Origin of World of Warcraft: The early days of WoW development | Jeff Kaplan and Lex Fridman
Jeff Kaplan discusses the early WoW development team as a diverse mix of industry veterans and inexperienced designers who succeeded precisely because they lacked MMO expertise. He contrasts this with Blizzard's later failure on Project Titan, attributing the difference to overconfidence and over-specialization, while positioning WoW as an underdog competing against EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies.
Summary
Jeff Kaplan recounts the formation of the original World of Warcraft development team, describing it as a 'Bad News Bears' assemblage of talented veterans like Mark Kern, Shane Dabiri, Bill Petris, and Chris Metzen, combined with newcomers and people from other disciplines. The team lacked hardcore MMO designers, so dungeon builders hired from the Quake community constructed dungeons as Quake levels, and WoW was initially even built in QERadiant, the Quake engine, before transitioning to a proprietary engine. Kaplan emphasizes that his own qualification was simply being someone who played a lot of EverQuest. He argues that WoW's success was fundamentally enabled by the team's collective inexperience and lack of preconceived notions about MMO design. He contrasts this with Project Titan, Blizzard's post-WoW MMO attempt that failed despite having the best talent available, attributing the failure to excessive expertise and overconfidence about creating a groundbreaking phenomenon. Kaplan positions the original WoW team as confident underdogs from a successful company (having made StarCraft, Diablo, and Warcraft) who believed they could compete with Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and LucasArts' Star Wars Galaxies, the latter featuring renowned designer Raph Koster from Ultima Online. The team worked extreme hours voluntarily, driven by passion rather than obligation.
Key Insights
- Kaplan argues that WoW's success was significantly enabled by the team not knowing what they were doing, contrasting this with Project Titan where excessive expertise and overconfidence led to failure despite having the best talent
- The original WoW team hired dungeon designers from the Quake community rather than MMO veterans, initially building dungeons as Quake levels and even prototyping the game in QERadiant before creating a proprietary engine
- Kaplan positions WoW as an underdog competing against EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies, with the team believing they would likely lose to these better-positioned competitors at the time of WoW's development
- The early WoW team consisted of Blizzard veterans like Mark Kern and Chris Metzen combined with people like Kaplan who had no previous MMO design experience, creating a diverse mix of expertise levels
- Kaplan emphasizes that the WoW team's minimal expertise in MMO design forced them to approach dungeon building by importing methodologies from other game genres rather than following established MMO conventions
Topics
Transcript
[0:02] so, you know, the early days of WoW was... It was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. You know, we had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Dabiri was, you know, legendary Blizzard developer. Bill Petris was the art director, and then we had Metzen, who was sort of like... Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be. Uh, I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother. And [0:38] then there were a lot of us who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types.…
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