World of Warcraft: Looking for Group
Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: Finding the Team is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the company’s successful launch of the World of Warcraft online gaming platform. Born out of a series of real-time strategy games in the 1990s, WoW is the world’s leading online gaming arena, peaking in 2010 with over 12 million players.
In a brief history lesson, the filmmakers walk us through the rationale for the rise of World of Warcraft through interviews with key Blizzard figures and media pundits. Ultima Online and later Everquest paved the way for the failure of Blizzard developers who kept doing what they’ve always done – turning a product consumed by a tiny audience into something that appealed to the masses.
So here’s what they do. Starting with a failed project that interviewees considered “crap,” the designers decided to steer it toward something they’d love to play — like EverQuest. Sales forecasts are optimistically set at 1 million copies within 12 months, and back-end service support is planned accordingly. They beat those forecasts within three months and were immediately working at breakneck speed to meet demand.
The company’s headcount ballooned from about 500 to 5,000, all due to the success of World of Warcraft. The game’s popularity brought it into the public eye, to the point that pop culture began to refer to it as a household name — the movies Jeopardy and South Park are examples of this awareness. Between-game slang has become so prevalent that it has crept from the digital space into the real world; phrases like “Leeroy Jenkins” (running headlong into dangerous situations with no regard for personal safety) have become memes and more.
The film’s focus then shifts to the people behind the characters that make up World of Warcraft, with interviews with players explaining why they chose the character type to play, what it said to them, and how the game became a stage for them that immersion in real life couldn’t provide. In the exciting fantasies of the world of warcraft – which is why World of Warcraft and all good video games succeed, it is a wonderful way to escape from everything that is not good.
