Blizzard has a history of high-quality April Fool’s posts. This year’s announcement featured the first Warcraft-universe console game, World of Warcraft: The Molten Core…for the Atari 2600. The trailer, done to Blizzard’s usual standard of excellence in trailer design, dramatically lists features like “Move in any of 8 unique directions” and “Has sound.”
Now one of their players has gone and done it: he made the game, as a Windows application. Someone produced a great screenshot of a game in progress, with the forum thread behind it.
I’ve been re-reading Sherlock Holmes stories lately, and Doyle has Holmes comment from time to time about the frustrations of explaining things that are obvious in retrospect and having them taken for granted once explained by people who were baffled at the time. The flip side of that experience is of course the delight at something you didn’t imagine, or didn’t believe would ever happen, and then finding it there after all. This is one of the moments for me. Like most of my WoW-playing friends (and a fair number of friends who don’t play WoW), I laughed at the April Fool’s conceit and thought, “You know, it would be kind of cool to actually have that…” But none of us imagined actually doing something about it.
Luckily for us, Tiros’ player saw further.
