Blizzard's Top 3 Pranks on World of Warcraft Players A comedy article
by Luke McKinney 11,088 110 03/19/2010 03:05 AM 9765 views
The best pranks require real emotional investment on the part of the prankees, which makes World of Warcraft the best practical joke environment outside of a banana skin-flavored cream pie factory. It's also excellent stress relief for the developers: making addictive games is incredibly hard and leaves little time for stress relief -- which is why Blizzard developers combine work and play to fantastic effect.
They pour an incredible amount of effort into each prank, entertaining millions with a combination of coding, custom graphics, and a deep understanding of their fanbase (which may be better than anyone has understood anything, ever). This kind of commitment is why Blizzard earns a billion dollars a year. Past stunts have included a Tin Foil hat, a musically-inclined "Bard" class to commemorate the absorption of Activision, and even an Evil Patch designed to destroy players. But here are our picks for Blizzard's Top 3 Pranks on World of Warcraft Players:
1. Molten Core Coming to Consoles
World of Warcraft (WoW) updates are more hotly anticipated than the Second Coming, because
a) They happen more frequently
b) They happen at all
Each update also raises the game's level cap, and while that might not mean much to those of us who see the big blue roof of the world sometimes, for players it's like the invention of a new kind of blowjob. They've already done everything it's physically possible to do in their land, reached the highest heights, and now even higher highest heights are coming. Imagine giving Alexander a spaceship and a map to new lands to conquer.
Blizzard played on this with the Molten Core expansion, boasting an incredible update with the entirely believable premise of pushing WoW onto consoles: a huge untapped market which would allow Blizzard to build platinum thrones in their golden castle. Then the update came out, with a trailer promising the very latest in console technology.
From 1977.
It's a perfect parody of grandiose videogame trailers, as well as a love letter to that most classic of consoles, with thundering music and flames promising such incredible features as "Move in any of 8 directions" and "HAS SOUND." (Fans of Adventure were reduced to tears of joy, and if you don't understand that, congratulations on being young.)
2. Pandaren Express
Where Molten Core was well-meaning fun, the Pandaren Express was a brilliantly brutal piss-take of their own audience -- the sort of joke a dealer knows he can get away with, because it's not like his customers are going anywhere. Note: this change in tone didn't make the prank any less hilarious.
This was entirely believable, especially after Everquest's infamous "/pizza" command, which would deliver a hot pie to your door rather than risk players leaving Norrath for more than a minute.
This one was NOT a joke.
Of course, the con was easier to spot from their photograph of Pandaren Xpress delivery staff:
And downright vicious, if accurate, when it came to the free in-game fortune cookie with every meal:
3. The Tauren Marine
What's better than pranking over eleven million players on a planet-spanning game? Pranking millions more by combining two massive games! It just so happens Blizzard is the number one firm able to do that (in a field of one), combining World of Warcraft with Starcraft 2 to bring out the Tauren Marine:
The Taurens are a race in WoW, Terran Marines are one side of the wars in Starcraft, and this shows you can get away with the worst pun in the world if you put in enough work. The Tauren Marine update revealed that Azeroth was just one world in the Starcraft galaxy, and featured full in-game videos of the Taurens destroying everything they encountered. And while some Warcrafters are so dedicated they invented the term poopsocking (do NOT Google that), Starcrafters would overthrow the Korean government if Blizzard promised new units for doing so.
It's a great example of the Internet as a prank-amplifier -- it's okay to pour weeks of work into a single perfect instant, because it'll be electronically communicated around the world with the potential of entertaining millions. Of course, it helps that Blizzard already had those millions kept in electronic cages (also known as "player accounts").
BONUS PRANK: The Pandaran Brewmaster
Possibly the best and most understated of all Blizzard jokes is the "Collector's Pandaren Brewmaster" figure in the Blizzard Store, advertising an eight-inch Panda doll as a "premium-sculpted ... limited-edition opportunity ... in a 4-color, spot UV collectors window box" and claiming it's worth $50. They still haven't even announced that it's a joke -- but it has to be.
Oh, I poopsocked once out in the desert when I was fighting fires. Only I couldn't use one of my precious socks, so I used the bread bag from our lunch. For some reason they didn't like it when I tossed it on top of the van at the end of the day...
Store
11,088 
110 
9,430 
21
