How I started World of Warcraft: by drowning

Before World of Warcraft, I played shooters. All through the early high school years it was a game called Enemy Territory, a free Wolfenstein spinoff, hours and hours of it. Then, in late 2005, a different game moved in and took over my life in a way no game had before. This is how that started, and it did not start with any dignity at all.

My friend Diana told me I had to play World of Warcraft, that I should go buy it, and that we would play it together that night. It was a Thursday. I bought it, installed it, and waited for her to come online so she could teach me how the whole thing worked. I had never played a game like this in my life. I only knew how to point and shoot. She promised she would be on soon.

She never logged on.

So I made my character without her, on the server she had told me to roll on, Cenarius. A human warlock named Maurizio, after the same Eiffel 65 keyboard player I name everything after. And then, figuring I would just poke around and learn the controls until she showed up, I started walking.

The pond

I walked out of the starting valley, down to Goldshire, and up the road to Stormwind, the big beautiful Alliance capital. And right at the bridge into the city, I managed to walk straight off the edge and into the lake out front.

Here is the problem. In a shooter, you do not swim. There is no swimming. So when my character sank into that water, I had no idea what to do. I did not know you press the jump key to float up. I just watched, helpless, as a little blue breath bar appeared and started ticking down, and I genuinely understood that I was about to die in a decorative pond thirty feet from the front gate, on my very first night, before I had done a single thing.

So I did the only thing I actually knew how to do. I opened the chat box and typed: “help, help, I do not know how to swim, I am drowning.”

And someone answered. A stranger told me to press the space bar to come up. I pressed it, paddled to the ramp, and climbed out, soaking wet and alive. And then that stranger did the thing that, looking back, quietly set the next six years of my life in motion. He told me welcome to the game. And he gave me a gold piece.

In 2005, to a level-one character, one gold was a staggering amount of money. It was a fortune handed to a drowned rat. Then he added me as a friend, and not long after that, into his guild. I can draw a straight line from that gold coin and that hand out of the water all the way to a forty-person raid team. It all came from being bad enough at the game to drown in the tutorial pond.

Gone

Diana, for the record, was already level 30 by the time I started, and she never really had the time or the pull for it the way I did. So I spent weeks leveling alone, chasing her number, until one day I hit level 60 and realized I was not chasing anyone anymore. I was just gone. We played here and there, but we never raided together seriously. The game had me, fully.

One last thing about me, because it explains a lot of what came later: I read the quests. Most people clicked through them as fast as they could. I read them. I learned the lore, the cities, the characters, why the world was shaped the way it was, the same part of my brain that loves world history and cannot stand American history. I loved Stormwind. I was Alliance down to the bone. That last part is going to matter more than you would think.