Remembrance of BlizzCon Past

The morning light comes in low and honest, the way it only does in the hour after school drop-off, when the house has exhaled and the day hasn't yet made any demands. I sit down on the couch, just for a minute, just to gather myself before the day’s work begins.

My eyes drift, the way eyes do when a mind is briefly without instruction, and land on the coffee table. There's a stack of books there. A vintage illustrated copy of The Hobbit, a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone of similar type and provenance. And on top, as it has been since the day we moved into this house, a large-format art book from a collector's edition of a video game expansion released in 2007.

By conventional standards, it shouldn't be on the coffee table. Most people in their middle years have coffee table books about their interests, but they're typically about more mainstream topics: rock music, impressionist art, vintage cars. And yet I never considered placing this particular book anywhere else in my home.

I reach forward and lift the cover. The inside page is scattered with signatures – scribbles of silver paint pen, dozens of them, maybe more, scrawled across the art and margins and white space. Names I know. Names I chased down across two days of a convention I'd flown halfway across the country to attend, sleep-deprived and twenty-two years old and completely certain this was a reasonable thing to do.

The morning light catches the silver, and the signatures glitter.

I lose myself in the pages for a little while.

My friend Anton came to me in the spring of 2007 with a question that was really a proposition: had I heard of BlizzCon? I had not. The first one had happened in 2005, and I'd missed it entirely – not through negligence, but through the simple arithmetic of being young and broke in Texas, a significant distance from Irvine, California, where Blizzard Entertainment makes its home. Even if I had known about it, I couldn't have gone. I didn't have money for a World of Warcraft subscription back then, let alone a plane ticket.

Anton made his case anyway. Here is what he proposed: a red-eye flight into LAX, cheap, landing eight hours before the convention opened. Drive to Anaheim. Sleep in the car. Two days of convention. Then, continue the trip by crashing on the couch of his brother, a student at Caltech in Pasadena. In short, a week’s vacation that would cost roughly the price of a late-night plane ticket, a small economy rental car, one unfashionable motel room, and a $125 convention ticket.

I was twenty-two years old. I said yes immediately.

We landed a little after midnight. Collected our bags, caught the bus to the rental center, picked up our car, and made the only logical first stop: a late-night pilgrimage to In-N-Out Burger (a delicacy that had not yet reached Texas and therefore carried the full weight of myth and rumor). It was probably well after 2am by the time we got back in the car and drove south on the I-5 toward Anaheim, found distant parking, reclined our seats as far as the Hertz econobox would permit, and attempted to sleep.

I am quite certain that attempting this today would be a disaster. My body would file a formal complaint. My brainstem would mutiny. At twenty-two, it was merely uncomfortable, which is a category of experience the young navigate without much trouble.

At 8am we got in line at the convention center.

I remember looking around at a roiling sea of people and feeling something that I hadn't anticipated: recognition. I didn't know anyone there except Anton, and yet I immediately felt as if I knew these people. The particular body language of someone who has strong opinions about which Warcraft III race is most imbalanced, or who their favorite WoW raid encounter was. There were people dressed up in costume, and even the regular people wore t-shirts advertising games and guilds and inside references legible only to a specific kind of person. I was among my tribe, and I knew it before a single word was spoken.

I had no idea what to expect from the convention itself. Less information existed about everything in 2007, and this was only the second BlizzCon ever held – they'd skipped 2006 entirely. So when I checked in and was handed a bag of things, I was genuinely surprised. Inside: pins, magnets, a pack of trading cards. A shirt. Coasters. A card with a code for an in-game toy – a Murloc costume, which was exactly as absurd and delightful as it sounds. And another card, for something else entirely: access to a beta for an upcoming Blizzard game. Jackpot.

Also in the bag was a bookmark with a quest on it. Find a location on the convention floor. Talk to the NPC. Get a stamp. Complete the quest, collect a reward. It was a small thing, a bit of manufactured purpose – and it worked completely. I am apparently still susceptible to quest design in the physical world.

This was the convention where Blizzard announced Wrath of the Lich King. Arthas, the Lich King, one of the most beloved villains in the entire Warcraft mythology, would finally be given his due as an endgame confrontation. It would be the logical conclusion to a story arc spanning five years, two games, and three expansion packs. And my primary game at that point in time had become WoW, so by any reasonable measure, this should have been the event of the convention for me.

