunky rules lifted from tabletop games. Then along came Blizzard – a developer that had made its name and a small fortune from superb online competitive strategy games such as StarCraft and Warcraft III. Unlike its competitors, WoW’s world of Azeroth felt lived-in, with gorgeous scenic vistas and vast numbers of animals and monsters prowling its landscapes. Iconic bright-yellow exclamation marks hovered above the heads of non-player characters, letting you know a quest awaited. And, of course, you’d see other players everywhere, taming beasts, taking down monsters for quests, drinking in inns, mining ore or just running by in high-level gear that filled you with jealousy as you struggled to tackle a pack of lowly Murlocs.

It was the social side of the game that came to define early WoW. The world’s tightly curated zones encouraged players to stumble across other people as they quested through Azeroth. And when you created your character, you had to pick between two factions, Alliance and Horde, giving players an immediate sense of allegiance. Whether it was grouping up to tackle dungeons, rallying into 40-person bands to take down colossal raid-bosses, or even rushing the enemy capital as an army of low-level cannon-fodder, seemingly every player has a story about their time in Azeroth.

I still romanticise my role in sneaking up to the Alliance capital of Stormwind alongside a group of low-level Undead Rogues. What we’d imagined as a daring raid ended up with us running for our lives. Another time, I asked a better-geared passerby for help taking down a particularly tough monster in the Night Elf zone of Darkshore, only to end up chatting to him for hours. I messaged that same player for months after.

WoW was quite simply a phenomenon. Blizzard had to more than double its headcount within a year, employing legions of people to answer players’ questions, solve their technical issues and keep servers up and running. WoW racked up staggering subscriber counts, boosted further by the release of two expansion packs: The Burning Crusade in 2007 and Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.

By 2010, more than 12 million players had active monthly subscriptions. Some called themselves WoWaholics. Other players found WoW to be an escape from the limitations of real life, as evidenced by the touching story of Mats Steen, recently told in the Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. Mats had muscular dystrophy before his untimely death at 25, but he was living a vibrant life inside WoW, a life of which his parents were totally unaware until his online friends sent long messages from all over Europe telling them how their son had touched their lives. Five members of Mats’ WoW guild went to Norway for his funeral.

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But no game can stay in the spotlight for ever. While WoW went from strength to strength in its first six years, as the game aged, so did its players. As then lead game designer, now game director, Ion Hazzikostas put it in 2014: “The person who picked up the game in 2004, who was a student with tons of free time, is now a career person with a family.” Blizzard had to attract a new generation, while keeping existing fans. For the 2010 Cataclysm expansion, a decision was made to shake up the game through a massive revamp of its world, with a new design philosophy suited to faster gameplay that it was thought modern gamers demanded. The changes are still controversial.

Questing through Azeroth today is a scarcely recognisable experience compared to those early years. WoW has had several distinct eras: there’s the classic WoW era running up to Wrath of the Lich King (2004-8); the world revamp that defined Cataclysm (2010) through to Warlords of Draenor (2014); the pivot to a long endgame grind, where players could become endlessly more powerful in Legion (2016) through Shadowlands (2020); and WoW’s modern era, beginning with Dragonflight (2022) and continuing into the recently launched expansion The War Within (2024). These “eras” are so distinct that it feels as though the game reinvents itself every six or so years.

The social aspect has also changed with the times. As Taliesin – one half of the husband and wife WoW YouTube duo Taliesin & Evitel – puts it: “The way we’re social on the internet has changed – and WoW is a reflection of that; 2004 was a time of message boards and forums and a more ‘underground’ internet. The internet today is much shorter and sharper. It’s TikTok, it’s all your social media focused on one or two megasites. What we do socially on the internet has changed, and so has WoW.”

It’s common to hear complaints that WoW has changed so much that its original spirit has been lost. Players have often been left confused about design decisions they felt were inconsistent with the traditional experience. Unfortunately for Blizzard, these reached their peak following the launch of Shadowlands in 2020, precisely when a perfect storm was brewing for the company. Not only was game development upended by Covid, but in 2021 Blizzard was hit with a lawsuit brought by California’s department of fair employment, accusing it of fostering a “frat boy” workplace culture, with sexual harassment and poor treatment of women.

The lawsuit had wide-reaching implications for the company and the wider gaming industry. Several senior executives, including Blizzard’s president J Allen Brack, stood down, and the company agreed to pay millions to address gender discrimination and wage inequality concerns. The suit ultimately contributed to the formation of the first labour union at a major US gaming firm.

Within WoW specifically, the suit led to rapid changes in-game. Characters named after accused abusers were renamed and many in-game assets deemed inappropriate in light of the allegations, such as sexualised depictions of women, were replaced or tweaked. Many of the changes were ridiculed by the playerbase, who urged Blizzard to combat toxicity, rather than “turning women into fruit bowls”.

Longdale had only just joined Blizzard in 2020 when the lawsuit kicked off. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. “I was only a few months in. To see the team just devastated, wondering what the future will be, was truly heartbreaking.” The fallout, combined with the already-present malaise about the state of the game, could easily have been the beginning of the end for WoW. But a commitment from both the WoW team and the new Blizzard leadership to build back better meant the game held on. “What I’m really proud of,” says Longdale, “is that the diversity of our team has grown significantly. There’s a lot more ‘voice’ in the content that we make now – and people are creating content that is very personal, based on their own experiences.”

Every time WoW seemed at risk of losing relevance over the years, it has managed to reinvent itself and claw its way back. And while its cultural reach has lessened over time, the impact it’s had is undeniable. ountless fantasy roleplaying worlds and characters have been inspired by WoW’s pantheon of heroes. The game is in the DNA of every subsequent generation of video games that have been developed since 2004.

While the WoW of today may not spark that same wonder that early players felt roaming the green hills of Stranglethorn or taking that first ship from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdoms back in 2004, the fact it’s still going, and still changing, is testament to the incredible foundations it laid down 20 years ago. And as for WoW’s future? “My goal, and I think the team’s goal, is that WoW is more than a game,” says Longdale. “It’s essentially part of your lifestyle. It can be for your friends, it can be for parents playing with their kids. It’s a charming fantasy world that connects you with people.”