World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft as a real thing that happened: a game that fell over on launch night in 2004, held twelve million subscribers at its peak, produced its own accidental epidemic and its own peer-reviewed epidemiology, and supported an economy of several hundred thousand gold farmers whose largest broker was run by Steve Bannon. Twenty-two years of raids, machinima, funerals, walkouts and one line about what players think they want.

A chronological documentary of 378 moments spanning 2001–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-13

Eras

Launches & Trailers, World of Warcraft went live on 23 November 2004 and fell over almost at once, because Blizzard had badly misjudged how many people wanted this. The queue was the first thing the game gave everybody in common. This facet is arriving, the 1994 strategy lineage it came out of, the launch, and every expansion cinematic since, which are the closest thing the game has to chapter headings.
Cinematics, What was startling in 2004 was not the combat but the continuity: one world, no loading screens between zones, weather and a day-night cycle, and other real people walking through it. Then in 2010 Blizzard did something no company with twelve million paying customers should rationally do, it destroyed that world and rebuilt it, so the Azeroth of the first six years simply stopped existing. This facet is the place itself, and what was done to it.
Forty People in a Room, The hardest content required forty people to be in the same place at the same time, sober enough to concentrate, for several hours a week, on a schedule. Most of the game's organisational culture, guilds, officers, loot systems, attendance policies, exists because that was logistically brutal. This facet runs from Ragnaros in 2005 through the world-first races to the modern Race to World First, which is now a filmed sporting event with a production crew and a peak audience of 388,837.
Tarren Mill, Blizzard put two enemy villages close together in a contested zone and accidentally created years of unrewarded, unstructured, enormously popular fighting. Alterac Valley battles could run for days, handed between shifts of players. The company spent the following two decades trying to formalise that into something a spectator could watch, arena brackets, championship circuits, a dungeon league, with mixed success.
It Got Out, Some of what happened inside this game left it entirely. A player charging into a raid shouting his own name became one of the most recognised things the internet has produced. South Park made an episode and won an Emmy. And in September 2005 a debuff escaped a raid and killed players in their thousands across whole servers, which produced actual peer-reviewed epidemiology, researchers arguing that watching real people flee, help, or deliberately spread an outbreak modelled human behaviour better than the mathematics then in use.
Made by the Players, The game shipped with no filmmaking tools whatsoever, so players pointed its camera at staged scenes and made films anyway, an entire machinima scene with festivals, prizes and feature-length work. Alongside it: songs, addons that rebuilt the interface, databases the developers ended up relying on, costumes that take months, and replica weapons on walls. This facet is everything Azeroth caused to exist that Blizzard did not make.
Server Stories, A realm was small enough to have a reputation. People married out of it and held ceremonies inside it; when players died, Blizzard quietly added them to the world as NPCs, unmarked, so that most people walk past a memorial without knowing. In 2006 a guild held a funeral in-game for a member who had died and a rival guild attacked it, and the argument about what the game was for has never resolved. This facet is the population, not the software.
Who Was Farming It, By 2008 roughly 400,000 people, overwhelmingly young men in China on twelve-hour shifts, were producing gold for Western players in a market worth around half a billion dollars. The largest broker was IGE, which took $60M from Goldman Sachs and was run as CEO from 2007 to 2011 by Steve Bannon. In 2015 Blizzard legitimised the trade itself with the Token. Meanwhile the American subscription has never moved from $14.99 since 2004, while everything around it, boosts, mounts, expansion tiers, early access, became separately purchasable.
Blizzard, Blizzard spent two decades as the most trusted studio in the industry and then stopped being that. This facet is BlizzCon at its height, the designers who argued with players in public, the 2021 walkout after California regulators sued the company over its treatment of women, the $68.7bn sale to Microsoft, the layoffs that followed it, and the collapse and repair of the Chinese partnership that took the game away from three million people for 556 days.
You Think You Do, But You Don't, Asked at BlizzCon 2013 whether the old version would ever return, Blizzard told the audience they thought they wanted it but did not. Players built it themselves instead; Nostalrius had hundreds of thousands of registered accounts when it was shut down under legal pressure in 2016. Three years later Blizzard reversed the position completely, and Classic launched to queues tens of thousands deep. It has since branched into permanent-death servers, seasonal experiments and anniversary realms, several parallel versions of a twenty-year-old game, running at once.

2001 - The 2001 announcement cinematic. Blizzard's first look at an MMO set in the Warcraft world, three years before anyone could play it. Warcraft had been a strategy series since 1994; this was the announcement that it would become a place you lived in instead of a map you commanded.
2004 - E3 2004: the year before launch. Trade-show footage from the last E3 before release. What it shows is unremarkable now and was startling then: a single continuous world with weather, day and night, and other real people moving through it.
2004 - The 2004 review. A contemporary review from the month of release, written before anyone knew this would run for more than twenty years. Worth reading as a document of expectations rather than a verdict.
2004 - The original cinematic. The opening cinematic that shipped with the game: a dwarf, a night elf, an orc and a human, each introduced doing the thing their class does. It set the register for every expansion cinematic that followed.
2004-11-23 - Launch day, 23 November 2004. A player recording the first day of World of Warcraft in North America. Servers buckled almost immediately under demand Blizzard had badly underestimated, and the queue became the first shared experience the game produced.
2005-04-25 - Ascent kill Ragnaros on Medivh. Guild Ascent downing Ragnaros on the Medivh server on 25 April 2005, uploaded years later by a raider who was in it. The player's own note that they had no voice chat, and that the fiery enchant was never swapped out, is the record of how forty-person raiding actually worked in the first year. Raw fraps of a first-year kill is primary material however it looks.
2005-05-05 - Ragnaros falls, 5 May 2005. An early kill of Molten Core's final boss, six months after launch. Forty people, no voice tools most guilds could afford, and an attunement chain that took weeks before anyone could even walk in.
2005 - Relapse downs Ragnaros in Molten Core. The guild Relapse's first Ragnaros kill in Molten Core on US-Burning Blade, uploaded years later by a member with the note 'time flies'. It is not a world first and it is not polished, and that is the point: this is what the fight looked like for the thousands of guilds who ground it out behind the leaders. Period fraps footage of vanilla raiding is scarce and this is a primary source.
2005 - Onyxia, July 2005. A 2005 Onyxia kill. The fight is remembered less for its difficulty than for the raid leader recording that came out of a wipe on it, which became the game's first true meme.
2005 - Leeroy Jenkins. A guild plans an encounter in detail; one player, away from his keyboard, returns and charges in shouting his own name. It is the single most widely recognised thing WoW ever produced, known to enormous numbers of people who have never played it.
2005 - Metzen at BlizzCon 2005. Chris Metzen on stage at the first BlizzCon. For twenty years he was the public face of Warcraft's story and, for much of the audience, of Blizzard itself.
2005 - The AFK problem. Players standing idle in Alterac Valley to farm reputation, recorded in 2005. Every large-scale PvP system the game has shipped since has been designed partly around stopping this.
2005 - Illegal Danish Super Snacks. Myndflame's machinima, made by pointing the game's own camera at staged scenes and dubbing over them. It is the film usually credited with showing that WoW could be a production tool rather than only a game.
2005 - Australian television reports the in-game plague. An Australian news segment on the Corrupted Blood incident, drawing the parallel between the game's spreading disease and real epidemics. The archive already carries the incident itself; this is the moment it crossed into broadcast news and, later, into peer-reviewed epidemiology.
2005 - Illegal Danish Super Snacks, part one. Myndflame's Illegal Danish is the machinima that showed players the game could be a filmmaking tool, and it circulated on forums and fileservers long before YouTube carried it well. This is part one, in the higher-quality transfer that later replaced the compressed originals. Kept as the full first half where the archive otherwise holds only the short cut.
2005 - Molten Core, 2005. Period footage from inside Molten Core in 2005, the forty-man raid that set the shape of the next five years of the game.
2005 - The dry run. An earlier take of the same scene. The video was staged by the guild, which was known at the time and forgotten later, the joke was always that it was a joke.
2005 - Ironforge during the plague. Player-shot footage of Hakkar's Corrupted Blood debuff loose in Ironforge, bodies stacking in a capital city because a raid-boss curse escaped its instance through pets and teleporting players. The incident of September 2005 was later modelled by epidemiologists as an accidental study of human behaviour in an epidemic. This is what it actually looked like from the ground.
2005 - Tarren Mill and Southshore. Two villages placed close together across a faction border, which produced years of unstructured, unrewarded, enormously popular fighting. Blizzard never designed it; players simply went there.
2005 - Corrupted Blood. In September 2005 a debuff from a raid boss escaped into the cities through hunter pets and NPCs, and killed low-level players in their thousands until Blizzard reset the servers. It is the closest thing to an accidental epidemic ever run on a human population.
2005 - Forty people, one room. A 2005 Onyxia raid from inside the group. The logistics, forty players, scheduled, most of them strangers a month earlier, were the actual content.
2005 - Mithrid's second Onyxia kill, August 2005. Guild footage of a second Onyxia kill in August 2005, when the forty-man drop was still the gate every guild measured itself against. Vanilla footage of this vintage barely survives, and what does survive is almost all guild-uploaded fraps at terrible resolution. The uploader states August 2005 explicitly.
2005-06-27 - Alterac Valley on Warsong, 27 June 2005. Raw fraps footage of the original Alterac Valley on the Warsong PvP realm, three weeks after the battleground opened. This is what the first version looked like before it was cut down: matches running for hours or days, with NPC commanders and objectives most later players never saw. Primary footage of the vanilla battleground is close to unfindable.
2005-06-27 - Alterac Valley, June 2005. The original Alterac Valley, which could run for days. Battles were handed over between shifts of players; some ran so long that the same match spanned a weekend.
2005-10-21 - Evil Inc kill Ragnaros. A guild kill recorded and dated by its own members in October 2005. Most of what survives from this era survives because a guild officer happened to be running capture software.
2005-11-12 - Mortality kill Onyxia, 12 November 2005. A 640x480 resto shaman recording of Onyxia going down on EU-Sunstrider, found on an old hard drive and uploaded thirteen years later by one of the warriors in the raid. This is what the archive means by a primary source: a bad-resolution capture that nobody made for an audience. The kill date is stated by the uploader.
2005-12-16 - No Surrender kill Onyxia, 16 December 2005. A Swedish level-60 guild kill Onyxia for the first time, filmed by a member who says nobody else in the raid knew how to record. Footage this early survives almost by accident, and that is exactly what makes it primary material. Dated to the kill, not the 2014 upload.
2006-05-21 - The Darkmoon Faire, filmed in 2006. Period footage of the Darkmoon Faire, the travelling carnival that appeared for a week each month and existed mostly as somewhere to stand around. It is a record of the kind of designed idleness vanilla built into the world.