Not a chance. The playable demo for StarCraft II was on the floor.

I was vaguely aware they'd announced the game a few months prior, at an event in Korea – very appropriate for that series. A sequel to a beloved franchise that sat at the absolute pinnacle of the real-time strategy genre was not a surprising development, in retrospect. But knowing something is coming and actually sitting down to play it are different experiences entirely, separated by a gap that no amount of anticipation can bridge.

Anton and I fell into a loop that consumed most of the first day: wait in line for a demo station, play until the machine kicked us off, exit the station, immediately rejoin the line. We did this without discussion, without ever seriously considering doing anything else. The game was electric. We were moths and it was a very bright light.

When we'd finally burned through enough of the StarCraft II demo to face the rest of the convention without withdrawal, I turned my attention to the Meet the Devs tables.

I had brought my Burning Crusade Collector's Edition art book with me from Houston. This was not an accident. I had a plan: periodically cycle through the signing tables, find every artist and developer I could, and get them to sign it. If they hadn't worked on Warcraft, I offered them the BlizzCon program instead. The signatures were almost beside the point. What I was actually doing – though I wouldn't have articulated it this way at twenty-two – was making human contact with the people who had made the things I loved. Reaching across the distance between audience and author, consumer and creator, and briefly collapsing it.

I kept that book through every subsequent chapter of my life. Years later, when I met the woman who would become my wife, I eventually gave it to her – or rather, gave it to us. It lives on our coffee table now.

The Blizzard Invitational was my first live esports experience, and it did not disappoint.

I'd watched professionals play StarCraft and Warcraft III before, through casts and replays, the way you watch anything when you can't be in the room. Watching it live is a different thing altogether. The crowd reads the game in real time. The tension moves through the room like wildfire. When Grubby – one of the most recognizable personalities in the Warcraft III scene, a player I'd followed through replays and casts – lost in the semifinal, the collective deflation was palpable. A room of strangers, briefly united in disappointment.

I hadn't been following the StarCraft: Brood War pro scene closely in 2007. Several years of deep immersion in Warcraft had pulled my attention in other directions. But even a casual familiarity with Korean professional StarCraft was enough to understand what it meant to watch sAviOr play in person. He was the only Zerg bonjwa¹⁷ – a player of such sustained, dominant excellence that the word "champion" is insufficient. Watching him dismantle Nal_rA in two straight games did as much to reignite my love for StarCraft as the demo I'd been playing all day. I was marginally disappointed at how quickly the series ended, but mostly I was just grateful to have been in the room when it happened.

The concert that night was Video Games Live – orchestrally arranged video game music, which I already loved – and Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain¹⁸, Blizzard's in-house metal band, which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as wonderful. Jay Mohr was the master of ceremonies, a comedian I knew by name but not by work. His opening material bombed. The crowd, which had plenty of opinions and no particular incentive to be polite about them, let him know. And then something unexpected happened: he stopped trying to win them over and started giving it back. The heckling became a conversation. The conversation became something genuinely funny. The room, which had been resistant, came around completely.

I've thought about that moment more than once since then. There's something instructive in it – about reading a room, about abandoning a plan that isn't working, about finding the actual audience in front of you instead of performing for the one you imagined. A comedian who lost the crowd and won it back by deciding to be honest about losing it in the first place.

Anton and I stayed in California for at least another week after the convention, visiting his brother, doing things I can no longer remember. The trip continued. Life continued. And yet when I try to retrieve that week, there is almost nothing there – just a pleasant blur of couch-sleeping and Pasadena afternoons, thoroughly overshadowed by two days of convention.

Less than two days. Sleep-deprived, slightly broken-backed from that nap in the car, twenty-two years old and running on caffeine and adrenaline and the particular energy of being somewhere you felt like you were always supposed to be.

There is a particular hour in the afternoon when the sun finds my office.

It varies by season – the orbital geometry of our planetary system shifts, the angle changes, and the light arrives a little earlier or later depending on where we are in the year. But it comes, and when it does, it catches a specific pane of glass, the frame protecting a painting that is hung above my desk. I look up, and there he is.

