It has been fifteen long years since the “World of Warcraft” first surfaced, and it is now without question a global phenomenon and the biggest MMORPG around.
On the anniversary, GameSpot.com spoke to Blizzard Entertainment’s game design chief Rob Pardo about the stunning success of the game, the global subscriber base for which now stands at an astounding eleven and a half million users. “I was working at Interplay Productions when it came out,” Pardo says. “Interplay was publishing the first “Warcraft: Orcs and Humans” for international back then. So I had the opportunity to play it, and it was pretty exciting, because I had already played “Dune II” so I think it was really cool to see a fantasy version of that… I definitely didn’t imagine back then that “Warcraft” as a franchise would get as big as it would get.”
The first game, while reasonably successful, was not as beloved as the series would eventually become and Pardo admits “It was really “Warcraft II” that I thought really blew things open, because of Kali (the online multiplayer networking service… It came out the same month as “Command & Conquer”, so we had this huge new genre explode at the same time between “C&C” and “Warcraft II”… I definitely saw a lot of potential in the future of the RTS game, and certainly “Warcraft” was a part of that.” As for the future, all Pardo would say is that “I’m hopeful we’ll be having this conversation another five years or ten years from now.”
