Found these in The Way Back Machine. How beautiful Worldofwarcraft.com looked back then is and was amazing.

Official Release date banner on the home page of Wow (2003/2004)



Collectors Edition



Original Stress Test Icon



Wrath Patch 3.3 SPLASH page.

Blizzard's old web design aesthetic was great back in the day, it really captured the feeling of the game.

The old Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft sites were amazing too but I can't remember the URL for those.

Side note, just been poking around on the Wayback Machine and found this bad boy:

Here is a similar topic we had earlier this year - fun finds from the wayback machine. Lots of graphics assets scraped from the original sites

Ohh yeah I scraped few images for our guilds website via the wayback machine :D
Very nostalgic indeed

Also want to say from a web dev perspective - the way they templated the pages was so typical of its time and had its own particular charm.

Grid-based with excessive use of <table> related tags and .GIFs split into different parts to overlap borders. .JPG can be found occasionally as well but not as often.

The design on the other hand was well beyond its time, like the Arreat Summit bnet site for Diablo 2 before it. They seamlessly brought in-game assets into a web context and the transition from game to site felt so consistent.

This is what I really miss about those times. In the rush for mobile responsiveness, speed performance and usability a lot of that immersion is lost (official bnet forums now for example).

This is what I tried to avoid when building bchat - I wanted to bring back some of that nostalgic feeling that we used to enjoy outside the game.

teebling wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Also want to say from a web dev perspective - the way they templated the pages was so typical of its time and had its own particular charm.

Grid-based with excessive use of <table> related tags and .GIFs split into different parts to overlap borders. .JPG can be found occasionally as well but not as often.

The design on the other hand was well beyond its time, like the Arreat Summit bnet site for Diablo 2 before it. They seamlessly brought in-game assets into a web context and the transition from game to site felt so consistent.

This is what I really miss about those times. In the rush for mobile responsiveness, speed performance and usability a lot of that immersion is lost (official bnet forums now for example).

This is what I tried to avoid when building bchat - I wanted to bring back some of that nostalgic feeling that we used to enjoy outside the game.

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Arreat Summit is still there!

Selexin wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Arreat Summit is still there!

I still use it quite a lot, as I'm sure @teebling does too when he gets that... urge.

Fantastic website.

The old wow website is well archived.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041129090 ... craft.com/

Is there any way we can get that website theme (html, css, etc. files) to build a custom one?

nafeth wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Is there any way we can get that website theme (html, css, etc. files) to build a custom one?

Thanks Kaiju.
I just found the old website still live at blizzard: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/games/wow/

And the fansite kit for vanilla (tho not looking quite the same..) http://media.wow-europe.com/vault/fsk/WoW_FSK_enGB.zip

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

nafeth wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Thanks Kaiju.
I just found the old website still live at blizzard: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/games/wow/

And the fansite kit for vanilla (tho not looking quite the same..) http://media.wow-europe.com/vault/fsk/WoW_FSK_enGB.zip

Kaiju wrote: ↑

5 years ago

The old wow website is well archived.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041129090 ... craft.com/

I remember as a kid I saw that WoW keyboard and thinking thats the most badass thing i've ever saw.

Ceglaw wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Man, I can hear that image...

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Hey, the Arreat Summit is still there!
http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/classes/
and it still looks amazing.