I remember it vividly! Visiting the house of my cousin, who had previously shown me Warcraft 3 and Serious Sam, I was surprised when he showed me the box of his newest video game purchase (still get tingles when I look at it):



I remember we stayed up late because the download took so long and that when we finally logged in to his fresh account..... We had absolutely no idea what to do. We didn't even have a clue as to how you moved your character (after 30 minutes or so I remember we figured it out)! I was absolutely enthralled.

Needless to say, as a 10 year old with very little patience, I immediately went home the next day and requested my very first laptop and a copy of the game (shoutout Mike<my dad> for being such a boss and allowing me to geek out).

Anyways, what were the circumstances under which you first learned about the existence of WoW (or how about the WoW classic for that matter)?

I had been playing counter-strike competitively and 2 of my highschool friends talked about WoW all the time. They would always stop talking when I was around because they didnt think I would like it. I expressed some interest and both refused to say anything about the game insisting that I would hate it. This fueled me to get the game because NO ONE TELLS ME WHAT I DONT LIKE! Needless to say, I hated the game... Wizards and magic... This was dumb. But alas, I paid my 15$ sub and I was damn well going to get my monies worth. I forced myself to play on and off and my character slowly grew as did my attachment to the game. Eventually I was an addict.

Hah what an unconventional beginning, with hate and pride! Alls well that ends well though

Saw people playing it at an internet café, this was in the CS 1.6 & DotA Allstars days, so it was rare to see kids my age playing it. Tried it out when I got the chance but couldn't be bothered to fight over a seat every time, wasn't THAT impressed by it in the little time I got to play.

Later on my older brother picked up a copy at the start of Wrath, that's when the addiction kicked in.
I still remember when I had the account all to myself for an entire month in summer due to him going on vacation, don't think I showered for over a week when he left.

Showers are cleansing for the soul AND the body! But I've been there haha.

@Krunk I've always been interested in the internet cafe culture as it wasn't a big thing where I'm from. Have you made more friends in-game or in-cafe??

Found forum of an unknown game called "Art Of War" on my internet provider site and decided to give it a try. Lately I realized that the game actually called World of Warcraft.
In time I learned about WoW I had very shitty internet connection and horrible PC and could play only on my internet provider servers in my country. So, first WoW experience i had on non-official server at my home. There was only around 30 people online at the time in whole world, server was crashing maybe once in 20-30 minutes with a rollback of 10, almost nothing was working, only simplest spells, like 2-3 talents in each talent tree. On top of all that my computer at that time was so shit that it could run the game at maximum of 12 (!) FPS with minimum settings and camera turned all the way to the ground. But holy cow, I enjoyed the game so much, was literally almost crying out of excitement leveling my first character. I even remember him to this day - it was Night Elf Warrior. Those days was truly some of the best in my life.

@Romsia It's incredible how much this game has impacted all of our lives! Where are you from?

I'm from Belarus, Minsk.

A friend told me about a game he had seen while playing Diablo 2 LOD at a local internet café. We had a look at the World of Warcraft website and i decided to give it a try, we rushed to the local gameshop at bought a copy of the game. We played all day and the day after i told all my irl friends that was playing Diablo about this wonderful game. Within a week we where all exploring Azeroth together having the time of our lives.

jtr wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Showers are cleansing for the soul AND the body! But I've been there haha.

@Krunk I've always been interested in the internet cafe culture as it wasn't a big thing where I'm from. Have you made more friends in-game or in-cafe??

Well, pretty much every person in the neighbourhood and school played there, so I'd say in-cafe. Games played there at the time were super rarely online, everyone would scrim against each other on LAN, only the really good players would play ladder matches for competitive games.
It's a stark contrast to modern day internet cafés, if they're still around seeing as how the barrier to entry for computers & internet is so low now.
Back then it was a tight-knit community of sorts, everyone knew each other, kind of like Classic. Could draw a parallel between the two.

But, things started shifting majorly when we got internet at home; I learned English from TV & video games so I started communicating more with people online, around the same time I got into WoW, so now the majority of my decade old friendships are with people I've met on the internet.