Zeratul.¹⁹

Arm extended, psionic blade ignited, cloak trailing behind him in a breeze that exists only in the paint. He is small in the frame – deliberately, meaningfully small – dwarfed by the scale of the Xel'Naga temple he is moving through. Ancient architecture looms around him, the ruins of the race that created his own, and he is alone in it, blade drawn, pressing forward into the unknown. I have looked at this painting hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I still find myself asking the same question.

What is he feeling in this moment?

Awe, almost certainly. He is walking through the remnants of gods. Wonder is the only sane response to that. But fear too, I think. He knows what else might be in those ruins. He knows that the Zerg are never far, that Kerrigan – the Queen of Blades, the most terrifying creation the Swarm has ever produced – could be waiting anywhere in the dark. In the cinematic that this painting echoes, she is. He rounds a corner and there she is, menacing and dominant in the way that only a villain assured of their invincibility can be. Any reasonable calculation of the situation suggests that Zeratul is doomed: he should not be here, he should not have come, he cannot hope to win this. He raises his blade and leaps anyway²⁰. There is a type of courage that doesn't require certainty. That looks at an impossible situation and decides, without much deliberation, that taking the leap is still the right thing to do.

The afternoon light shifts. I continue with my work.

The first time you do something extraordinary, everything is new to you; the possibility space is endless and wide open, leaving it up to you to discover what is and what can be. The second time you do something extraordinary, you know what to expect, because you've been there before. That knowledge is both a gift and a thief.

I skipped BlizzCon 2008 for the same reasons I'd nearly skipped 2007, the harsh arithmetic of disposable income failing to support ambition. I returned to BlizzCon 2009 because I had a new job, a little more money, and a determination to recapture something I hadn't fully understood the first time. I was older by two years, which in retrospect is not very much time at all. Old enough to arrive with intention rather than just wonder.

The convention had grown. Four full halls now, twice the footprint of 2007, and yet it had the same density and quality – everywhere you looked, there was something worth looking at. Cataclysm was announced, the next chapter of a Warcraft story I'd been living inside for the better part of a decade. Diablo III was playable on the floor. These were not small things, and yet they settled into memory the way the second viewing of a great film does - recognized, appreciated, but ultimately not revelatory. The spark had become a flame. Steady. Warm. Reliable.

What I remember most about 2009 is not anything particular that happened at the convention. It was the comfortable embrace one feels upon returning home, to be amongst one's people again.

In 2010 I came back again, and this time I brought home two things that have never left.

The first is a statuette of Deathwing – Neltharion the Earth-Warder, the corrupted black dragon aspect, rendered in miniature and included in that year's swag bag. He occupies a place of honor on my bookshelves now, front and center among the Lego sets and gaming collectibles and other artifacts of a life spent caring about fictional worlds. He has survived every move, every reorganization, every periodic reckoning with what deserves to stay and what doesn't.

The second thing I brought home from BlizzCon 2010 is steeped in much deeper meaning.

The Child's Play charity auction occupied a small piece of the convention floor, and I drifted through it the way you drift through a museum – not looking for anything specific, just interested in the works of art, and open to being stopped by something.

That’s where I found it. A framed digital painting of Zeratul, clearly a work of concept art for StarCraft II. I stood in front of it and knew, with the particular certainty that bypasses logic and deliberation entirely, that I had to have it.

I told myself it was for a good cause. Child's Play does genuinely good work – bringing games to children in hospitals, to kids for whom play is not a luxury but a lifeline. But if you demanded complete honesty, I would tell you: the charitable reasoning is ex post facto rationalization. The truth of it is, I saw it and I had to have it.

I was young. I was making entry-level salary with entry-level savings to match. The justification was simply a way to rationalize spending a significant percentage of my income on something so extravagantly frivolous. I bid anyway.

The final hour and a half of the auction I spent in a particular kind of focused anxiety, drifting through the other pieces, with one eye always back on mine, running contingency calculations in the event that someone else – some heartless monster with deeper pockets and no regard for my need to have this artifact – decided to outbid me. Someone did, repeatedly, and with what I can only describe as a cheerful disregard for my emotional state.

