At least since his via Kickstarter funded diary around the development of World of Warcraft (vanilla version) we know that John Staats is an inexhaustible source for exciting insider anecdotes from the years before the vanilla launch. As a 3D level designer, he was responsible for the development of many vanilla dungeons back then. If you want to learn more about the development of WoW, you don't have to buy the book, Staats also regularly publishes short essays on Wowhead in which he shares his stories.

The current issue is about the team structure in the first years of WoW development as well as the crunch phase, which Staats obviously looks back on very fondly. We have summarized the most important insights from the essay for you below:

  • Mark Kern, another developer of vanilla WoW, once remarked that he had never experienced such a sociable professional environment as the WoW team in the years before the vanilla launch. And John Staats backs that up: the team was constantly going to lunch together in a motley fashion, squeezing into the backseats of a few cars in spontaneous groups to do so, and often the clique was so large that only a few restaurants were even considered for lunch. Cliques, which mostly kept to themselves, were remarkably few.
  • The WoW team leaders had learned from the development of Starcraft and were keen to avoid burning out team members with overly intense and long crunch phases. In this regard, the development of Starcraft must have been a nightmare, as the team constantly lagged behind milestones, Allen Adham kept finding things to improve, and new problems repeatedly caused the crunch to not stop. What was supposed to be a sprint for a short time turned into a marathon at a constant sprint pace. It was normal for people to work late into the night and sleep in the office. Meals were skipped, as was the daily shower. Thanks in part to this energy-sapping time, Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham then announced his departure in 2004.
  • Still, even vanilla WoW had labor-intensive phases that could be called crunches. However, John Staats explains that much of the overtime was done voluntarily by the developers. He himself saw Blizzard less as an employer and more as a promoter. He loved designing dungeons. He would have loved to take on every instance, as they all had their cool special features. And for him, it was natural to put as much time as necessary into designing the dungeons to get the best possible result.
  • According to Staats, the same was true for the other developers, who worked tremendously hard to ensure that the features that were important to them remained in the game and achieved the best possible quality. Programmers like Collin Murray and Scott Hartin were particularly blatant about this, spending many of their weekends in the office. Tim Truesdale, John Staats' roommate, was often experimenting with code and systems late at night, simply because he wanted to see if WoW (buy now €14.99 ) could be made even better. Even employees with families put in a lot of overtime that wasn't even required. The fact that someone simply served his eight hours every day, that did not exist.
  • Before the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS), the developers wanted to show as polished a version of the game as possible for a big announcement, so twice a week in the months before, the working hours were extended to 22:00. However, a large part of the team voluntarily stayed longer. Partly to work, but also to play a few rounds of Counter-Strike. Which brings us back to the first point: the WoW team was a very social bunch at the time.

More anecdotes from John Staats:

  • How vanilla WoW was born from the mistakes of Nomad
  • Blizzard was afraid of the lousy MMO competition
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