@Krunk your post makes me almost nostalgic for something I never even had the privilege to experience! Sounds like we need to start a petition for classic internet cafes

Back in 2005 when I was still in highschool, I had a couple of friends who wouldn't shut up about the game. I would overhear their conversations and became curious and started asking questions. One day I just decided to buy the game and give it a shot, I instantly became hooked, best decision of my life. I miss what the game used to be compared to today, the game just doesn't have as much soul put into it anymore. I can't wait to play Classic.

Back in 2004 I was reading gaming magazine at home and there was a small article stub about WoW beta (or alpha?) leak, discouraging people from trying it and recommending to wait. There was also small screenshot that looked really wonky after playing W3 (I think some disproportionate orc standing next to tree stump?). Until then I have never heard about WoW before. Later I found out that my Warcraft 3 disc had WoW trailer on it. Ever since then I started frequenting WoW forums with anticipation.

The preorders were very limited in numbers (for prepaids as well!) and I didn't get my copy. The news said Blizzard would supply more copies a few months after release. I was so hyped I decided to get it off local auction house, similar to eBay (so far I had good run with them). People were selling WoW for ridiculous amounts: 200%, 300% of price. I found one offer with just small margin which should have been suspicious. Long story short, I got scammed. Surprisingly, years later Police traced the guy despite his use of fake credentials.

So I had to wait for next batch of copies. Until then I played W3 ladder a lot and often asked people in chat if anybody tried WoW. Nobody answered, nobody said yes. I was so shocked, this game was so anticipated. Certainly somebody must have tried it?! I didn't realize that whoever tried WoW, wouldn't turn on W3 for a long time.

When the next batch of copies came, I started my adventure as human mage. For weeks I was so stoked I couldn't sleep. And so the addiction began. :D

I was always an RTS baby. I loved the warcraft franchise and I loved the starcraft franchise. I played these games to death.

Fast forward to the release of WoW. I knew it existed but I had been playing blizzard games forever and I wanted to give something else a try, and because some of my friends were playing it. Instead of buying WoW, I decided to join my friends in City of Heroes/Villians. And I have to say, it was a very enjoyable game for my very first MMO. The customization options in the game blew my mind. But that was about the best part of the game for me. Just messing around with the character creator and making whatever hero or villain I could think of. The actual gameplay portion of the game left a lot to be desired.

After a bit of time with the game I thought, you know what... it's time to return to my roots. I gave another game developer a shot and it didn't really scratch the itch I was feeling, so I made the switch and started playing WoW.

Oof... big mistake. That game showed me what I was actually missing in an MMO. CoH/V had this thing where pretty much every quest took place in an instanced zone where you were alone, almost like a mini dungeon, except you don't go in with a group. So you have the open world and then quest locations that are instanced, but solo. WoW was ALL world with some instanced zones, but those were dungeons. Pretty damn bad ass.

I must have spent all of vanilla not even playing the game to 60 but instead rolling alts of every single class because I wanted to experience everything the game had to offer in terms of zones, races, doodads, and just overall feeling. I was hooked man. I played WoW from vanilla to the beginning of Cata. I tried really hard to like the game in Cata but the game that I came to love was a shadow of its former self and I just didn't love it as much as I did back in WotLK. Perhaps it was also because I didn't really leave myself a gap of time between WotLK and Cata and I just kept playing and playing and probably burned myself out by the time Cata released. Needless to say, I am insanely stoked for Classic!

At the mall checking out new RTS games and saw a lot of posters about it.

I reserved a copy there and then!

Went to a friends house watching him play and it looked dumb, mostly because I never played a game like this before.
This was the days we mostly played FPS's like Counter-Strike.

A couple months went by and went the same friends house to LAN!
I read the game manual and was interested in playing priest (Dwarf because they were Alliance)
They gave me a free trial code to play it and the rest was history!
Stopped playing all other games after that lol

It was addicting as soon as I created a character and logged in!
Blizzard stole another persons adolescence lol

I got bored playing the Gamecube during the summer holidays before high scool.

I started in TBC, I've lost track of how many characters I've had.

Pretty early on, I think. I'm trying to remember exactly, but early enough that I was completely overhyped for the game by the time it actually came out.

It must've been some time around early 2004 or late 2003? Early enough that I remember them revealing the designs for Trolls on the website being an update for me when I was checking the site regularly.

