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Every Sunday, we dust off one of our favourite articles from the archive for you to enjoy again or maybe read for the first time. As Hearthstone goes into open beta and Blizzard sits on the cusp of another potential phenomenon, we thought we'd go back to November 2009, as World of Warcraft celebrated its first five years. World of Warcraft celebrated its fifth anniversary last week. On 23rd November 2004, Blizzard launched its MMO in North America. Even though some critical features (player-versus-player battlegrounds, for one) weren't implemented, the game clearly outstripped established rivals in polish and scale at launch, and demand was so intense that Blizzard's overloaded servers spent the first few months fighting a losing battle against the tide of players.
So you can hardly call Blizzard's first steps in massively multiplayer gaming tentative. Nevertheless, WOW in its early days was a shadow of what it has become over the last five years, in terms of the quality of the game itself as well as the size of its player-base (two million in June 2005, 12 million today) and its impact on popular culture. You can trace that journey on this site: in the news and in reviews (the original 8, the re-review 10, the reviews of the Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions). Best of all, you can hear the story of its development in the words of its developer, in parts one and two of our exclusive Making of World of Warcraft.
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