Erasing the Past: When (and How) a Groundbreaking Game Disappears for Good
By: Meredith Rose, staff attorney at Public Knowledge
The news reached me, quietly and without comment, as most stories do in the modern age: via a Facebook post on a friend’s timeline. People who had, a decade ago, been closer to me than my own family slowly trickled in from their corners of the social network, text tinged with disbelief. Suddenly, a Facebook thread became an epicenter for a muted, mournful class reunion, laced with “why didn’t I know about this sooner?”s and “I can’t believe it finally happened”s.
Nostalrius — the largest (and nearly the last) server running the original iteration of World of Warcraft, a linchpin of our high school social experience — was closing down.
The owners of the free server had received a cease-and-desist letter from the game’s developers, Blizzard Studios, accusing them of copyright infringement. Faced with the threat of legal action, they made the difficult decision to pull the plug on their living museum. Nostalrius would go dark at midnight on April 11, 2016, taking with it the last and most vibrant community dedicated to preserving a decade-old game — a game they once loved, but had become, in many ways, unrecognizable.
The saga of Nostalrius is intimately tied to World of Warcraft, one of the first truly successful massively online multiplayer games (sometimes called MMOs). When the game was first released in 2004, it was nothing short of revolutionary, rewriting the rules for what an online video game could be. It was heavily flawed, though, with buggy quests, unbalanced playable classes, and a public chat that was, in its best moments, offensively asinine.
Its quirks, ironically, made it even more appealing. Leveling up was a grind, and character death was both frequent and absurd, with mid- and high-level players regularly being jumped, and unexpectedly KO’d, by football-sized, first level beasties. Stat-heads gamed the system’s wonky probability in an arms race to create the most powerful character. Casual gamers sometimes ignored the quests altogether, socializing in guilds or holding avatar dance marathons in the town squares. Christmas came with Santa-themed armor sets and lit trees in the city center, and the sudden, marvelous ability to hurl snowballs at passersby. WoW was by turns punishing and giddy, and its fans were hopelessly devoted.
And so gamers flocked to the sometimes-goofy, often-frustrating game in record numbers. By Q4 of 2006, 8 million subscribers were running gleefully wild over 172 servers. The game was a commercial and cultural juggernaut, drawing nearly a million new players each quarter.
The world took notice. Think-pieces sprang up everywhere from the New York Times to Wired. Epidemiologists used the progression of an in-game contagion to study how humans react to outbreaks. The Chinese government tried to curb WoW’s adoption, even as Beijing became the hub of a booming black market for in-game currency. Gameplay footage went viral in an era when YouTube wasn’t even a blip on the collective consciousness.
Blizzard kept the game running with a steady stream of patches and enhancements, tweaking here, fixing there. For its first two years, the game remained both ridiculous and inexplicably lovable. You endured, you laughed, and with friends, you thrived.
In January 2007, Blizzard released its inaugural expansion. The Burning Crusade represented the first injection of new content into the wildly successful two-year-old game, and players’ excitement was palpable. (This remains a hugely lucrative strategy; the game will see its sixth expansion this August.)
The moment Burning Crusade went live, all players, expansion or no, were directed to download and install patch 2.0.1. Mandatory patches were nothing new — this was the fortieth update patch since the game exited beta, after all — but 2.0.1 began to change how the game was played. It was the first push in a slow, but near-total redesign of the game’s underlying mechanics — a push toward a “newer, friendlier WoW.”
“New WoW” was sleeker, tighter, and noticeably easier. The mechanical shifts became more radical with each patch; monsters fell more quickly, levels racked up with less effort, and the game shifted its relative emphasis on solo versus group-based play. For three years, the rewiring of the core game continued largely under the hood.
Then, on December 7, 2010, Blizzard published its Cataclysm expansion. The automatic patch that went live that day included an in-game disaster that literally reshaped the world map. Familiar starter areas were wiped clean and redesigned; whole regions vanished in the time it took to install. The new WoW was now manifest, and mandatory.
A decade on, World of Warcraft bears very little resemblance to the game it was in 2006. The constant redesigns gave rise to a small but growing faction of players who wanted to return to the game as they remembered it — before it had become, in their minds, obsessively over-engineered and watered down.
