WOW BioShock

BioShock‘s Levine, who played WoW‘s beta version more than five years ago, says he still devotes several hours to the game every week.

Pardo aimed for the sky: 1 million subscribers, which would have made his game far and away the most popular MMO of all time.

WoW passed that milestone in a matter of months. “We were off by about an order of magnitude,” he said.

Pardo, now an executive VP at Blizzard, said he never thought that Warcraft‘s world could go on for five years. “When you look historically at what other MMOs have done, by the time you hit the five-year mark, you’ve already hit your peak,” he said. “With World of Warcraft, people are like, ‘I’ve been playing this game for five years, and I still love it.’”

“I just love being in that world,” he said. “When you go into [the city] Stormwind, you go across the bridge and see all those giant statues of the heroes, that sells the space. It’s over the top, it’s huge and you know what you’re getting into.”

The fastidiously detailed underwater dystopia of BioShock was influenced by WoW‘s grandeur, Levine said: “Any project where you need to sell people on a space in a videogame, you can learn something from World of Warcraft.”