2006 - The funeral raid. A guild held an in-game funeral for a member who had died in life. A rival guild attacked it. Both the grief and the attack were real, and the argument about which of them the game was for has never resolved.
2006 - Chinese Gold Farmers. Ge Jin's documentary footage of gold farms in China, shot while he was a doctoral researcher at UC San Diego. A farm owner tells him that exporting virtual items is the same as transmitting Chinese labour to America.
2006 - Big Blue Dress. Cranius's song about a mage's robe, recorded and animated in-game. It is the best-known piece of WoW music made by a player, and it is genuinely a good song.
2006 - The Scepter of the Shifting Sands. Period footage of the final step of the scepter quest chain, the months-long server-wide effort that had to be completed before the gates of Ahn'Qiraj could be opened. It is the clearest surviving example of vanilla WoW asking an entire realm, not a party, to do something. Filmed years before its 2011 upload.
2006 - Illegal Danish Super Snacks, part two. The second half of Myndflame's Illegal Danish, the machinima that more than any other established WoW film as its own form. The archive carries the first part; this is the rest of the episode, released the year after it began.
2006 - Paul Sams at E3, 2006. Blizzard's chief operating officer at E3 in 2006, the year the game passed six million subscribers and became the largest subscription MMO ever run.
2006 - War in Silithus, Blackmoore 2006. Vanilla-era PvP footage from the realm Blackmoore, shot on the day the Ahn'Qiraj gates opened, when the Horde spent the whole day hunting Alliance players in Silithus instead of raiding. World PvP of this kind had no scoreboard and no reward, it happened because a server-wide event put both factions in the same zone. The maker states a March 2006 release; the 2017 upload is a re-post.
2006 - The farms, filmed. Early documentary footage of gold farming operations. Richard Heeks later estimated roughly 400,000 people employed worldwide, earning about $145 a month, in a market worth around half a billion dollars.
2006 - Bruce Hack. The Vivendi Games executive who oversaw Blizzard during WoW's rise, photographed in 2006. The corporate ownership above Blizzard changed repeatedly across the game's life; the game did not.
2006 - A farmer at work. Footage of a gold farmer in-game. The work was piecework on twelve-hour shifts, and the people doing it were overwhelmingly men between eighteen and twenty-five.
2006 - The Anti-Elf Anthem. Oxhorn's machinima, from the era when a fan film could reach a large part of the playerbase because there was nowhere else to put it.
2006 - Inventing Swear Words. Oxhorn's best-known short, and the one that made the case that the game's stiff animation set was a constraint you could write around.
2006 - Randy Marsh plays. The parent-discovers-the-game sequence from the South Park episode. The joke lands because it was, in 2006, a recognisable domestic scene in a lot of houses.
2006 - Live to Win. The montage from the South Park episode. Its target was not the game so much as the amount of unglamorous work the game asked for.
2006 - That's the World of Warcraft That You Play!. Ian Beckman's short, one of the pieces most often named when people describe the tone of the early machinima scene.
2006 - E3 2006. Blizzard at E3 in the middle of the first expansion cycle, with the game already the largest subscription MMO in the world.
2006 - The addiction segment. Local news on WoW addiction in 2006. The framing, a mother, a darkened room, a number of hours, was near-identical across dozens of these segments and set the tone for a decade of coverage.
2006 - Transcend take Instructor Razuvious on Uther. Priest point-of-view footage of Transcend's server-first Horde kill of Instructor Razuvious in forty-man Naxxramas on the realm Uther. Vanilla Naxxramas was cleared by a vanishingly small number of guilds before Burning Crusade made it obsolete, and per-realm firsts were the way most servers experienced the race. The 2013 upload is a re-post of period fraps footage.
2006 - The Ballad of the Noob. A player-made song about being new, from a period when the game had no tutorial worth the name and being new was genuinely hard.
2006 - Nihilum kill Kel'Thuzad. The world-first kill of Naxxramas's final boss in its original forty-man form. Naxxramas was famously the least-seen content Blizzard ever built: a small fraction of players ever cleared it before it was removed and rebuilt.
2006 - Resurrection. A thirty-minute machinima that won at the Xfire Summer competition, from the years when the scene had prizes and juries.
2006 - An early documentary. One of the first attempts to explain the game to people outside it, made while it was still growing.
2006 - Purged take Kel'Thuzad with Ventrilo running. A forty-man Naxxramas kill of Kel'Thuzad recorded with the guild's voice channel left in, the raid leader's calls, the panic and the noise at the moment it dies. The Ventrilo track is the point: it is the only surviving record of what forty people coordinating actually sounded like. Uploaded in 2011 from vanilla-era footage.
2006 - C'Thun. Audio and footage from a forty-man C'Thun kill. The boss shipped in a mathematically unkillable state and had to be rebuilt by Blizzard after guilds proved it could not be done.
2006 - Opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. The scepter chain and the gate event: a server-wide quest requiring thousands of players to pool materials, culminating in one player ringing a gong and a war beginning on that realm. It happened once per server and could not be repeated.
2006 - More dots. A raid leader explains a plan for Onyxia; it collapses; the recording of the collapse becomes the game's longest-running in-joke. Blizzard eventually put the line into the game itself as an achievement.
2006 - A guild's first Ragnaros. Fellowship of the Horn on Aszune kill Ragnaros for the first time in Molten Core, filmed by a priest in the raid. This is not a world first, it is an ordinary guild finishing the hardest thing in the game, which for most of 2006 was what the endgame meant. Dated to when it was played, not the 2011 upload.
2006-10-03 - An editorial on internet addiction. A 2006 video editorial arguing that World of Warcraft is an addiction problem, made at the height of the mainstream panic about the game. It is worth keeping as an example of how the argument was actually framed at the time, clinical language applied to a hobby, with no clinical evidence behind it. The claim is the artifact here, not the diagnosis.
2006-10-04 - Make Love, Not Warcraft. South Park's WoW episode aired on 4 October 2006 and won an Emmy. Much of it was rendered inside the game by Blizzard staff, and it introduced the game to an audience that had only heard it mocked.
2007-01-16 - The Burning Crusade cinematic. The first expansion opened the Dark Portal and took players off Azeroth entirely. Illidan's line, "You are not prepared", outlived the expansion by two decades and is still quoted by people who never played it.
2007-05-26 - Supremus falls in the Black Temple. Nihilum's kill of Supremus, the second boss of the Black Temple, from a paladin healer's point of view during the guild's world-first push through the raid in May 2007. The healer PoV is the interesting part: it shows the raid as a maintenance job rather than a spectacle. The uploader's title confuses Supremus with Illidan; the footage is the Supremus encounter.
2007-05-30 - Rob Pardo and Tom Chilton. Two of the designers most responsible for the game's shape: Pardo as lead designer, Chilton as game director for over a decade. Chilton ran WoW through Wrath, Cataclysm and Mists.
2007 - Patch 2.1: the Black Temple. The content patch that added the Black Temple and Illidan as its final boss, the raid that defined the first expansion and that most subscribers never saw the inside of.
2007 - Tales of the Past III: the creation of the Ashbringer. A single sequence lifted from Martin Falch's Tales of the Past III, the feature-length machinima that was the form's high-water mark. This is the Ashbringer's forging, the film's most-quoted scene.
2007 - The William Shatner advert. The thirty-second television spot in which William Shatner explains his character to camera, part of the celebrity campaign Blizzard ran from 2007 onward alongside Mr. T, Verne Troyer and later Ozzy Osbourne. The ads are the clearest evidence of WoW being sold to people who did not play games. Dated to the broadcast campaign, not the 2010 re-upload.
2007 - Wrath of the Lich King revealed. The BlizzCon 2007 reveal of the expansion that would take the game to its twelve-million-subscriber peak.
2007 - Ni Hao (A Gold Farmer's Story). Nyhm's song, written from the perspective of a farmer. It is a player's attempt to think about the people on the other end of the transaction, from a period when most players' engagement with them was abuse in chat.
2007 - Mr. T and the night elf mohawk. Blizzard's celebrity advertising campaign put Mr. T on television explaining his character build. The ads treated the game as mainstream entertainment years before the press did.
2007 - Illegal Danish 2: Escape from Orgrimmar. The sequel, longer and far more ambitious, made entirely inside a game that provided no filmmaking tools of any kind.
2007 - Nihilum kill Illidan. The world first on the boss the expansion had been advertising since its cinematic. Nihilum were the first guild to be famous for raiding rather than for playing.
2007 - Nihilum kill Archimonde. A world first from the Burning Crusade era, when the race was followed by forum post and screenshot rather than broadcast.
2007 - Tales of the Past III. A feature-length machinima with a cast, a score and a three-hour running time, made by a small group over years. It is the most-cited achievement of the machinima scene and almost unwatchable to anyone without the context.
2007 - William Shatner explains his class. Shatner delivering a shaman monologue to camera. The campaign's conceit, real celebrities describing their characters completely straight, is why the ads are still watched.
2007 - Verne Troyer. Another entry in the celebrity campaign, this one built around a gnome mage.
2007 - Darrowshire. Cranius setting a quest chain about a destroyed village to music. The quest it draws on is one of the few pieces of vanilla writing that people still talk about.
2007 - Addiction on the evening news. A Philadelphia news report treating online games as a clinical problem. The reporting was rarely wrong that some people played destructively; it was usually wrong about why, and about how many.
2007 - ROFLMAO. A later Oxhorn short, from the point at which machinima had a genuine audience and a convention circuit.
2007 - Fox covers the expansion. A television report on the launch of The Burning Crusade, covering a midnight queue as a news event.
2008-02-01 - Burning Crusade: The Movie. A feature-length player-made machinima assembled from Burning Crusade footage and released in February 2008, here in a later upscaled re-upload. It is the kind of long-form fan film that the expansion era produced in volume, made entirely inside the game client. The archive keeps it as a released work of its own year.
2008 - Serenity Now crash a wake in Winterspring. Sixty seconds of the guild Serenity Now ambushing an in-game memorial gathering held for a player who had died in real life. It is the founding artefact of a whole argument about what a shared server owes the grieving, and it is here alongside the archive's other funeral footage as the griefers' own record of what they did.
2008 - The Wrathgate. The in-game cinematic that changed what players expected from questing. A scripted betrayal plays out in the world itself rather than in a cutscene you watch from outside, and both factions lose. It is still the scene people cite when defending WoW as storytelling.
2008 - Assassinate, a rogue song. A player-written parody song about playing a rogue, set to an Xzibit beat, from the wave of WoW music that circulated on YouTube in the late 2000s. Fan music was a whole genre of its own alongside machinima, and this is a plain example of it. Dated to the release of the track.
