What follows is a brief history regarding the events and trends leading to an interesting evolution of the video games industry. I had the fortune to be there, on the ground floor, observing and contributing somewhat to the thing. This was originally published in January 2020 and as such is a rehost, but I’m still trying to handle a feline-free experience and rehosting is the righthosting right meow.
Warning: To the uninitiated, this article will be slathered in odd terms, acronyms, and curious words one simply will not have encountered outside of online video games. As such, I’ve provided a helpful glossary which defines them below. One can muddle through without this legend pointing the way, but why would they? It’s more interesting than the article itself.
MMORPG = Virgin Simulator, Chaos Realm consisting solely of electrons
WoW = World of Warcraft, sarcastic exclamation
Kobold = Doglike monster with rudimentary cognitive capabilities, voter
NPC = Digital punching bag, quest-giving taskmaster, voter
Blizzard = Video game developer doomed to become a Disney developer
Kilrogg = Best WoW Server in the Universe
Guild = Voluntary associative body of nerds in an online space
Player versus Player = Bloodsport competition for Top Virgin
Player versus Environment = Industrial revolution, capitalism
Raider = High caliber virgin, anti-social individual
Banhammer = Heavy-handed orbital bombardment, masturbatory technique
Level = Number of missed opportunities to have sex with a person
Boss = Virgin slaying non-player entity, strong, big dick energy
Casual = One who has had the sex but insists on playing video games anyway
Massive-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games have come a long way since Everquest, thanks mostly in part to the World of Warcraft and an entire generation of consumers with both disposable income and leisure time; not to mention a will and desire to endlessly harvest kobold paws for pushy NPCs. WoW, an acronym which just gives itself over to gleeful marketers, was released in late 2004 to immediate applause and wide market-adoption.
It was praised, and rightfully so for the time, for its accessibility, its ease of play, and for its art style which has so gracefully weathered the vagaries of time. True, there have been several updates to the game over the last fifteen years of its existence, bringing its graphical quality more up to par, but the style itself is timeless. This game, particularly when paired with the name-brand recognition of its developer and publisher, Blizzard, was simply doomed to success from the beginning.
This isn’t to say Blizzard had any experience at all with MMORPG’s, which will become important later on. But it is to say the numbers involved with WoW, that is, number of sales, number of subscriptions, number of concurrent users, etc, were all astronomical. The sheer volume of players doing things must have been overwhelming to individuals at the company who had never done this sort of thing before; with ‘this sort of thing’ being the operation, maintenance, and updating of a MMORPG with literally a million users just after its launch.
In those days, specifically in early 2005, Blizzard learned through failure more so than through success. They overreacted to everything, from the price of black oil fish to a minor situation regarding a terminal blood plague from the jungles of Zul-Gurub. The story regarding the origin of the game strategy video was also the ultimate result of an overreaction on their part.
Once upon a time on the Kilrogg server in World of Warcraft, a guild existed called Conquest. Now, Conquest was a bunch of super nerds, some of whom I consider friends to this day, who played Everquest together prior to moving over to WoW.
These guys and gals and troglodytes of the internet underworld took great pride in being excellent raiders, which is to say, virgins of the highest caliber. I also was an excellent raider who took pride in that fact; though full disclosure, I did not raid with Conquest. I was in the only other “competitive” guild on the server, called Temporary Insanity. I played a rogue, though I’d played a priest previously, before I realized I’d rather stab people than heal them.
Now when I say “competitive” that isn’t to say we were ever neck-to-neck in any sort of race of progress, because we weren’t. Although, we did smash their asses in player-versus-player on the regular. Come at me, Conquest Bros, and I shall sing a song of our people, called Warsong Gulch. But in the realm of player-versus-environment, or player-versus-enemies, Conquest was without peer. There were several reasons for this, not the least of which was the tiny yet significant fact they were simply quite excellent at video games. But they were also organized and meticulous and determined, and that is precisely how they found themselves face to face with an over-reactive banhammer wielded by Blizzard.
Some context is required here. Upon the release of WoW, the player could engage in a variety of things, but all of these things simply revolved around accruing experience points to level up one’s character. The highest level, referred to as the level cap, was set at 60. After level 60, one would begin to “grind” dungeons, which is a term of phrase used to refer to running dungeons with a group of four other players, over and over again to gain access to better and better equipment for their characters. This was done in order to prepare oneself for a “raid”, which consisted of a dungeon requiring forty players total.
There were only two raids available for players initially, Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair. I and some friends had reached Molten Core early on as these things were measured, but Conquest had done so long prior to our arrival. Upon entering this raid, my groups were almost immediately obliterated, and we simply failed to figure out the first of several bosses in that molten hell. We thought perhaps it was unfinished, as in the game designers hadn’t gotten around to finishing the content they’d released just to satisfy a few power virgins, and it turns out that was indeed the case. But Conquest, as already mentioned, were meticulous and determinedly nerdy, and they dug into the raid with a gusto and patience I didn’t even know people possessed.
