Why Blizzard Made World of Warcraft Classic

World of Warcraft Classic, at first blush, might seem like a bit of an odd decision. While work continues on the main World of Warcraft, with the latest expansion being last year's Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard Entertainment made the call to also go back and essentially remake something as close to the original version of the video game that it could. Why did the company ultimately decide to do so? The short version is: everyone kept asking for it.

ComicBook.com spoke with Brian Birmingham and Omar Gonzalez, lead software engineer and senior software engineer on World of Warcraft Classic, respectively, ahead of release. Between the two of them, there's 29 years total -- 13 and 16 -- with the company. If anyone had answers about the why and how of the new, old game, they would. And while they initially chuckled at the question, they both went on to explain how the feedback from fans and their collective desire to go back to vanilla World of Warcraft was really the driving force behind World of Warcraft Classic.

ComicBook.com: Can you explain what exactly, for maybe someone who doesn't understand, what is the point of World of Warcraft Classic? Why bother making it?

Brian Birmingham: I would say this has been something that our fans have been passionately requesting from us for many years. So, we really wanted to respond to the community feedback we received for that. And write this as a thank you and a love letter back to our fans. Say thank you so much for your passion and commitment to this game and all of your interest in seeing us restore this original product. So, for a long time we thought this would be difficult and did an investigation trying to figure out if this is something we thought would be feasible on our large developing stack and after a prototype that actually Omar Gonzales cheered up the effort for, we decided it was something we could do and we began the process to try and make this a reality for everybody that has been asking for it so much.

Omar Gonzalez: I do want to add, included in the reasons for why [...] there is a lot of old, retro games that you can just kind of pull up, blow the dust off their old installation CDs like, Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2. You can just grab the old discs and just pop them in if ever you wanted to play older games. This option is not available with big online subscription-based games. So, there was no avenue for people who wanted to play the old versions of, or the Warcraft that they remember playing in their younger days. So, that was another big reason why we did this, because there was no other way to do it.

*****

What do you think of the reasoning behind the creation of World of Warcraft Classic? Were you one of those fans constantly clamoring for a way to play the original version of the game? Are you excited to play now that it's out? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!

World of Warcraft Classic is currently available for anyone that has an active World of Warcraft subscription. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the throwback MMORPG right here.