I probably learned about it through PC Gamer since I was reading that pretty regularly at the time. My initial reaction was disinterest, because I remembered disliking my brief time in Everquest (I rolled a dwarf warrior on Rallos Zek and spent the bulk of my playtime getting my ass kicked, never really accomplished anything). I was a big Warcraft 3 fan at the time though, and still liked MMOs in general, so with a little cajoling from one of my friends I eventually got on board the hype train. I think there was a big spread on it in some gaming magazine that went over all the classes (One fun note from that is I remember it being the first time I read the term DPS, which they defined as Damage Per Strike, confusing me as to how that was different than just damage), and that pushed me way over the edge.

Ended up playing City of Heroes over the summer in 2004, then went back to Nexus TK for a while. Ended up getting into some late-stage beta for WoW, around November 8th-11th 2004, made a Shaman, but chickened out and ended up remaking as a Warrior, which I continued on with at Launch.

So, to actually answer the question of the thread, "I dunno, probably in PC Gamer a few months before release?"

i was still like 12 y/o, right around the time classic came out in europe, my neighbor came to me one day asking for help to install this new Warcraft game ! ( he thought it was Warcraft 4 !!! ), i inspected the the game box, and was amazed by the images and the artwork(even the cds were sexy af), so i explained to him its an MMO game, not strategy like wc3, he was disappointed and told me to keep it as he's not interested.
at that time, the only MMOs i have played were Runescape ( oh the memories..) and even that was an addicting experience.

i immediately fired up my pc, began to install it, cd by cd i recall it took me a solid 6 hours to install it !!!, made an account, entered the cd key, and i got in !
i distinctly recalled making a male gnome mage, when i logged in for the first time, it was insanely overcrowded, everything was dead, there were literally dozens of players fighting to tag 1 mob, while oblivious me was having fun killing critters ! XD.

the other memory i had was making a human warlock, i ran around elewyn forest, as lvl 6, and i decided to follow a group of lvl 40s that were at goldshire, i ran with them from elewyn to redridge, all the way to burning steppes !! as a level 6 warlock. i died ALLOT but i was so amazed by how different and awe-some the world was, i remember seeing the giant golem constructs, their unique golden frame, the fear of the zone and how it looked, so the only thing that i thought about next, was to cast a shadow bolt at it xD ! ofc i died but it only made me more intrigued by the game.

my parents hate that kid for basically handing me an addiction that day xD,

I was 12 years old. I don't remember exactly what brought me there, but I clicked a link somewhere and it took me to the page on Blizzard's website for the launch of Burning Crusade, which was coming out soon (in about a month I believe). I remember there was a graphic of a character fishing, and of course lots of Blood Elves. I spent the whole night just reading about the game, and then I knew I had to buy it. So I asked my Mom to buy it for me and she did. Then I told all my friends at school about the game and a bunch of them started playing too. My first character was a Night Elf druid, but I ended up rolling a bunch of different characters, never getting one past level 20, until I finally stuck with a Human paladin and got him all the way to 70. Stimey was his name, on Quel'Dorei (US-PvE).

At a friend's house in summer, he showed me how you could take all the female characters gear off and dance naked on top of the table.

I was sold on it instantly.

Hazen wrote: ↑

5 years ago

At a friend's house in summer, he showed me how you could take all the female characters gear off and dance naked on top of the table.

I was sold on it instantly.

LOL I actually laughed out loud at work at this!

Shit I dunno. Probably sitting in my parents' basement playing CS:S or another Blizzard property. I've been fairly interested in all of their games so I never had some big "OMG WoW!" moment where I discovered its existence.

pan0phobik wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Shit I dunno. Probably sitting in my parents' basement playing CS:S or another Blizzard property. I've been fairly interested in all of their games so I never had some big "OMG WoW!" moment where I discovered its existence.

I did!

I didnt play any games that Blizzard made that I am aware of...never heard or saw any warcraft games until I played WoW.
It was a sight to be seen!

It reeled me in real quick and never let go!

I was in my brother's room, located in the way back of my grandma's house. He was basically stuffed in a closet, but anyway he was playing WoW. I can only remember fragments of the vision. He was on a Tauren something running through a forest somewhere... the rest is history. A good couple years of taking turns, then getting your own rig, then learning about macros and addons, etc. Good times... pumped classic #2019.