One day, Conquest announced they had defeated not just one boss in Molten Core, but the vast majority of bosses in Molten Core. Stunned, everyone else in the online community reacted with disbelief, not the least of whom was Blizzard themselves. To Blizzard designers, the dungeon wasn’t finished, the fights were broken, and for some reason they presumed players would have left them alone. Conquest didn’t get the memo, nor did a handful of other raiding guilds, and the declaration the majority of these bosses had been slain was seen by Blizzard as evidence of cheating.
WHAM went the Blizzard banhammer, and several members of Conquest had their accounts suspended.
At the time, Conquest wasn’t particularly vocal. They more or less kept to themselves so far as I could tell, with some exceptions, and focused on doing their own thing in secret. Their own thing in this case was recording these boss fights, which everyone called “encounters” and playing them back to figure out what went wrong when they all died, so they could overcome it on subsequent attempts. Football teams do this as well, I’m told and I believe it, though I’ve never even touched a football. But these videos would turn out to be immensely helpful to them, both for devising a working strategy for these supposedly broken encounters, but also for proving they’d done so more or less legitimately to skeptical and envious viewers.
Conquest engaged in a few very public exchanges with Blizzard moderators on the World of Warcraft forums and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. They viewed their suspensions as an injustice and so far as anyone could tell from the Blizzard responses, Blizzard viewed their suspensions as justice. A typically cynical observer couldn’t help but notice faulty reasoning behind this type of justice, however. I watched this occur personally, and my opinion was neither side was being particularly honest about the thing. I would have to change my tune shortly.
In February 2005, Conquest released a strategy guide for Molten Core. This strategy guide detailed their approach to defeating each individual boss and these strategies not only worked, but they required no exploits, no cheats, and nothing a reasonable individual could consider insidious at all. The guide included the videos they’d recorded and explained how they avoided/countered the various boss abilities, in addition to how they engaged them initially. They didn’t merely send these to Blizzard for consideration, they made them widely available to anyone and everyone at all. The Court of Public Opinion was gaveled into session.
With the release of this guide, anyone could make up their own mind on whether Conquest deserved to be suspended or not; although anyone even remotely familiar with the internet knows no one needs permission to form an opinion, ill-advised or otherwise. The general consensus on the WoW forums at the time was Conquest did not in fact deserve to be suspended, and even if they did, Blizzard would soon have to ban dozens of guilds en masse as these tactics and strategies were quickly adopted and executed. Before too long, Conquest’s suspension was revoked, and I should think they declared victory in the matter, as they had achieved victory in the matter.
But the title of this piece promised to provide the origins of the game strategy video phenomenon. To a younger gamer, they likely have never thought about this. Youtube exists, games exist, and people like to help other people, right? Thus, these strategies videos and guides have simply always existed out of the kindness of our little, bleeding hearts. Ah, the foibles of youth.
But it isn’t true. While one could at the time rely on GameFAQs for guides written by folks hoping to help in single player games, these were always limited to text guides, some with admittedly impressive ASCII art representing the only visualization to be found in the guide at all. This is insufficient for delivering a working strategy for more modern video games, involving multiple people and a ton of movement.
Something to understand in addition, is with the advent of WoW, much of the raid content became “instanced”, which is to say, private. In Everquest, anyone could watch you kill a boss, as anyone could simply waddle up and observe your attempt to kill a boss. But in WoW, only one engaging the boss themselves could see the boss. This meant strategies for defeating them were also private, and no one was all that interested in sharing these strategies with others due to a competitive nature the hopelessly celibate exhibit around video games. I knew this feeling well.
But when Conquest provided video evidence of their slaying of these bosses, that cat ripped and roared its way out of the bag. Suddenly, anyone who consumed their guide (which I have unfortunately failed to locate some fifteen years later, as of the time of writing) knew exactly how to defeat these enemies. Conquest, who were moderately famous virgins already, became the cream of the celibate crop overnight.
It didn’t take long before other guides appeared and these guides almost always had video accompaniment. Youtube, at the time, was a fledgling company running out of a garage, so these videos were not often hosted there just yet. But upon Google’s acquisition of the platform in 2006, it exploded into the central hub one uploaded their game guides and cat videos to. The precedent for game guide sharing had been set by Conquest in 2005, and a technology platform (coincidentally) arose allowing wide distribution of these game guides. MMORPG games would never be the same.
It was rare to not find a guide for any particular video game encounter on Youtube. The video game guide quickly became established as the preferred format, eagerly consumed by the lazy; those super-nerds unwilling to figure things out on their own, or those completely bored with their IT jobs, wasting time boning up on the latest and greatest method of wasting time.
As with all innovations, there were positive and negative effects to be seen here, of which I’ll enumerate only two. One benefit was more and more individuals were able to defeat difficult encounters, which fit in well with Blizzard’s commitment to accessibility in WoW. However, this also resulted in more and more tin-pot tyrant raid leaders becoming incensed when any individual attempted to figure something out on their own, rather than watching endless videos containing endless spoilers. With a (questionable) justification for calling these people ignorant, jerks would simply eject folks who had the gall to enjoy games without a twenty-minute tutorial beforehand.
All the same, for good or for ill, video game guides are absolutely everywhere now some fifteen years later. This practice has continued and expanded and it is almost certainly not going anywhere.
For questions and concerns and general hate-mail, please use the following submission form and as always, zug, zug, bitches. Kekekekekek.