2008 - Kil'jaeden and the Sunwell. The final boss of the Burning Crusade, killed as the expansion ended. The Sunwell was the last raid designed on the assumption that most players would never see it.
2008 - Method take Kil'jaeden, world second. Method's kill of Kil'jaeden in the Sunwell Plateau, the last boss of The Burning Crusade, cut from four points of view. It is an Alliance first and a world second, and it marks the moment Method arrives as a guild that would go on to win outright. Uploaded in 2010 from 2008 footage.
2008 - The Craft of War: BLIND. A short film following a rogue through Stormwind, animated far beyond anything the game engine offered, and still the technical high point of WoW machinima.
2008 - The trading card game. A physical Warcraft card game, one of many objects the game generated outside itself. Loot cards from these packs redeemed for in-game items, which made cardboard worth real money.
2008 - Ozzy Osbourne
2008 - True Life. MTV's documentary strand on a player who describes his own use of the game as compulsive. Worth carrying with the moral-panic coverage around it, because the individual accounts and the genre framing are not the same thing.
2008 - Game Overdose. A documentary on WoW addiction from the peak of the coverage. The panic subsided without the underlying question ever being settled.
2008-06-26 - Epic Raids, an Oxhorn music video. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific machinima makers of the era, working in filk, original songs performed by in-game characters. Epic Raids is a raider's complaint set to music, made when forty-man raiding was the game's centre of gravity.
2008-11-11 - Immortal Lords finish Kil'jaeden, 11 November 2008. The last four percent of Immortal Lords' first Kil'jaeden kill in the Sunwell Plateau, recorded two days before Wrath of the Lich King launched and closed the Burning Crusade era. Sunwell was the hardest content in the game and most guilds never saw its final boss. The uploader gives the kill date explicitly.
2008-11-13 - Wrath of the Lich King cinematic. Arthas walks through snow while his father narrates a memory of his son. Wrath is widely held to be the high-water mark of the game, and the expansion during which subscriptions peaked at twelve million.
2009-03-09 - An Oxhorn Brand Medley. A musical machinima by Oxhorn, one of the most prolific WoW filmmakers of the late 2000s, staging the game's characters as a song-and-dance number. Oxhorn's shorts were a fixture of the era's fan-film scene alongside the better-remembered dramatic machinima. Dated to the film's release on the maker's own channel.
2009-03-16 - Tank Tank Heal Tank. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific WoW machinima musicians, and this song, cut from his film Associates, is a joke told entirely in the grammar of a five-man group. It shows the fan-music strand of the community, where the game's mechanics became lyrics. Dated to release, which is its upload.
2009 - Cataclysm revealed. BlizzCon 2009: Blizzard announces it will destroy and rebuild the world players had spent five years in.
2009 - Ensidia kill Algalon. Ulduar's hidden encounter, available for one hour per week. Ulduar is the raid most often named by designers and players alike as the best the game has produced.
2009 - The board game. Warcraft as a tabletop game, photographed at a gaming convention in 2009. The franchise had been a board game, a card game and a novel series before it was ever an MMO.
2009-07-05 - Gnome Overboard. An Oxhorn machinima musical, made inside the game engine with player characters as actors and an original song on top. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific of the WoW machinima makers and represents the comic-musical strand of the form, against the cinematic ambitions of BLIND and Tales of the Past. Dated to the film's release.
2009-08-21 - The Cataclysm nerdscream, filmed from the floor. An attendee's recording of Chris Metzen opening BlizzCon 2009 and announcing Cataclysm, the expansion that would delete the old Azeroth. The archive holds the announcement; this is the room reacting to it, shot from inside the crowd. Filmed 21 August 2009, uploaded three days later.
2009-09-22 - Onyxia at level 80, the day she returned. A guild's first clear of the level-80 Onyxia's Lair on US-Cenarion Circle, recorded the day patch 3.2.2 reissued the vanilla fight for WoW's fifth anniversary. The uploader's own DKP accounting sits in the description, which is the texture of how raiding was administered. It is an ordinary guild night rather than a world first, and that is why it is worth holding.
2009-10-14 - Wiping on Onyxia, patch 3.2.2. Eighty-six seconds of a pick-up group failing on the re-tuned Onyxia during her fifth-anniversary patch, filmed by a player who found it funny. Failure footage is scarcer than kill footage and shows what the ordinary raid night actually looked like. The upload date is the play date.
2009-12-01 - The Burning Addiction. A short amateur documentary about a friend named Sam and his relationship with the game, made harder by his death during production. It is not a broadcast moral-panic segment but something closer to a home movie, and it shows how the addiction question was lived rather than televised. Dated to its release; the filming period is not documented.
2010-02-02 - Fall of the Lich King, the ending cinematic. The cinematic that plays after Arthas dies at the top of Icecrown Citadel, capturing the end of the story arc that had run since Warcraft III. Patch 3.3.2 opened the final wing shortly before this was captured. The existing archive has the kill; this is what the kill was for.
2010-02-05 - The Downfall spoof about the Lich King ban. A Downfall parody made within days of Blizzard banning Ensidia for using saronite bombs on their Lich King kill, reacting to the most contested world first in the game's history. The archive already carries the kill that was undone; this is how the playerbase argued about it at the time, in the internet vernacular of 2010. Dated to its upload, which is the event.
2010-03-16 - A boomkin is dared into the whelp pit. A guild's own recording of an Onyxia wipe caused by a druid taking a dare to jump into the whelp egg pit, with the tank following him down and dying too. Raid archives usually preserve the kills; the wipes are what most of the forty people actually spent their evenings on. Uploaded by one of the players present.
2010-04-13 - Fall of the Lich King ending cinematic. The in-game cinematic that played only for players who actually killed Arthas in Icecrown Citadel, for most of a year the single most gated piece of storytelling in the game. It is the payoff to five years of the Lich King as the game's standing antagonist. Dated to the Icecrown kill window in patch 3.3, not to this re-upload.
2010-05-03 - Gold Farmer, a machinima parody. A player-made music video setting Snow's 'Informer' to a song about gold-seller spam in Ironforge, complete with machinima footage. It is fan work about the game's economy, and it preserves the casual racial caricature that Western players routinely aimed at Chinese farmers, alongside the archive's more sober coverage of that trade.
2010 - Two versus two at BlizzCon 2010. An arena match played on stage. Arena was Blizzard's attempt at a spectator format: small teams, short matches, and a result a viewer could follow without knowing the game.
2010 - A farmer, interviewed. A long interview with someone who worked in the trade, describing the economics from the inside rather than from a newsroom.
2010 - Three versus three. The three-player bracket, which became the competitive standard and remained so for the life of the tournament circuit.
2010 - A husband, a wife and the addiction segment. A television news item on a man said to have abandoned his wife and infant daughter for the game. It is a clear specimen of the addiction-panic genre that ran on local news through the late 2000s: the claim is presented as fact, the framing is the story, and no counter-view is offered. Kept for what the coverage looked like, not as a finding about the game.
2010 - The BBC reports on Azeroth. A BBC news segment on World of Warcraft, mirrored by a viewer with no attribution. Broadcast coverage is the record of how the game looked to people who never played it, which is why period news reports belong in the archive alongside the game footage.
2010 - Geek Is. Metzen's opening speech at BlizzCon 2010, delivered to a hall of people who had paid to be in a room about a video game.
2010 - Ghostcrawler. Greg Street, the lead systems designer who spent years arguing with players in public under the name Ghostcrawler, an unusually exposed position for a developer to hold.
2010 - The Fall of the Lich King, part three. The closing part of Onix's machinima retelling of the Icecrown Citadel campaign, cut from in-game footage to the game's own score. It is a fan film made in the same months players were actually fighting the Lich King, and shows what the community did with the tools it had. Machinima on this scale is the closest thing the archive has to a native cinema of Azeroth.
2010 - The Fall of the Lich King, part two. A player-made film of the Icecrown Citadel assault, cut in the style of the guild progression movies of the era, released around the time raiders were working through the instance. Machinima like this was how most players first saw content they had not yet reached themselves. Kept as a released fan work of 2010.
2010 - The Lich King kill that was undone. Ensidia killed the Lich King first and were banned for it, having used an item interaction Blizzard ruled an exploit. The kill was stripped and the achievement removed, the moment the world-first race acquired a rulebook and a referee.
2010 - Paragon kill the Lich King. The heroic twenty-five-man kill that stood as the endpoint of Wrath. By this point guilds were raiding sixteen hours a day for a fortnight to win a race with no prize attached.
2010 - An Illidan costume. A costume of the Burning Crusade's final boss, built by a player. Warcraft cosplay skews toward armour and prosthetics because almost every character in it is the wrong shape for a human body.
2010 - Cosplay at PAX. Warcraft costume at a games convention in 2010, at the height of the game's subscriber numbers.
2010 - A hearthstone, made real. A physical replica of the item that teleports a character home. The hearthstone is one of the few objects in the game every single player owns from their first hour.
2010-12-07 - Cataclysm cinematic. Deathwing tears the world open. Cataclysm did something no MMO of its size had risked: it deleted the original world and rebuilt it, so the Azeroth of 2004 stopped existing for new players.
2011-01-28 - Paragon kill heroic Al'Akir. The Finnish guild Paragon's 25-man heroic Al'Akir kill in the Throne of the Four Winds, uploaded to the guild's own channel weeks after Cataclysm's raids opened. Four points of view are cut together, the format that guild kill videos had settled into by 2011. Paragon dominated the world-first race across this era.
2011-03-07 - Like the Game. An Oxhorn music machinima, from one of the most prolific fan film-makers of the era, who built a following making comic shorts entirely inside the WoW client. By 2011 machinima had its own recognisable auteurs with their own audiences. Released on its upload date.
2011-05-07 - Nox Necis get their first Ragnaros kill. Nox Necis's first Molten Core Ragnaros kill, filmed by a guild member who says outright he was learning to give his videos a story rather than shoot a plain kill log. This is the world firsts' opposite number: a small guild finishing, years later, what Evil Inc did in May 2005, and it is the form most raiding actually took.
2011 - Playing the demo at BlizzCon 2011. Attendees at machines running the unreleased expansion. The convention was built around letting several thousand people play something a few weeks early.
2011 - Paragon and heroic Ragnaros. Paragon's world first on the hardest encounter of Cataclysm. Finnish guild, European servers, and the first sustained challenge to the assumption that the race was American and Chinese.
2011 - The nerdscream. The voice channel at the moment of a world first. This recording is why the race eventually became a broadcast product: what people wanted to watch was not the fight but the room.
