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Comment by burke | Hacker News Reader

I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours.

I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.

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A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life, hands down.

You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.

I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.

Completely agree. I started playing two days after TBC came out IIRC, and stopped shortly after I hit the level cap in WotLK.

I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)

WoW at the least is far too large to ever die. There are private servers for every version of the game except WoD, and that is hopefully for legal reasons - of course I'm not a lawyer and the law here is a fucking mess especially if you live outside the US, but there has to be an abandonware case for every version of the game that is not currently available on Blizzards servers.

A decade from now there will still be WoW private servers, and there will still be the opencore-esque projects providing the server infrastructure to run private instances of it. Albeit I wish the private server community shared source more, but I'm not really involved in it so more power to them for putting in the scripting effort to make all the mobs work again.

I hear you. I played a lot of Star Sonata and Phantasy Star Online. I can still relive my PSO (BB) days, SS, not so much. (it's still around but it's gotten a huge overhaul, it's a different game to me). A tale in the desert was amazing, too, although a big part of that was community-driven gameplay, something as impossible to recreate as your particular childhood community even if you provide the same gameplay mechanics.

I'm not much of an emotional guy, but looking at those screenshots from way back when I was 15, about 9 years ago now, hits me 10x harder than your typical tear-jerker movie/book. It's definitely a shame that never comes back beyond the few screenshots.

I don't think you should be too concerned. For WoW specifically, there are private servers available which allow players to experience Classic again. There's also servers concentrating on the other expansions. Runescape also has a healthy server emulation scene. There's work being done to bring back the original Star Wars Galaxies. There used to be private servers for Ultima Online and I suppose those are still out there.

I think if something has at least a minimum amount of popularity, and a portion of the software (the client in this case) is still available, then enough people will find a way to keep it alive even when it's been abandoned by its creator.

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