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.
Part of World of Warcraft
30 moments in this segment.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - E3 2006. Blizzard at E3 in the middle of the first expansion cycle, with the game already the largest subscription MMO in the world.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - Legion at Gamescom. Blizzard's stand at Gamescom during Legion, the expansion generally credited with recovering the game after Warlords of Draenor.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - Dragonflight announced. After Shadowlands, an expansion deliberately smaller in stakes: no cosmic villain, a return to Azeroth, and a stated intention to stop escalating.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - Twenty years. The twentieth-anniversary retrospective. Very few pieces of software have held a continuous population for that long.
- - 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.
- - Midnight: Intercession. The announce cinematic for the twelfth expansion, revealed in August 2025 and released the following March.
- - Arator: Immolation. A Midnight cinematic released in early 2026, twenty-two years after the game launched.