2011 - Chuck Norris. The Chuck Norris advert, built on a meme format already several years old by the time it aired.
2011 - Ten death knights against heroic Ragnaros. A cross-realm raid of ten death knights killing heroic Ragnaros in Firelands, a self-imposed challenge kill rather than a progression one. Stunt raiding of this kind, one class, reduced numbers, no outside help, was its own competitive scene running alongside the world-first race. Player-organised, with the organiser's own point of view.
2011-08-05 - vodka take heroic Ragnaros. vodka's kill of heroic Ragnaros in Firelands, the first in the United States and fifth in the world, recorded from the guild's own raid. Uploaded by vodka the day of the kill, so the upload date is the event date. The world first went to Paragon, already in the archive; this is what the race looked like one rung down.
2011-10-21 - Pandaria, unveiled at BlizzCon 2011. The preview trailer that introduced Mists of Pandaria at BlizzCon 2011, a year before the expansion shipped on 25 September 2012. It is the announcement itself rather than the story cinematic, and it drew immediate scepticism that Blizzard had turned an April Fools race into an expansion.
2011-12-06 - Ensidia and the Raid Finder bans, discussed. A podcast recorded with Ensidia members days after Blizzard handed out bans for exploiting the newly introduced Raid Finder. It is an interview with the people it happened to, at the time it happened, on a guild that had already been banned once for the Lich King kill the archive carries.
2012 - Ahab Wheathoof. A quest giver in Mulgore, added by Blizzard as a memorial to a player who died. His quest asks you to find his lost dog. Requests like this are handled quietly and there are dozens of them scattered through the world.
2012 - Aubrey Plaza. A later entry in the campaign, running after subscriber numbers had begun their long decline.
2012 - Lady Vashj. A costume of a raid boss from the first expansion, five years after that raid closed. Cosplay is the part of this culture that keeps content alive longest after Blizzard removes it.
2012-09-25 - Mists of Pandaria cinematic. An orc and a human wash up on the same shore and fight each other to exhaustion before a pandaren intervenes. The expansion was mocked on announcement for its premise and is now generally considered underrated.
2013 - You think you do, but you don't. Asked at BlizzCon 2013 whether Blizzard would ever run legacy servers, J. Allen Brack told the audience they thought they wanted vanilla servers but did not. The line followed the company for years and was quoted back at it constantly when Classic eventually shipped.
2013 - Siege of Orgrimmar. The patch that ended Mists of Pandaria by having the Horde tear down its own leader, the faction, not the Alliance, removing Garrosh Hellscream.
2013 - Arena at BlizzCon 2013. The Arena Global Invitational final. Arena was WoW's attempt at a conventional esport: small teams, short matches, a format a spectator could follow.
2013 - Aligning Azeroth: The Gold Farmers. A machinima treatment of the gold-farming economy, made by players about the industry that grew around their game.
2013 - Ghostcrawler on patch 5.4. A design interview from the end of Mists of Pandaria, when Street was still the most visible developer on the game.
2013 - BlizzCon 2013 opening. The opening ceremony at which the "you think you do, but you don't" exchange took place later the same weekend.
2013 - Away From Keyboard. A feature documentary about the people who play, made by players rather than by a broadcaster.
2013-08-21 - The concert stage at Gamescom. Warcraft music performed live at Gamescom in 2013. The score has been one of the least-argued-about parts of the game for its entire run.
2013-08-22 - Greg Street and Brian Holinka answer PvP questions. WoW's lead systems designer and its PvP designer take questions on a player's Twitch stream in August 2013, with arena players in the chat. It is a developer interview conducted on the players' own turf rather than a stage, and it captures the period when Blizzard designers argued about balance in public and under their own handles. Recorded live and reuploaded the next day.
2013-11-08 - Warlords of Draenor announced at BlizzCon 2013. The announcement trailer shown on the BlizzCon 2013 stage, revealing an expansion built on an alternate-timeline Draenor and the orc warlords Grommash, Blackhand and Ner'zhul. Warlords would ship a year later at $49.99, the first expansion price rise. Dated to the announcement, not the November 2014 launch.
2013-11-08 - A developer panel. A design talk at BlizzCon 2013. The panels are the only venue where the people making the decisions answer directly to the people affected by them, in a room, on the record.
2013-11-09 - A competitor interviewed. A player interviewed after the Arena Global Invitational final, professional competition in a game most of its players used for something else entirely.
2013-11-09 - The demo floor, BlizzCon 2013. BlizzCon 2013, the convention at which Blizzard was asked about legacy servers and answered that players thought they wanted them but did not.
2013-11-09 - Jarod Nandin at BlizzCon 2013. Floor footage of Jarod Nandin at BlizzCon 2013, the costumed regular known for the 'how do you kill that which has no life' line, filmed by another attendee. He died in 2021, and the uploader added the note afterwards. BlizzCon's crowd is one of the few parts of this story that was ever photographable, and this is one attendee filming another.
2013-11-09 - Arena Global Invitational final. The 2013 grand final. Arena esports peaked around this period and contracted afterwards, while the dungeon and raid formats grew.
2013-11-09 - Questions from the floor. The audience half of a BlizzCon panel. The format has produced several of the most-quoted moments in the game's history, usually not the ones Blizzard planned.
2014 - Looking for Group. Blizzard's own tenth-anniversary documentary about its players. It is a corporate film, and it is also the only professionally shot record of several of these communities.
2014 - Lords of War: Grommash. A short animated series Blizzard released between expansions, telling the backstory of orc warlords in a hand-drawn style unlike anything else the game produced.
2014 - The couple. Two people who met in the game, in Blizzard's tenth-anniversary series. Marriages out of WoW are common enough to be unremarkable, which is itself the point.
2014 - Talador, the finale. An in-game story cinematic from Warlords of Draenor, shown as players finish the Talador zone campaign. It is one of the first expansions where Blizzard put rendered scenes inside the questing flow rather than saving them for the login screen. Dated to the expansion's 2014 release rather than the pre-release upload.
2014 - Tarren Mill again, ten years on. Blizzard restaged the Tarren Mill and Southshore fight as a tenth-anniversary event, which is as close as the game has come to admitting the accident was the best thing in it.
2014 - BlizzCon 2014. The opening ceremony for the tenth-anniversary year.
2014 - Dragon Con. Warcraft costume at Dragon Con in 2014. By this point the game was ten years old and its cosplay community had its own competitive circuit.
2014 - A costume contest. Honourable mentions at a convention costume contest. Contest cosplay of this kind takes months and is built to be judged at arm's length.
2014 - A night elf. 2014. The race has been playable since launch and remains one of the most-built.
2014-08-10 - The Rise and Fall of Sparta, epic animation cut. A short German-made machinima that stages the Thermopylae story with WoW models and voice actors. By 2014 machinima had moved from Fraps and improvisation to scripted casting and model rigs, and this is what that later craft looked like.
2014-11-13 - Warlords of Draenor: the in-game cinematics. The full run of in-engine cutscenes Blizzard cut into Warlords of Draenor, captured and collected by a player. These short scenes were the expansion's storytelling method, not the pre-rendered trailer but the smaller, cheaper cinematics the game showed you mid-quest. Dated to the expansion's release rather than the upload, which preceded launch by weeks from beta.
2014-11-13 - Warlords of Draenor cinematic. The expansion that raised the box price from $39.99 to $49.99, the first increase since 2007, and that shipped with a level-90 boost sold separately for $60, more than the expansion itself.
2015-03-02 - The Token is announced. Blizzard announces an item bought for real money and sold for gold, letting players pay a subscription with in-game currency. The stated purpose was to undercut the gold sellers whose supply, Blizzard said, came overwhelmingly from stolen accounts.
2015-03-03 - Arguing about the Token before it shipped. A player's discussion of the WoW Token in the weeks between Blizzard's announcement and the Token going live, working through what a first-party gold market would do to the game. It records the argument as it stood before anyone knew the answer, which the later coverage cannot. Dated to the upload, since the video is itself the contemporary reaction.
2015-04-07 - The Token goes live. The Token launched in the Americas at $20, opening at 30,000 gold. Within twenty-four hours the price had fallen to around 20,000.
2015-04-08 - A player buys a Token in its first week. A player talks through buying a WoW Token days after it went live in April 2015, weighing gold prices against real money and asking whether it was worth it. It is first-hand testimony from the week Blizzard made gold-for-money a first-party product, after a decade of banning the people who sold it.
2015 - The price collapses. Coverage of the Token losing a third of its value in a day. The price floats on supply and demand, which meant Blizzard had built a commodity market and handed it to several million people.
2015 - Arena World Championship final. The tournament circuit at its most formalised, with regional qualifiers feeding a BlizzCon final.
2015 - Legion cinematic. Announced at Gamescom in August 2015 and released a year later. Legion arrived after Warlords had shed subscribers faster than any prior expansion and is generally credited with steadying the game.
2015 - The film. The first trailer for Duncan Jones's Warcraft. It made over $430 million worldwide, most of it in China, and was still considered a disappointment in the United States.
2015 - Valeera Sanguinar. A blood elf costume at a Canadian expo. The blood elves arrived with the first expansion in 2007 and immediately became the most-played race on the Horde side.
2015 - Blood elf, contest entry. A costume contest entry in Chicago, 2015.
2015 - WonderCon. Warcraft costume at WonderCon in California, 2015, a general comics convention rather than a Blizzard event.
2015 - ChinaJoy. Warcraft cosplay at ChinaJoy in Shanghai. China was one of the game's largest markets from 2005 until the servers went dark in 2023.
2015-08-17 - The Rise and Fall of Sparta, the Wrath-era cut. A German machinima retelling the assault on the Lich King, voiced by a cast of fan actors credited in full. It is a late entry in a form that had largely died by 2015, made with Wrath-era assets years after that expansion ended. Kept as evidence that machinima outlived its own moment.
2015-08-17 - One warlock solos heroic Icecrown Citadel. A destruction warlock kills the 25-man heroic Lich King alone, five years after Paragon needed a full raid and hundreds of attempts to do it first. Solo runs of retired raids became their own practice as level caps rose, and this is the clearest measure of how far the game had moved past its own hardest fight.
2015-11-03 - Subscribers, over time. The public subscriber figures charted: from launch, through the twelve-million peak in October 2010, to 5.5 million at the end of September 2015, after which Blizzard stopped reporting the number at all.
2016-04-10 - The last night on Nostalrius. Nostalrius, an unofficial vanilla server with hundreds of thousands of registered players, was shut down under legal pressure in April 2016. Players spent the final hours marching across the continent together.
2016-04-10 - Past vs Present. A machinima short setting vanilla Azeroth against the Warlords-era game, made at the moment Nostalrius was being shut down and the Classic argument was at its loudest. It is the nostalgia case made as a film rather than a forum post. Dated to the film's release.
