It helped that the team was spending a lot of time playing certain other games. It wasn't just this natural progression, however, that inspired World of Warcraft. I think that helped to establish the feeling that, wow, our game would look awesome like this." You see the horizon, and the enemy camps in front. "We ended up going back more to the RTS side, but I remember seeing those first builds of the game: you're running around with the Archmage or the Blademaster, right behind him. We were thinking of a slightly different, RTS-slash-RPG vibe for the game. "I'm not sure if this is exactly where it started - but at one time, we had a behind-the-character camera in Warcraft III, much like you see in WOW now. Sam ("Samwise") Didier, the company's art director, interjects. "We had been working on Warcraft III or different iterations of it for a couple of years at the point when we really started to think about World of Warcraft, and a lot of the creative vision really translated from the Warcraft III experience." It took a bit longer to get murlocs right, however. "It felt like a natural progression," recalls Blizzard's grandly-titled vice president of creative development, Chris Metzen, casting his mind back almost a decade. Why would Blizzard, a strategy-gaming giant, be choosing to muck around with this niche genre? Didn't they know how few people played MMOs? Did they understand what they were getting themselves into? There was excitement and intrigue, certainly, but there was also a sense of confusion - even disappointment. You would be able to play from first-person, third-person or zoomed-out, isometric perspectives. Three playable races - humans, orcs and the bull-like tauren - were revealed, and each was going to be fundamentally different. That afternoon, Roper announced a whole new direction for Blizzard - the company was going to make a massively multiplayer game, letting people roam the Warcraft world as their own characters. An early sketch of a gnoll defined the look of the game, says Didier. The smart money was on a sequel to its other strategy hit, StarCraft. Even then, the studio was known for doing few games, very slowly - and very, very well. The already legendary studio had revealed its (as yet unreleased) strategy game Warcraft III at ECTS two years previously, and the announcement of a new Blizzard game was a big deal. Blizzard executive Bill Roper had flown into London to make an announcement at the ECTS trade show. World of Warcraft first popped into public view in September, 2001. If we want to talk about that game - rather than the baggage it has accumulated over the years - it makes sense to go all the way back to the beginning. A game crafted with skill, love and obsessive perfectionism by an exceptionally talented team at the company that built it, Blizzard Entertainment. Strip away the hype, the numbers, the media coverage and the debate, and what you're left with is simply a superb game. Yet all of this can sometimes serve to obscure the most important thing about World of Warcraft. Perhaps because WOW is so huge, so impossible to ignore, it polarises opinions. There's nothing else like it in videogaming, a fact which makes perfect sense to its players - but is frankly baffling to non-players, and those who don't understand the appeal of the online worlds presented by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs, or simply MMOs). The sheer magnitude of World of Warcraft is staggering. Therapists creating in-game characters for addiction counselling. A billion-dollar grey market in gold and items.