World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade turns one, still setting passions ablaze

Remember The Burning Crusade‘s launch? Surprise, that’s exactly a year ago. One of the most epic launches in gaming history, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is still one of the most epic video game releases in the history of forever. Check out the full article for more TBC reminiscing.

Remember the queues outside stores exactly one year ago? Yes, it was the release for the World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Let’s look back at the events then and afterwards, shall we?

The Epic Launch

Ah, the nostalgia. January 16, 2007 marked the opening of the gates to Outland for North America, Europe, and Australia. Fans lined up to get copies of the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade while the die-hard players went for the Collector’s Edition. With the expansion’s release came two new races (Draenei and Blood Elves), a higher level cap, new professions, more content, and a whole new area to explore.

With a release that can only be described as epic, The Burning Crusade went on to take the world by storm. Launches around the world was much like a party of sorts as cosplayers, guilds, and members of Alliance and Horde gathered to get their copies. It broke a number of records like most sales in a day (nearly 2.4 million copies, FTW!), most sales in a month, and more. It also held a lofty position on top of charts of a good number of months after release.

We saw a number of crazy stuff during launch – a dance alike contest where people mimicked the different classes’ dance moves and a lady cosplaying as a murloc, with murloc plushie in tow.

Since then

So what’s happened since then? A LOT. Since The Burning Crusade‘s release on that cold day in January (we know some of you guys camped out outside stores, we got videos from the Gnomeregan Gnews Gnetwork, no less), we’ve seen the four major content patches: Before the Storm/The Burning Crusade, The Black Temple, Voice Chat and The Gods of Zul’Aman. Plus we’re going to face Kael’Thas Sunstrider again once patch 2.4.0 hits the live realms.

We saw the different guilds like Nihilum, Death and Taxes, Curse, Forte, and the rest breeze through raid content, doing away with the big names of the Warcraft universe: Kael’Thas Sunstrider, Illidan Stormrage, and Archimonde.

(We should probably also add that Blood Elf is still the most popular WoW race.)

And now that we’re waiting for another expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, here’s to hoping that Blizzard delivers more epic love. If The Burning Crusade is any indication of how WotLK is going to be, then we have a lot of good reasons to wait for its release “when it’s ready.”