2016 - The shutdown. Footage from the closing of the private server whose scale made the case that demand for the old game was real and large.
2016 - The argument after Nostalrius. A player response to the shutdown, from the debate that ran for three years and ended with Blizzard reversing its position entirely.
2016 - Warcraft, trailer two. The second trailer, released ahead of a June 2016 opening.
2016 - The critics. Mark Kermode reviewing the Warcraft film. The critical reception in the West and the commercial reception in China were so far apart that the film became a standing example of the gap.
2016 - Cosplay at BlizzCon 2016. The convention floor, where a substantial fraction of attendees arrive in costume.
2016 - An orc at C2E2. An orc build at a Chicago convention contest. The silhouette is the hard part: the shoulders alone are usually a separate rig.
2016 - Draenei at Igromir. A draenei costume at Igromir in Moscow. Russia and eastern Europe held some of the game's densest player populations.
2016 - BlizzCon, in costume. Costume at BlizzCon 2016.
2016 - Animefest. Warcraft costume at a Czech convention, 2016.
2016-07-21 - Harbingers: Gul'dan. The first of the three Harbingers animated shorts released in the run-up to Legion, telling the origin of Gul'dan in ink-wash animation. Alongside Warbringers it is the clearest example of Blizzard building an animation studio around the game's marketing calendar.
2016-07-28 - Harbingers: Khadgar. An animated short released in the run-up to Legion, following the archmage Khadgar as the Burning Legion returns to Azeroth. The Harbingers trilogy was Blizzard's pre-launch storytelling experiment, seeding an expansion through character shorts rather than one cinematic. Dated to Blizzard's release, a month before the 30 August 2016 Legion launch.
2016-08-04 - Harbingers: Illidan. One of the three animated shorts Blizzard released ahead of Legion, following an Illidari recruit into Illidan's demon hunters. The Harbingers films were the studio's move away from single pre-rendered launch trailers toward serialised animation, a form it kept for Warbringers and Afterlives. Dated to its release, which is also its upload.
2016-08-09 - The Broken Shore, from the Alliance side. The in-engine cinematic that opens Legion, showing the assault on the Broken Shore as the Alliance experienced it. Blizzard shipped two versions of the same battle, one per faction, so that the same defeat read differently depending on who you played. Uploaded the week Legion's pre-patch went live.
2017-01-16 - Hillsbrad on a private server, 2017. A Tarren Mill and Southshore world-PvP raid fought on Elysium, one of the private servers that filled the gap after Nostalrius was shut down. The uploader dates the fight to 16 January 2017. It documents that the vanilla open-world war people remembered was still being fought on unofficial hardware two years before Classic existed.
2017-03-23 - A private-server guild band records a song. Players on the Kronos vanilla private server recorded a rap about the priest spell Shadow Word: Pain and released it under the guild's own band name. It is small, amateur and completely typical of the fan-music layer that ran alongside the game for twenty years, and it is notable that by 2017 that layer had migrated onto private servers along with the players.
2017-05-30 - Resurgence, a death knight machinima. A machinima short following a death knight's memory of the life taken from him, made a decade after the golden age of WoW film-making and released during Legion. It shows the form surviving into the era of modern rendering tools.
2017-06-04 - Elloric, and the player he was named for. A tribute film about Michael, a player who died, and Elloric, the NPC Blizzard put in the world to carry his name, built with footage from the in-game memorial his guildmates held. Blizzard's practice of writing dead players into Azeroth as permanent NPCs is one of the clearest things WoW did that other games did not. Distinct from the archive's survey scene 'The memorials, collected': this is one death, told by the people who were there.
2017 - Patch 7.2: the Tomb of Sargeras. A mid-expansion patch trailer from Legion, the expansion that reset expectations for how much content a patch should contain.
2017 - The memorials, collected. A survey of in-game memorials to players who died. They are unmarked: nothing tells you which NPCs are real people, and most players walk past all of them.
2017 - Synipus. Another memorial NPC, documented by a player who set out to record them before patches moved or removed them.
2017 - For the Horde, in Budapest. An esports pub in Budapest decorated for one faction. Faction identity travelled well outside the game: it is a shorthand that works in a bar.
2017 - For the Alliance. The other half of the same Budapest pub. The faction split has structured how players talk about themselves for twenty years, including people who play both.
2017 - Battle for Azeroth cinematic. Revealed at BlizzCon 2017. The expansion returned to the faction war as its central subject, a decision that produced the best cinematics in the game and some of its most argued-over story.
2017 - Method kill Fallen Avatar. A Legion-era world first from the guild that turned raiding into an organisation with sponsors, staff and a production schedule.
2017 - The man behind the meme. A documentary tracing what happened to Ben Schulz, the player behind Leeroy, and to the guild that made the video, after it escaped into the wider internet.
2017-07-23 - A group build. Several Warcraft characters photographed together at a Taiwanese event. Group cosplay is coordinated months ahead and is usually guild-organised.
2017-08-22 - Legion at Gamescom. Blizzard's stand at Gamescom during Legion, the expansion generally credited with recovering the game after Warlords of Draenor.
2017-11-03 - Battle for Azeroth announced on stage. The BlizzCon 2017 opening-ceremony segment in which Battle for Azeroth is revealed to the hall. The announcement is the event here, the reveal, the reaction of the room, and the ritual of the opening ceremony as Blizzard had refined it over a decade. Captured from the broadcast by an attendee-facing channel.
2017-11-04 - The demo at BlizzCon 2017. Attendees playing Battle for Azeroth months before release, at the convention where it was announced.
2017-11-04 - Arena World Championship 2017. Rockets Eclipse against Panda Global at the world championship, the tournament circuit at its most formalised.
2017-11-12 - Killing C'Thun eleven years late. A player who raided Ahn'Qiraj in 2006 and never got past its final boss finally kills C'Thun, on a private server, eleven years afterwards. The whole emotional case for Classic is in this clip: not new content, but finishing something that was left unfinished. Dated to the kill itself in 2017, not to the 2006 raiding it refers back to.
2017-12-07 - Method kill Argus. The final boss of Legion, killed first by Method. By now the race was streamed, co-streamed and clipped, and the guild's own channel was a media property.
2017-12-12 - Method kill Aggramar, Antorus. Method's own recording of their world-first Aggramar kill in Mythic Antorus, the Burning Throne, the last tier of Legion. Guild-uploaded kill footage is the primary record of the world-first race in the years before it became a full broadcast production. Dated to the kill, which the guild posted within days.
2017-12-13 - A Method raider on the Argus world first. A French-language interview with Rytnek recorded immediately after Method took the world first on Mythic Argus, the last boss of Antorus and the end of Legion's raid tier. It is the guild's own account of the race rather than a recap, and the archive already carries the kill but not the debrief. Dated to the interview itself.
2018-01-06 - Southshore versus Tarren Mill, on Elysium. Hours of unstructured world PvP between Southshore and Tarren Mill, recorded on the Elysium private server at level 60. The original battles had no objective, no scoreboard and no end; this recreation is the closest thing to a long-form record of what that actually looked like.
2018-03-01 - Greg Street: twenty years of making games. An hour-long conference talk by Greg Street, the designer who spent years as WoW's public face under the handle Ghostcrawler, given after he left Blizzard for Riot. He talks through what two decades of shipping games taught him, including the years he spent explaining class balance to an audience that argued back.
2018-04-05 - Instinct kill mythic Argus the Unmaker. The German guild Instinct's first mythic Argus kill, filmed 5 April 2018 and cut from multiple raiders' points of view. It is not the world first, which Method took months earlier, but it is what the long tail of mythic progression actually looked like for the guilds behind the race.
2018-04-07 - A Sylvanas statue, on stage. A player and his collectible statue at a Blizzard event in Taipei. The merchandise economy around the game is large enough to sustain its own manufacturers.
2018 - A wedding, held in Azeroth. A guild wedding staged in-game. For players separated by continents this was often the only ceremony everyone could attend.
2018 - Method Black at the AWC. A lower-bracket final from the 2018 season, when raiding guilds had begun fielding arena rosters under the same banner.
2018 - Metzen returns to the stage. A Q&A appearance after Metzen had stepped back from Blizzard, citing anxiety and burnout, a rare public account from someone at that level of the industry.
2018 - Race to World First: the film. A documentary on the race made before it became a broadcast product, when guilds still streamed it themselves out of guild houses.
2018 - The epidemiologists took it seriously. Corrupted Blood produced actual peer-reviewed literature: researchers in epidemiology argued that the behaviour of players under an uncontrolled outbreak, fleeing, staying to help, deliberately spreading it, modelled human responses better than the mathematics then in use.
2018 - Argus killed with a single healer. A guild kills the Legion end boss on mythic difficulty with only one player healing, a self-imposed constraint run of a fight most groups needed six healers for. Challenge kills like this are the raiding scene talking to itself, long after the world-first race has moved on. Dated to the July 2018 run.
2018-07-17 - Old Soldier. Blizzard's pre-launch short for Battle for Azeroth, in which Varok Saurfang is broken by a war he no longer believes in. It is the moment the studio's cinematics team stopped animating spectacle and started animating regret, and it was released weeks ahead of the expansion itself. One of the few WoW films that works with no knowledge of the game.
2018-07-19 - Old Soldier: the Saurfang cinematic. The short Blizzard cinematic in which Varok Saurfang, the Horde's oldest surviving warrior, is confronted by the war his faction is about to start. Widely regarded as the best-written piece of animation Blizzard made for the game, and the emotional argument for the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Kept as an artifact distinct from the expansion's announcement cinematic.
2018-07-23 - Warbringers: Jaina. An animated short released ahead of Battle for Azeroth, following Jaina Proudmoore's return to Kul Tiras. The Warbringers series marked the point where Blizzard's between-expansion storytelling became a standalone animation programme rather than a trailer.
2018-07-31 - Warbringers: Sylvanas. The animated short Blizzard released before Battle for Azeroth showing Sylvanas Windrunner at Teldrassil, the scene that set off years of argument about the character and the faction war. Warbringers was the studio at its most confident as a film-maker. Released on its upload date.
2018-08-23 - The Return of Hope: Kul Tiras. An in-game cinematic from Battle for Azeroth in which Jaina Proudmoore reclaims her family's fleet and her drowned home. Released by Blizzard in the weeks after the expansion went live. Included as one of the rare pieces of Azeroth the archive can actually show a viewer.
2018-08-24 - Warbringers: Azshara. One of the three animated Warbringers shorts Blizzard released around the Battle for Azeroth launch, telling how the night elf queen Azshara struck her bargain in the deeps. The Warbringers series was Blizzard's most ambitious animation outside the expansion cinematics themselves. Dated to Blizzard's release, days after the 14 August 2018 expansion launch.