The last ten minutes were tense, in the way that only auctions and close sporting events manage to be tense – a specific, compressed, very personal variety of suspense. I had to thread the needle between responding too quickly, which signals desperation and invites escalation, and waiting too long, which risks losing the piece entirely.

In the end, I won. I handed over my credit card information. Gave them my address for shipping. The prize was mine.

The painting hangs above my monitor now. Has for years. It is the first thing I see when I look up from work, and the last thing in my eyeline before I close the computer for the night. I did not know, standing in that auction corner in 2010, that I was buying something I would carry into every subsequent version of my life. I did not know what was coming – the years of drift, the marriage that would slowly extinguish things I cared about, the long dim interval between the man I was at BlizzCon 2010 and the man I would eventually need to become again.

At the time, I just knew I had to have it.

There is something to be said for the instincts that operate below the level of reasoning. They are keeping score even when you aren't paying attention.

It is January 2021. Ten years have passed since BlizzCon 2010. In that decade I accumulated the artifacts of a shared life with someone who turned out not to be my person – furniture and kitchenware and the accumulated objects of a household that was never quite a home.

My daughter, now four years old, is visiting and playing with my parents. My soon-to-be ex-wife is absent for a different reason: our marriage is in the throes of a prolonged death spasm. I am alone in a house that is quiet in a way that borders on oppressive, the same quiet you'd find in a crypt, or an abandoned museum.

I am packing boxes.

The physical part of packing is straightforward enough. You find boxes, you fill them, you seal them, you stack them. The real skill lies in the act of deciding. Every object you pick up asks the same question: does this come with me? And underneath that surface question, the real inquiry, which you do not ask aloud because there is no one to ask: who am I, on the other side of this? What does that person need? What does he carry forward, and what does he set down here, in this room, and walk away from?

I find, when it comes to it, that I do not need most of it.

What I do want fits in surprisingly few boxes. Clothes. The necessities. And then the things that belong to an earlier version of me – a version that had not yet been talked out of his enthusiasms, had not yet allowed the things that lit him up to quietly dim under the weight of a life that had drifted badly off course. A book, heavy with signatures. A statuette of a dragon. A painting, wrapped carefully and set aside before I'd packed anything else, the only piece of art I take.

I was twenty-two when I first understood what it felt like to be exactly where I was supposed to be. I am thirty-six now, and I am trying to remember what that felt like.

The boxes are a question. The answer, slowly becoming clear as the afternoon wears on and the rooms empty, is simpler than I expected.

You carry forward what still has meaning. Everything else is just weight.

I met the woman who would become my first wife just a few months after BlizzCon 2010. I was in my middle twenties, not anxious to settle down but aware, in the vague way you become aware of things at that age, that it was probably time. We met, we dated, we got to know each other. She made token overtures about liking Final Fantasy on the Super Nintendo, seemed to enjoy some of the same fantasy and science fiction I did, and I figured she was one of the tribe.

I was wrong, but I wouldn't understand how wrong for years.

When you are new in a relationship, it's easy to mask off portions of yourself. She hid her distaste for video games. I hid how important they were to me. We met somewhere in the middle, which sounds like a reasonable compromise until you understand that in a long-term relationship, that middle ground is where things go to slowly die.

The truth is she didn't mind games categorically. Single-player games were fine – something you engaged with on your own time, paused when needed, closed when called upon. Clean. Contained. No fuss. The friction started the first time I booted up something multiplayer, something with other people in it who were depending on me to be there. She couldn't understand why I couldn't simply stop. To her, the other people in the group weren't quite real.

It was a friction point that might have been managed. And then Mists of Pandaria released. I remember the moment she saw what I was playing. The grimace. The clenched teeth. The words: “what is THAT you're playing?” For whatever reason, she had an intense personal dislike of the WoW franchise. It was reflexive, irrational, and absolute.

Though her feelings would soften somewhat over the years, I became skilled at tiptoeing – finding the edges of what was acceptable to her, keeping the games I loved at a careful distance from the parts of my life that required peace. I could play the games I loved, but that always came at a cost. I could never engage to the extent I wanted, and never enough to recapture that sense of real mastery, strategic or mechanical. The flame didn't go out. But it was banked low, starved of the oxygen it needed, kept alive through careful and diminishing tending.

