I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.
This post is a bit different from previous ones as it doesn't actually talk about my experience playing the game itself, but rather contains a collection of links to WoW fan videos that I discovered at the time. In the original post, every single link was broken by now (some of them didn't even go to YouTube yet, but to the old Google Video site) but I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to locate re-uploads of all but one of videos (so the links work again). Get ready for some stamp-sized, 5 frames-per-second, incredibly cheesy nostalgia!1
The following was originally posted on November 13th, 2006 under the title "Billy Maclure Has Got Some Trouble...":
For once I have to thank my brother for introducing me to a great source of entertainment: World of Warcraft music videos. On Sunday he asked me what kind of character I played and such, and when I told him that I was a Night Elf he told me that there was a video on Google of Night Elves dancing to YMCA that I should definitely check out.
My brother's taste and mine don't always overlap, but I decided to humour him and have a look... and ended up finding this. Not the most well-made video ever, but the sheer silliness of it still made me laugh, not to mention that I was amazed by how well the dancing was synchronised. And of course there's the fact that these people actually named their characters Tha, Vil, Lage, Peo and Ple...
But this was only the beginning. I soon discovered that there are a lot more WoW music videos like that out there, such as this version of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" or this vid to the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West". I watched, I giggled, and the more I searched, the more creative the work I found became. I mean, if I were to make a WoW music video, Weird Al's "Hardware Store" wouldn't exactly be my first contender for the song to use... yet someone still pulled off the amazing feature of making an excellent vid out of it (made in the EU, I'm also proud to say). And there's just something strangely right about Al's part being played by a troll... *snerk*
And yet the best was still to come, namely videos for which people had actually written and performed their own songs too, such as The Ballad of the Noob and my absolute favourite Billy Maclure, a parody of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean". I have to admit that I've watched that one over and over again and still laugh at some of the jokes... cause yes, I also killed legions of hogs and swine for those damn pork pies. Not to mention that it's simply amazingly well done. If I read correctly, the guys who made it were later also involved in the making of the South Park WoW episode.2
And finally, honourable mentions go to two German contributions I stumbled upon by accident: Dwarves dancing to Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" (nothing really special, but nicely synchronised and Dwarves are funny, period) and the plainly named WoW Song3, which doesn't even have a proper video so I don't know why it was uploaded to Google Video, but the sheer geekiness of the singing still cracked me up. Now if someone could only tell me which song it's based on, cause I know that I know the tune but I can't remember the original title and lyrics...
1 I do miss the days when people made this kind of silly content for no other purpose than to have fun, and others also enjoyed watching it. These days it's hard to find WoW content that isn't guides or news trying to capitalise on clicks.
2 I don't know about that, but I do know that Terran Gregory ended up working for Blizzard that same year and still works on WoW as Cinematic Narrative Director to this day. To think it all started with a humble quest in Elwynn Forest...
3 This was the one video I couldn't find, probably since "WoW Song" is not a very unique search term and my description of it is kind of vague. I did find this entry on the Wayback Machine, but it doesn't appear to contain a copy of the actual video, and the video title stored there, "Der neue Deutsche WoW Song" didn't yield any search results for me either.
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