My Life As A Gamer: Big Thanks To Mark Kern

(Note: I've been in hospital or rehab since mid-January. I'm going home today, so this post is one I wrote ahead of time because I'm going to be busy.)

Today's post is dedicated to the man who went to bat for the Classic WOW community, former Vanilla WOW dev Mark Kern, and his videos addressing both Classic and his own project Em8ER.

I am grateful to Mark for going to bat and personally talking for now-former CEO Mike Morihime about Classic and arguing in support of Blizzard doing it officially. The response to the Beta so far has been fantastic, and I expect it will only grow as later waves of invites go out and more people access the Classic Beta servers to see for themselves; the BlizzCon demo last Fall was a lot of fun for a lot of people, so I think it'll be just as fun now.

For you tabletop types, think of this as being like the Old School Renaissance. The original version of WOW had a quality to it that got lost with subsequent expansions, with many--including myself--pointing to the latter half of Wrath of the Lich King as being when the rot really set in and becoming obvious with Cataclysm. We just aren't waiting 20-30 years to course-correct thing time. The opportunity to revisit the past, and take roads heretofore not taken, is too good to pass up.

As for Em8ER, I really hope that Mark nails it with this Mech v. Kaiju game of his. I've been watching its development for a while, and I'm looking forward to seeing it reach the masses. Thanks for everything, Mark, and good luck.