2018-09-04 - The axe at Hangzhou. A Warcraft axe outside NetEase's campus in Hangzhou, the Chinese partner that ran the game from 2009. When the partnership collapsed in early 2023, NetEase dismantled the sculpture outside these offices as the servers went dark.
2018-11-02 - BlizzCon 2018, opening ceremony. The full opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2018, two and a half hours on stage in Anaheim. This is the convention at its peak scale, and the same show whose Diablo Immortal announcement made the audience reaction a news story in itself. Recorded 2 November 2018; the upload date is days later.
2018-11-02 - Lost Honor. Blizzard's Battle for Azeroth cinematic in which the imprisoned orc Varok Saurfang is confronted by King Anduin Wrynn. Released at BlizzCon 2018, it opened the Saurfang arc that carried the expansion's faction war to its end. One of the studio's rendered short films, and part of the only visual record of Azeroth this archive can carry.
2019-03-17 - Ragnaros Wipe Animation. A fan animation of a Molten Core raid falling apart, made in the tradition of the older Onyxia Wipe Animation it credits. It is a joke that only lands if you have stood in a forty-person raid listening to a leader lose control, which is exactly the shared experience it documents.
2019-04-21 - Struggles of Raid Bosses. A comic machinima short imagining the raid encounter from the boss's side of the fight. It belongs to the late period of WoW machinima, when the form had survived long past its 2007 peak and turned mostly to comedy. Dated to its release.
2019-05-15 - Safe Haven. The Battle for Azeroth story cinematic in which Varok Saurfang meets Thrall, the turning point of the expansion's Horde storyline. It was released as a standalone film mid-patch, a sign of how far Blizzard's cinematic cadence had drifted from the once-per-expansion trailer. Released on its upload date.
2019 - Serenity Now kill Ragnaros. Footage of the guild Serenity Now downing Ragnaros in Molten Core. Serenity Now is remembered for one thing above all, the raid on a rival guild's in-game funeral, and this is the guild doing the ordinary thing it also did, raiding. Kept as guild-side material rather than as a world first.
2019 - Queues, thousands deep. Coverage of the launch congestion. Blizzard had underestimated demand for a fifteen-year-old version of its own game.
2019 - World of Queuecraft. The launch-night experience, played for comedy by people who spent it waiting.
2019 - Launch night. A player stream from the night Classic opened, recorded by someone who had been waiting since the 2013 answer.
2019 - Naxxramas, seen at last. Classic gave the forty-man Naxxramas to an audience that had mostly never seen it, the content the original game had built and then removed within months.
2019 - The launch was botched. Critical coverage of the Classic launch, against the enthusiasm around it.
2019 - Mankrik's wife. A quest whose objective was badly marked, in a zone with no map detail, which produced years of players asking the same question in the same chat channel. "Barrens chat" became shorthand for a whole style of public conversation.
2019 - Shadowlands cinematic. Revealed at BlizzCon 2019: Sylvanas destroys the Helm of Domination and cracks open the barrier between the living and the dead. The expansion shipped a year later into a very different world.
2019 - Fifteen years. Blizzard marking the anniversary in 2019, the year it also brought back the version of the game it had spent years arguing against.
2019 - Twenty-five years of Warcraft. Counting from the 1994 strategy game rather than from the MMO, the lineage the game came out of and mostly stopped referring to.
2019 - BlizzCon 2019. The opening ceremony that announced both Shadowlands and, to considerably more noise, WoW Classic's successor plans.
2019 - The original team plays Classic. Developers who built the 2004 game returning to it in 2019, through the version Blizzard had spent years insisting nobody really wanted.
2019 - Sindragosa. A costume of an Icecrown Citadel boss, built a decade after that raid opened.
2019-07-09 - Azshara falls: the Eternal Palace finale cinematic. The cinematic that plays when Queen Azshara is defeated at the end of the Eternal Palace, the raid whose world-first race Complexity-Limit won in July 2019. It is the ending of a villain Blizzard had held in reserve since the game launched.
2019-08-26 - Level one on Classic launch night. An unedited stream of the first hour of WoW Classic on 26 August 2019: a new warrior in a starting zone shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of other people doing the same tutorial quest at the same moment. The archive already has the queues and the outages; this is what it looked like once you were finally inside. Upload date is the night itself.
2019-08-26 - Queuing for one mob in the Valley of Trials. Launch-night footage from Classic in August 2019 of a line of players waiting their turn to kill a single quest mob in the starting cave. The archive already has the login queues; this is the second queue nobody expected, caused by tens of thousands of people starting the same quest at the same minute. Filmed on the night by a player in the line.
2019-08-26 - Classic goes live. WoW Classic launched in August 2019. Queues ran into the tens of thousands and single starting zones held more players than the servers were designed for.
2019-08-27 - The queue organises itself, Hydraxian Waterlords. On Classic launch night the login queues ran hours deep, and on this realm players in the queue elected a leader and handed the role over when he got in. It is a small piece of evidence about what the crowd did with the wait rather than how long the wait was. Filmed on the night, uploaded the day after.
2019-09-25 - Reckoning. The Battle for Azeroth cinematic in which the faction war ends at the gates of Orgrimmar, with Alliance soldiers standing alongside Saurfang's rebels against Sylvanas. Released with patch 8.2.5, it closed the storyline opened by Lost Honor a year earlier. Blizzard's rendered shorts are the archive's only sustained view of Azeroth.
2019-09-30 - Saurfang's Mak'gora. Blizzard's cut of the Varok Saurfang storyline through Battle for Azeroth, ending in his duel with Sylvanas outside Orgrimmar. It is the clearest late example of WoW telling a story about one character across a whole expansion, and the duel itself was among the most-discussed cinematics the game ever shipped. Published by Blizzard as the expansion's war chapter closed.
2019-11-01 - Shadowlands features overview, BlizzCon 2019. Blizzard's announcement reel for Shadowlands, published as the expansion was revealed at BlizzCon 2019: covenants, the Maw, the level squish. It is the sales pitch for the afterlife expansion a year before anyone could play it. Dated to the reveal, not the November 2020 launch.
2020-01-29 - Limit kill Ra-den, Ny'alotha. Complexity-Limit's world-first Ra-den kill inside Ny'alotha, the raid whose Race to World First drew 281,479 concurrent viewers and 19.5M hours watched. The archive already has the N'Zoth kill that ended the race; this is the fight before it.
2020-01-30 - Limit take Carapace of N'Zoth. Complexity-Limit's world-first kill of Carapace of N'Zoth, the penultimate boss of Ny'alotha, uploaded by the guild itself. It comes from the first Race to World First that Limit won, breaking Method's long run of victories, and the raid drew 19.5 million hours watched. The guild's own upload is the primary record of the pull.
2020-01-31 - Limit take Il'gynoth. Complexity-Limit's world-first mythic Il'gynoth kill during the Ny'alotha race, posted by the guild itself the night it happened. Ny'alotha was the race that Limit finally won outright after years of finishing behind European guilds, and it drew 19.5 million hours watched.
2020-05-13 - Mythic Ny'alotha, a full clear from one player's view. An eighty-minute warlock point-of-view run through Mythic Ny'alotha during the Method versus Aversion race, captured off the player's own stream. The single-player perspective is what a race actually looks like from inside it, as opposed to the produced broadcast. Ny'alotha was the tier Complexity-Limit won in early 2020 with a peak audience of 281,479.
2020 - Opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj, again. A server's war-effort and gate-opening event replayed in WoW Classic, fifteen years after the original. The Scarab Lord title went to whoever rang the gong first, and Classic servers reran the whole grind, thousands of players banking materials for weeks, knowing exactly how it ended. The 2006 original is in the archive; this is the restaging.
2020 - Kel'Thuzad falls again. The final boss of Classic, cleared fifteen years after the original.
2020 - Limit kill N'Zoth. The North American guild breaking a long European hold on the race. The Ny'alotha race drew a peak of 281,479 concurrent viewers across all channels.
2020 - Complexity-Limit on the road to world first. A member's edit of Complexity-Limit's Ny'alotha progression, cut from raid footage and voice comms during the race the guild won. It shows the race as the guild experienced it, hundreds of pulls, exhaustion, in-jokes, rather than as the broadcast presented it. The kill itself is already in the archive; this is the weeks around it.
2020-07-29 - Hardcore death clips, the first compilation. The first community death-clip compilation from the player-run Hardcore ruleset, three years before Blizzard made permadeath an official mode. Each clip is somebody's character ending permanently, submitted by the player it happened to. The upload date is when the clips were collected and posted.
2020-08-27 - Shadowlands Afterlives: Bastion. The Bastion instalment of the Afterlives shorts, in which Uther the Lightbringer arrives in the afterlife and the Paragon Devos discovers what a mortal wound really costs. Released ahead of the Shadowlands launch as the fullest animated treatment of a character players had known since 2004. Dated to Blizzard's release, months before the 23 November 2020 expansion.
2020-09-03 - Afterlives: Maldraxxus. One of the four animated shorts Blizzard released ahead of Shadowlands, this one giving Draka an afterlife and a second death. The Afterlives series was the first time WoW's pre-expansion storytelling ran as episodic animation on YouTube rather than a single cinematic.
2020-09-10 - Afterlives: Ardenweald. One of the four animated Afterlives shorts Blizzard released before Shadowlands, introducing Ardenweald and its dying grove. By 2020 the pre-expansion short film had become a routine part of the release calendar, made to be watched on YouTube rather than in the client. Released on its upload date.
2020-11-23 - Beyond the Veil: the Shadowlands launch. The launch cinematic for the expansion that released on the sixteenth anniversary of the game, during a pandemic, to an audience with unusual amounts of time indoors.
2021-03-13 - Retired servers. Decommissioned server hardware that once ran the game. Each of these machines held a realm, a population with its own economy, its own guilds and its own reputation, none of which survived the hardware.
2021-03-14 - A wall of weapons. Replica weapons from the game, built and mounted. Almost every object in Azeroth has been fabricated in the real world by somebody.
2021-05-18 - A Classic guild clears Naxxramas, fifteen years late. A mid-tier guild's first Kel'Thuzad kill on Classic, taken down on the first attempt for a full 15/15 Naxxramas clear. In 2006 barely any guild on any server saw this room; in 2021 an ordinary raid team could. That gap is the whole argument about Classic.
2021 - Farming from Venezuela. Gold farming as a survival wage during Venezuela's currency collapse, the same trade as the Chinese farms of 2006, relocated and re-framed by a different economic emergency.