Ten years is a long time to tiptoe. In the end, it was simply too much.

I met Clover in the late summer of 2020.

She was a very talented Paladin healer, a new recruit to Fully Rested on the Pagle server, who joined us partway through the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj while the rest of the world was doing … whatever the rest of the world does in the grips of a global pandemic. I was an established senior officer, vaguely aware of her name from the PUG/GDKP communities on Pagle, but I didn't know her personally.

She first knew me as Aeon – the name I'd been carrying in these games for years, the name under which I write. We knew each other's in-game personae before we knew the person behind the keyboard at all, which turns out to be a more honest introduction than most.

Over the following months we got to know each other properly. We were of an age, our childhoods running in chronological parallel – the same games at roughly the same times, the same cultural landmarks, the foundations of personal identity. We shared a love of cooking and good food. And, crucially, a passion for World of Warcraft and a burning desire to be among the best to play it. We went from guildmates to friends in short order.

And we were both, as it happened, in unsatisfying marriages and contemplating futures without our spouses, though we didn't discuss that directly until much later. What we had first was simpler: a friendship, and a shared language, and the particular ease that comes from talking to someone who already understands you, even before you say anything.

Most normal people, wanting to express something warmer than friendship, would gift someone flowers or chocolates. I did what any reasonable person would do: As we battled our way through the Qiraji armies, I would flirtatiously master-loot [Huge Venom Sacs] directly to her inventory.

She thought it was funny. Honestly, there's no accounting for taste.

By the end of the year, both of us had reached our respective breaking points with our spouses. The marriages were over, but the geography remained – she was halfway across the country. Luckily, we already had a shared activity that put us in the same space a few times a week, which is more than most people get at the start of something new.

Our first date was appropriately nerdy. One evening after the main raid concluded, she whispered me, “hey, someone's going to show a group of us how to clip into Hyjal, wanna come?”

As if she needed to ask.

We wall-jumped up the mountains in Frostwhisper Gorge in Winterspring, and into Hyjal proper. We rode up the mountain, swam in the pond beneath the remnants of Nordrassil. One by one our friends logged off for the night, until it was just the two of us. We rode back down a ways from the summit, down to a ruined Kaldorei tower jutting out over a cliff above Felwood, and we sat there and talked until the moon set in the west across the Veiled Sea.

It was, as first dates go, perfect.

And along the way I learned something I should never have forgotten: when you want something, you go for it. Even when it's hard. Even when it's improbable. Even when the reasonable calculation suggests you shouldn't. To do otherwise isn't madness – it's just the first step down a long road that ends in a dead-end.

Within three months she had bought a house here, and we began a life together. In another year, we would be married. And today, almost five and a half years later, I can say: she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

My company email stopped working on a Tuesday.

No phone call. No meeting invite. No warning. Just a password prompt that wouldn't clear, and then a message from the contracting agency – not my boss, the agency – letting me know I was done. Three months into a contract. Three days before a flight to Anaheim.

We had planned the trip months in advance, because that's what you do. You book the flights before you know the lineup. You secure the hotel before the block sells out. You make plans to meet people you only see once a year, people who speak the same language and make you feel, for a long weekend, like you are among your people.

I moved through the first day like a man wearing himself as a costume. Friends tried to cheer me up. I let them try. The convention floor buzzed with the kind of energy that used to lift me automatically, and I felt it the way you feel sunlight through a window – present, visible, but not quite reaching.

We ended up in the Diablo hall because that's where we found seats. I was on the floor, craning up at a projected screen the size of a small building, waiting for the Warcraft keynote to begin.

I should be honest about what I had actually lost. It certainly wasn't my dream job. It was remote in the worst sense of the word. My boss worked in a different city. I had met her once in person. The work was getting done, but at a cost that exceeded what the work was worth. I didn’t enjoy it, and when it ended, my boss couldn't even be bothered to tell me herself.

