World of Warcraft Retrospective

In celebration of the game’s sixth anniversary and impending launch of Cataclysm, Ten Ton Hammer has put together a two-page retrospective for the insanely popular fantasy MMORPG. The article covers the game’s history from the perspective of several different editors, though, so it’s not as in-depth as we might have hoped:

Even though I ended up on a server that crashed more often than a narcoleptic junkie over those first few months, and using my Mage’s Blink spell while running uphill would send me on an odyssey through the vast expanses of nothing beneath the surface of the world, it was a killer gaming experience through and through. I still recall with great fondness how we’d always know the server was about to crash. First, you’d get stuck in loot position, soon followed by a chat channel filled with people asking, “Um, why won’t my character stand up?”

But you know what? Even though we may have grumbled about it at the time, we’d still hop directly back into the queue to resume our newfound favorite pastime.

If it were any other MMOG, some of those early bugs and nutty server queues would have crushed its chances of success 2 weeks out of the gates. But this was World of Warcraft, damn it, and once you go Hogger, you never go back.

World of Warcraft has always been a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts. And the glue that binds it all together is one of the largest, most passionate groups of gamers on the planet. Thanks for giving us such a vibrant virtual world to connect through Blizzard, and here’s to wishing you another six kick ass years of WoW!