2021 - Pandora's Box. An essay-documentary on what convenience features did to the game's social fabric, the argument that making grouping easy made guilds unnecessary, and that the game lost something real in the trade.
2021 - An ode to returning heroes. Blizzard's trailer for Burning Crusade Classic, addressed to people coming back rather than arriving.
2021 - International coverage of the walkout. The walkout reported as a labour story rather than a games story. The lawsuit that triggered it was filed in July 2021 by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
2021 - Echo kill Sylvanas. The Sanctum of Domination world first. The race that year ran 22.9 million hours watched, with Echo alone accounting for nearly a third of it.
2021 - The open letter. Employees published an open letter rejecting the company's initial response to the lawsuit, which had called the allegations distorted.
2021 - Blizzard patches the boss mid-race. Blizzard hotfixed the Sylvanas encounter while guilds were progressing on it, breaking a strategy Echo had built. A developer changing the rules during the competition, live, in front of the audience.
2021 - BlizzConline. The pandemic edition, held online, with no hall and no queue.
2021 - Sanctum of Domination, from inside the race. Echo's own highlight film of the July 2021 Race to World First in Sanctum of Domination, cut from their broadcast. The 2021 races drew 22.9 million hours watched and were the point at which raid progression became a spectator sport with production values. Dated to the race, not the guild's later posting.
2021 - The Craft of War: Redemption. A sequel made thirteen years after the original, long after the scene that produced it had dispersed to other platforms.
2021 - Carbot. An animated series that has been drawing Warcraft for over a decade, and is now most players' shorthand for the game's own absurdities.
2021-07-21 - Calling the finish of the Sanctum race. The analyst broadcast covering the final hours of the Sanctum of Domination race, as Echo closed out the Sylvanas kill. By 2021 the Race to World First had a full commentary layer of its own, pull-by-pull percentage tracking, competing co-streams, an audience of 22.9 million hours watched for this tier. Dated to the broadcast itself.
2021-07-28 - The walkout. After California regulators sued the company over its treatment of women, employees of Activision Blizzard walked out. It is one of the few organised labour actions the American games industry has produced.
2022-01-19 - An analyst reads the Activision deal, day one. Yahoo Finance interviews a Jefferies equity analyst on the day Microsoft announced its $68.7bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, framing it as a bet on gaming scale rather than on any game. Broadcast the morning the deal was public, twenty-one months before it closed against an FTC challenge in October 2023.
2022-03-07 - Method go into the Sepulcher. Method's own pre-race film for the Sepulcher of the First Ones, framing the Race to World First as a season with a narrative rather than a raid night. Echo won that race on 26 March 2022, and it became the most-watched RWF ever at 34.7 million hours. Dated to the film's release, before the race itself.
2022-03-26 - Echo kill the Jailer. The end of Shadowlands, after the longest race yet, nineteen days. Sepulcher remains the record holder for total hours watched of any Race to World First: 34.7 million.
2022-04-19 - Dragonflight announcement cinematic. The cinematic Blizzard released to announce Dragonflight, the expansion that followed Shadowlands and turned the game back toward flight and dragons. The archive already holds the announcement broadcast itself; this is the film that played inside it. Dragonriding, the Dracthyr and the talent rebuild were all trailed here.
2022-05-30 - Kil'jaeden killed again in Burning Crusade Classic. A retribution paladin's point of view on a Sunwell Plateau Kil'jaeden kill in Burning Crusade Classic, fourteen years after the fight first closed the original expansion. The on-screen 2,355 DPS is the tell: numbers, addons and player knowledge that did not exist in 2008 applied to an unchanged encounter.
2022 - Kil'jaeden in Burning Crusade Classic. Sunwell Plateau's final boss killed in Burning Crusade Classic, from a druid's point of view. In 2008 Sunwell was seen by a fraction of players; in 2022 it was cleared by guilds who had read every strategy for a decade. The comparison between the two runs is the point of keeping both.
2022 - Wrath Classic announced. The Classic line reaching the expansion most often named as the game's best.
2022 - Chinese players arrive on other servers. When the Chinese servers were closing, players moved onto neighbouring regions to keep their characters, and turned up in numbers on servers that had never had them.
2022 - Dragonflight announced. After Shadowlands, an expansion deliberately smaller in stakes: no cosmic villain, a return to Azeroth, and a stated intention to stop escalating.
2022 - Liquid kill Anduin. A Sepulcher world first from the American side of a race that by then ran twenty-four hours a day from a production studio in Santa Monica.
2022 - Echo: the Sepulcher race in full. The guild's own edit of the longest world-first race in the game's history.
2022 - Inside the Microsoft deal. Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January 2022 at $68.7 billion. It became the largest deal in the history of the games industry.
2022-08-17 - Kil'jaeden on Burning Crusade Classic. A warrior's point of view on the guild One More Pull clearing the Sunwell's final boss, the last raid boss of Burning Crusade, on the 2021-22 Classic realms. The original 2008 kill is elsewhere in the archive; this is the same fight fought again fourteen years later by people who had the strategy but not the gear.
2022-09-22 - The Wrath Classic journey trailer. Blizzard's official trailer for Wrath of the Lich King Classic, cut from the footage of a community content creator rather than a cinematics team. It sells Northrend back to players who had already been there in 2008, which is the whole proposition of Classic. Released four days before the 26 September 2022 relaunch.
2022-10-10 - Raid comms, unedited. A short clip of Liquid's voice communications during a Race to World First pull, posted to the guild's clips channel. What the broadcast smooths over is thirty seconds of people shouting instructions at each other, and that is the actual texture of a progression night. Kept as the sound of the race rather than the result.
2022-10-25 - Dragonflight Legacies, chapter one. The first episode of Legacies, an animated series Blizzard released in the run-up to Dragonflight rather than a single launch cinematic. Nozdormu, the bronze dragon Aspect, guides a warrior with broken memories. It marks the point where the game's marketing became serialised storytelling.
2022-11-16 - Blizzard and NetEase fail to agree. After fourteen years, Blizzard and its Chinese partner could not agree renewal terms. The announcement gave Chinese players roughly two months' notice that their servers would close.
2022-11-28 - Take to the Skies. The Dragonflight launch cinematic. Dragonriding, actual momentum-based flight rather than a hovering mount, turned out to be the change players talked about most.
2022-12-08 - The FTC sues to block it. American regulators moved to stop the acquisition. The case ran for more than two years before it was finally dropped in May 2025.
2023-01-21 - Yogg-Saron with no keepers. A warlock's point of view on a realm-first Alone in the Dark, the Ulduar achievement for killing Yogg-Saron with all four keepers left inactive, on the Wrath Classic realm Faerlina. It was the hardest optional fight of 2009 and remained so when Classic put it back in 2023. Streamed and uploaded the same day.
2023-01-23 - The last minutes in China. Chinese servers went dark at midnight at the end of 23 January 2023, after sixteen years. Around three million active players lost access to their characters.
2023-02-01 - Yogg-Saron with no keepers, on Classic. A rogue's point of view on the hardest optional version of Ulduar's final boss, Yogg-Saron with zero keepers assisting, cleared on a Wrath Classic realm and logged publicly. The fight was the high-water mark of raid design in 2009 and players went back to beat it again fourteen years later, which is the whole argument of Classic in one clip.
2023-02-04 - Yogg-Saron with one Keeper left. A ten-player Ulduar group beats Yogg-Saron with only one Keeper active, the hardest optional version of the fight, played on Wrath Classic from a tank's point of view. Fourteen years after Ulduar first opened, players were re-running its hardest achievements on the returned servers. The upload date is the play date.
2023-02-05 - Yogg-Saron with no Keepers, in Wrath Classic. A shadow priest's run through the zero-Keeper Yogg-Saron kill in Ulduar on Wrath of the Lich King Classic, the hardest optional encounter of that era attempted again fifteen years later. The Classic servers let guilds re-fight the fights that had defined 2009 with everything already known about them. Dated to the run, which the player posted the same week.
2023-02-22 - Yogg-Saron with no keepers, on Wrath Classic. A rogue's-eye run of Alone in the Darkness, the Ulduar achievement that requires beating Yogg-Saron with none of the four Old God keepers assisting. It is the hardest thing Wrath ever asked of a raid and it was still being chased fourteen years later on Classic servers. Dated to the run itself, which the uploader's combat logs confirm.
2023-03-08 - Yogg-Saron with no keepers, on a private server. A no-light Yogg-Saron kill recorded on Warmane, the largest surviving private-server project. It shows the hardest encounter of the Ulduar era still being run competitively on unofficial servers years after Blizzard's own version moved on.
2023 - A seller talks. Someone inside the gold-selling business describing how it works in the 2020s, when the supply chain runs on compromised accounts and automated farming.
2023 - The case for banning GDKP. Gold-bid loot runs let a player buy raid drops outright. The argument against them was that they created demand for gold that would not otherwise exist, and therefore fed real-money trading.
2023 - A year to plan a griefing. A player spent over a year positioning himself inside a Hardcore guild in order to kill all of them at once, permanently. Hardcore has no resurrection, so the loss was total.
2023 - C'Thun on Hardcore. A world first on Hardcore rules, where death is permanent and a wipe ends the characters rather than the attempt.
2023 - Thirty-one minutes of deaths. Hardcore deaths, collected. The mode has no resurrection: a mistake at level fifty-eight costs the whole character.
2023 - Blizzard makes Hardcore official. Hardcore began as a player-enforced honour system with its own addons and adjudicators. Blizzard eventually built it into the game.
2023 - The Hardcore final boss. How the last boss of Classic was killed under permanent-death rules, by a raid that could not afford a single mistake across a whole evening.
2023 - Cataclysm Classic. Classic reaching the expansion that destroyed the original world, which meant re-destroying it, deliberately, for an audience that had chosen to go back.
2023 - The War Within announced. Announced at BlizzCon 2023 as the first part of a three-expansion arc, the longest-range plan Blizzard had ever committed to publicly.
2023 - How the race actually works. Team Liquid on the logistics behind a modern world-first attempt: split raids, gold spent on consumables, sleep schedules, and a roster that treats it as a job because it now is one.
2023 - The statue comes down. NetEase dismantled the orc statue outside its Hangzhou campus as the partnership ended, a corporate divorce conducted with unusual visibility.
2023 - A player sues. A Chinese player sued Blizzard over the shutdown. NetEase opened a refund channel that took over a million applications in about a day.
2023 - Four raiders talk about the race. A long unedited conversation between competitors and casters immediately after the 2023 Amirdrassil race, which drew a record 388,837 concurrent viewers and briefly made WoW the most-watched game on Twitch. These are people who were actually there, debriefing while it is still fresh, rather than a retrospective. Dated to the stream itself.