A handful of these players, fueled by equal parts nostalgia and ambition, set out to rebuild their lost world. They painstakingly built and instantiated a server that emulated that now-gone vision. On this new — or perhaps old — server, anyone could create a character, log in, and experience the game as its earliest adopters did, blemishes and all. It ran version 1.12.1, the last iteration before Burning Crusade and the game’s first serious mechanical redesign. They called it Nostalrius.
Nostalrius was a new answer to a very old human impulse toward conservation. We are obsessed with the past and how we view it; questions of experience and context are the beating heart of historical understanding. The Vatican famously grappled with questions of Renaissance censorship and restoration while cleaning the Sistine Chapel frescos. The National Park Service weighs the value of restoring centuries-old evidence of human habitation against the farther history of pure wilderness.
There were differences in format and orders of magnitude, but the idea behind Nostalrius was the same: “This was what we had, once upon a time.”
Blizzard attempted to frame its Nostalrius takedown in terms of licensing and piracy, but copyright law in the United States has an awkward relationship to private digital archiving. Institutions like libraries and universities are familiar legal territory: the 1909 Copyright Act required anyone applying for copyright to send a deposit copy of their work to the Library of Congress. Congress later went out of its way to carve out special space for these institutions to copy their collections for preservation.
But when you dig down to what the individual consumer can do, the law mostly thinks of copying and saving media as a way to consume it, not to save it. Libraries, the law understands; individuals, not so much.
Luckily for us, archives and libraries have taken up the mantle of game preservation. The Library of Congress has a relatively small but growing collection of video games. The University of Michigan has a program dedicated to exactly this issue. But the status of video games as preservation-worthy is still relatively new, and institutional archives are playing catch-up — a situation that, as one researcher put it, leaves no “time to ‘hope for the best.’”
It is hard to know how much has already been lost to history in only a few decades Developers close their doors and move on; product design flaws, such as internal batteries with limited shelf life, render code unsalvageable; hardware systems and accessories break or enter the landfill. Individuals, who are best poised to save these pieces of early history, ironically only have the legal right to do so if they don’t let anyone else touch the fruits of their labor.
Nostalrius, and virtual worlds generally, ask us something that we have never before had to consider: How do you preserve a game that is, by its very design, meant as a shared experience?
It is, perhaps, the modern-day equivalent of “if a tree falls in the woods”: If an MMO exists on a server, but nobody is allowed to access that server, is it really preserved? What if one person at a time can use it? Just as we cannot “preserve” a book by supergluing its cover shut, we cannot “preserve” an MMO by locking away its code.Certain parts of the game, such as boss fights, can only be accessed by multiple users operating in concert. If those are no longer available due to use restrictions, are you really preserving the entire work?
Preserving vanilla-WoW under a glass case is like “archiving” a concert by transcribing its sheet score. It is an after-image, leaving us to guess how the echoes once rang.
We have many reasons for wanting to preserve the past, but none stronger than our personal connections to experiences and memories.
The impromptu memorial on my friend’s Facebook wall had an unexpected side effect; I found myself surrounded by decade-distant friends and classmates, reliving the exploits of our misfit guild. There was the time when our shared naming convention caused outside players to mistake us for multiple accounts of the same person; there was the time somebody convinced me that if you swam around Loch Modan long enough you could locate and challenge Nessy, the giant lake monster visible from the Deeprun Tram. (Ten hours of frustrated swimming and over a dozen deaths later, I discovered this was a hoax.) There was that time I changed my ringtone in freshman year of college to be the sound of Murlocs attacking — officially transcribed as “Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!” — and caused three of my player friends to startle violently when it went off in calculus.
There was also the time that my friend met his wife — the woman who had posted the article — for the first time on Blizzard’s forums, bonding over Doctor Horrible lyrics and subsequently falling in love.
Our last tie to that world that formed the linchpin of so many memories, served as the backbone of so much of our growth and jokes and free time, was being severed. We had each other, and we had our memories, but we no longer had our game.
It was like bulldozing a museum, we echoed.
