World of Warcraft will celebrate its 14th birthday later this year, a few months after the game’s seventh expansion — Battle for Azeroth — arrives. In celebration of a game that’s maintained a strong, dedicated audience for more than a decade, the developers from Blizzard shared the game’s history with Wired in an excellent 50-minute video interview.
The piece features Ion Hazzikostas, World of Warcraft’s director, as well as long-time WoW developers Patrick Magruder and Jimmy lo. It starts with what World of Warcraft is and slowly builds into the game’s extensive feature and expansion history. It moves through the periods of vanilla WoW, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor, and finally, Legion.
While the focus is on the game’s update history, the video takes a surprising amount of time to touch on small, important additions like the WoW token or the transmogrification system — something current and recent players can appreciate.
All 50 minutes of this video is certainly worth a look for old players, current players, and people who barely know what World of Warcraft is.