2023-08-09 - Inside a GDKP run, before the ban. A prominent Classic player walks through a gold-DKP run from the inside, the bidding, the payouts, and why organisers blacklist people who talk about it. Recorded months before Blizzard banned GDKP in Season of Discovery, it shows the practice as it actually ran rather than as it was later argued about.
2023-09-18 - Forty seconds of a hardcore death. A single permadeath clip from a prominent Hardcore streamer: one mistake, and a character of many weeks is gone. Hardcore's whole appeal is that the loss is real and unrepeatable, and short clips like this were the format the community traded in.
2023-10-10 - Fall of the Lich King launch trailer, Wrath Classic. Blizzard's launch trailer for the Fall of the Lich King phase of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, built with community machinima maker Hurricane. It restages the Icecrown Citadel climax fourteen years after the original as an argument that the old content is worth returning to. An official artifact of the Classic re-release programme rather than of 2010.
2023-10-13 - Microsoft closes. The acquisition completed on 13 October 2023, after regulatory fights in three jurisdictions.
2023-11-03 - BlizzCon 2023, the Warcraft segment. The World of Warcraft portion of the BlizzCon 2023 opening ceremony, staged on 3 November 2023 at the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. Blizzard announced three expansions at once as the World Soul Saga, plus Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery, three weeks after Microsoft closed its acquisition.
2023-11-30 - Season of Discovery. Blizzard began changing Classic rather than preserving it, new abilities, new content, in the old world. The question of whether Classic should be a museum or a living game has no settled answer.
2024-01-25 - The layoffs. Three months after the acquisition closed, Microsoft cut 1,900 roles across its gaming division. Blizzard's president and one of its co-founders left the same day, and a survival game six years in development was cancelled.
2024-03-07 - A Philippine newscast covers a Warcraft wedding. A segment on GMA's Balitanghali about a couple in Iloilo City who staged their wedding around the game. It is evidence of how far the game's iconography travelled from its Western player base and into ordinary local news. Distinct from the archive's 2018 in-Azeroth wedding: this one happened in the world, and made the evening news.
2024-04-09 - The return is announced. Blizzard and NetEase announced a new agreement in April 2024. Over two million Chinese players pre-registered within days.
2024-05-17 - The Cataclysm cinematic, remastered for Classic. Blizzard re-released the 2010 Deathwing cinematic in 4K to announce Cataclysm Classic, arriving 20 May 2024. The same footage that once announced the destruction of the old world was repurposed fourteen years later to sell its restaging as nostalgia. Dated to the remaster's release, not the 2010 original, which is a separate scene.
2024-06-03 - Shadow and Fury. The War Within trailer introducing Xal'atath, the Harbinger of the Void, as the expansion's antagonist, released three days before beta access opened. It doubled as marketing for the $89.99 Epic Edition, which sold three days of early access. Blizzard's cinematic output is the closest thing this archive has to a picture of the game itself.
2024-06-09 - The War Within date announce. Blizzard's date-announce cinematic setting 26 August 2024 for The War Within, the first chapter of the three-expansion Worldsoul Saga. Announce cinematics like this one are how a twenty-year-old game still schedules its own calendar. Upload date is the release date.
2024 - The Chinese cat advert, second episode. A live-action television spot made for the Chinese relaunch of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, part of the marketing push after WoW returned to China in August 2024 following 556 days offline. Chinese WoW advertising has always run on a different register than the Western campaigns. Dated to the campaign it belongs to.
2024 - What the Chinese client had to change. A comparison of model differences in the Chinese client. Skeletons were given flesh, corpses became tidy graves and undead were recoloured, to satisfy regulators who twice rejected Wrath of the Lich King for its imagery.
2024 - Mythic Dungeon International. The other competitive format: five players, one dungeon, against a timer. MDI rewards route optimisation and pull planning rather than reflexes.
2024 - The gold cartels. On the organised operations running boosting and gold services at scale, and the difficulty of policing an economy inside a game people pay to play.
2024 - The famous and the infamous. A survey of the players who became known server-wide, in an era when a server was small enough to have a reputation.
2024 - Mists of Pandaria Classic. The Classic line continuing into an expansion that was mocked on release and reassessed later.
2024 - Twenty years. The twentieth-anniversary retrospective. Very few pieces of software have held a continuous population for that long.
2024 - Counting the losses. Coverage of the scale of cuts across Activision Blizzard through 2024, in an industry year that set records for layoffs.
2024 - Twenty years of music, played live. The orchestral concert for the twentieth anniversary. The score is one of the few parts of the game that has been continuously well-regarded for its entire run.
2024-08-06 - Threads of Destiny. An animated short released three weeks before The War Within launched on 26 August 2024, following the Nerubian queen Ansurek. By this point Blizzard was releasing pre-launch animation as a series rather than a single cinematic, which is how the expansion story is now told outside the game.
2024-08-26 - Shadows Beneath. The War Within launch cinematic. Its Epic Edition, at $89.99, sold three days of early access, the point at which paying more bought you playing sooner in a game with a competitive race at its top end.
2024-11-21 - The Anniversary realms. Fresh Classic servers for the twentieth anniversary, with GDKP banned from the start.
2025-02-25 - Undermine launch trailer. Blizzard's trailer for patch 11.1, which opened the goblin city of Undermine as a zone. It is a late-period example of what the expansion trailer had become by 2025: a short, stylised piece selling a single patch rather than a whole expansion. Released the day the patch went live.
2025-05-24 - Arena World Championship 2025 grand finals. The full first day of the AWC 2025 grand finals, broadcast by Blizzard, with eight teams playing for a $200,000 prize pool. Arena esports had by this point been running for close to twenty years, long outliving most of the games it started alongside. The broadcast is the event, so the stream date is the right date.
2025-06-12 - How the $68.7bn deal was booked. An accountancy body's lecturer walks through the Activision Blizzard acquisition as a financial-reporting problem: purchase price allocation, goodwill, and what Microsoft actually bought when it bought Warcraft. It is the only view of the deal in the archive that treats the game as a line item rather than a headline. Dated to publication.
2025 - MDI global finals. Teams pushing the highest keys live. The scene it grew out of, friends timing a dungeon for a weekly reward, is still the most-played endgame in the game.
2025 - The private server era. A history of the unofficial servers, from Feenix to Nostalrius. Almost nothing from these projects survives officially, so accounts like this are much of the record.
2025 - The Return. Blizzard's trailer for the Classic 20th Anniversary edition.
2025 - Midnight: Intercession. The announce cinematic for the twelfth expansion, revealed in August 2025 and released the following March.
2025 - The Sweep. Liquid's account of taking every world first in The War Within, the first time a single guild had swept an entire expansion.
2025 - The player count, finally. Blizzard stopped publishing subscriber numbers in 2015 at 5.5 million. Occasional disclosures since are the only public data anyone has.
2025-07-21 - Mists of Pandaria Classic launch trailer. Blizzard's launch trailer for Mists of Pandaria Classic, narrated by Lorewalker Cho, marking the point where the Classic re-run reached the 2012 expansion. By 2025 the Classic timeline had caught up with the era many players first quit during. The official artifact of the relaunch, distinct from the archive's existing scene on the Classic release itself.
2025-07-25 - Eighteen mages against the Lich King. A speed kill of heroic Icecrown Citadel on Warmane, a long-running private server, with the raid stacked to eighteen mages. Private servers are where the older content kept being played after Blizzard moved on, and stacking a single class is the kind of optimisation only a permanently static population can attempt.
2025-08-24 - Liquid kill Dimensius. The Manaforge Omega world first, taken after 384 attempts, with Echo finishing close behind.
2026-05-24 - The Lich King, 2026. An Arthas costume built in 2026, eighteen years after the expansion that introduced him and sixteen after he was killed.
2026 - Developers on the GDKP ban, two years later. A short stream clip in which Classic developers discuss the gold-for-loot ban and whether it achieved anything. Blizzard banned GDKP on Season of Discovery in February 2024 and never published data to justify it; the ban was still in force in January 2026. The clip is a rare on-record developer remark, not a settled account, talk of a reversal is unverified.
2026 - Did the ban work?. Blizzard banned GDKP in Season of Discovery in February 2024 and extended it to the Anniversary realms that November. It has never been lifted. Two years on, players argue that real-money trading is worse, not better.
2026 - MDI 2026. The competitive dungeon circuit still running in 2026, well after the arena scene it once shared a stage with had contracted.
2026 - A developer answers, sort of. Blizzard restating in January 2026 that the GDKP policy has not changed. The company has never published the botting or trading figures that justified the ban.
2026 - Arena World Championship 2026. Championship Sunday, twenty years after arena was introduced in the first expansion.
2026 - Burning Crusade Classic, again. The Anniversary edition of the first expansion, launched in 2026, the second time the Classic line has reached it.
2026 - Classic in 2026. An assessment of where the Classic line stands, now running several parallel versions of the same twenty-year-old game at once.
2026 - Arator: Immolation. A Midnight cinematic released in early 2026, twenty-two years after the game launched.
2026 - Sylvanas returns: the March on Quel'Danas finale. The in-game finale cinematic for the March on Quel'Danas raid in Midnight, in which Sylvanas Windrunner returns and is reunited with Vereesa and Arator. Blizzard's story cinematics are the only view of Azeroth this archive can carry, and this is the payoff of the expansion's opening arc.
2026 - Liquid kill Midnight Falls. A world first from the Midnight expansion. The 2026 race peaked at 341,797 concurrent viewers.
2026 - Liquid kill Belo'ren. From the March on Quel'Danas raid, twenty-two years after the first forty people walked into Molten Core.
2026 - A season, documented. Team Liquid's documentary on the Midnight Season 1 race, the format the world-first race has settled into: a filmed sports event with a production crew.
2026 - Ghostcrawler on what MMOs are for. Greg Street, long after leaving Blizzard, on player agency and where the genre went, from someone who spent years making the decisions being argued about.
2026 - State of Azeroth 2026. Blizzard's annual address on the game's direction. The 2026 edition drew a peak of 355,888 concurrent viewers, more than that year's world-first race.
2026-06-16 - Liquid kill Sporefall. Liquid's guild-side capture of a world-first Mythic Sporefall kill in Midnight, one of the closest races the guild has run. Race to World First footage from the guild's own stream is the archive's primary record of competitive raiding.
2026-08-10 - Echo announce their run at the Venomous Abyss. Echo's announcement trailer for their Race to World First run through the second season of Midnight, scheduled to start 18 August 2026. By this point the race was a sponsored, scheduled, multi-platform broadcast with its own promotional cycle, a long way from a guild posting a kill video. Dated to the trailer's release.

Full text archive: /loreline-text/world-of-warcraft.md