Yet still, I grieved the loss of it. Not because I wanted it back, but because losing it confirmed something I had been trying not face directly: that I had drifted so far from work that mattered to me that I simply couldn't tell the difference anymore; that I was not even sure I knew who I was anymore, at least professionally; that now I would have no choice but to do so.

And then Chris Metzen walked out onto the stage.

I have been playing Blizzard games since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. That is not a casual statement. It is a measure of time – of thirty-one formative years, of a specific kind of imagination, of the particular joy that comes from discovering that someone else built a world you wished you could have invented yourself.

Metzen was part of that world from the beginning. His art was in the manuals. His voice was in the games. I remember the first time I met him at BlizzCon 2007, briefly, at the signing table. He was exactly what you would want him to be: warm, present, genuinely pleased to be there. They say never to meet your heroes. They haven’t met Metzen.

When he left Blizzard in 2016, citing burnout and a need to be home with his family, I was sad because I knew it was probably the best decision for him, even though it would come at a cost to both him and the rest of us, for him to be separated from something he loved.

The convention hall had not expected him back. I could see it on the faces around me – a suspended moment of collective disbelief before the room erupted. I was sitting on the floor, exhausted and embarrassed and grief-adjacent in a way I couldn't quite name.

And in an instant, all that was gone. Wiped away, albeit temporarily. It simply didn't matter anymore.

I believe that when Metzen talks about Warcraft, he is not performing enthusiasm. He is not simply hitting his marks, going through the motions, or just representing a brand. He is a man entirely in his element – someone who has found the exact thing he was made to do, is doing it, knows he's absolutely killing it, and cannot help but share that with everyone around him.

I recognized that feeling. I used to have that. I knew exactly what it felt like, and I knew that I had lost it – not all at once, not dramatically, but slowly, the way a room gets darker as the sun moves across the sky. You don't notice until you're sitting in the dim half-light, wondering when it happened.

I had let my career drift. I had taken the contracts that were available instead of the ones that mattered. I had optimized for stability and gotten neither stability nor meaning. I had become, slowly and without deciding to, someone who worked at things instead of for them.

And here was a man who had stepped away from all of it, burned down to nothing, come back – and was lit.

I wanted that. Not his job. Not his franchise. Not his résumé. I wanted to stand in a room and talk about my work the way he was talking about his. I wanted the feeling back.

BlizzCon 2023 was, by any conventional measure, a diminished thing. The third-party vendors were gone. The micro-experiences, the quests, the density of discovery that had characterized every prior convention I'd attended – gone. The swag bag had been replaced with an empty backpack, which I can only describe as a metaphor so on-the-nose that Blizzard must not have noticed they were making it. The convention had stayed the same size but hollowed out, uncertain of what it was supposed to be anymore.

I understood the feeling completely.

And yet, in the Diablo hall, on the floor, craning my neck up at the screen, something that had been banked low for a very long time caught. Not a blaze. Not the electric shock of 2007, that first contact with something you didn't know you needed. Something quieter and more durable than that. An ember, finding oxygen.

And in that moment, a question popped into my mind, fully formed.

“What would Metzen do?”

It sounds like a joke. It isn't one. It is a genuine heuristic – a north star I return to when I'm being asked to choose between the work that pays and the work that matters. When the reasonable calculation suggests the safer path. When the odds don't favor the leap.

He walked away from the biggest job in gaming because he needed to. He came back when he was ready. He showed up to a convention full of people who love what he loves and he was present, fully, without apology.

Everywhere I look, I am reminded of a life lived in and around these games: in the worlds Blizzard built, in the communities that formed around them, in the friendships and the rivalries and the late nights and the convention floors and the guild raids and the first dates conducted on a mountainside that exists only in a server somewhere.

It is a life I nearly let go of. It is a life I chose, in the end, to carry forward.

This is not only a remembrance. Memory is where we've been; it is not, by itself, a destination. I am no longer the twenty-two year old who flew red-eye to Anaheim with a thin wallet and a twinkle in his eye, though I certainly recognize him. I am not the thirty-six year old packing boxes in a quiet house, though I remember exactly what that felt like.

I am something that those two people, and all the versions between them, were in the process of becoming. It's time to find out what that is.

BlizzCon 2026 is coming in September. You already know I'll be there.