Get ready to hop in a time machine to 2006, WoW fans: Blizzard announced that they are bringing back the original World Of Warcraft so thousands of gamers can relive the most depressing era of their lives.


The company has spent the past two years recreating the “Vanilla” version of the game before any expansions were released, so players can finally re-experience that grim period when they suffered from a crippling, all-consuming addiction to the fantasy MMORPG. Featuring the return of slow travel and a level-60 cap, the upcoming release will be a major nostalgia trip for those who slowly lost all of their friends and gave up on their dreams as they spent countless hours grinding for loot in beloved dungeons like Blackrock Depths or Uldaman.



Whether you will be shouting “For The Alliance!” or “For The Horde!” the folks over at Blizzard promise that WoW Classic will make it seem like all the growth you’ve experienced in the past decade never happened and that you’re back in a time when you would grind out your blacksmithing skill, not shower for weeks, and erupt into violent outbursts whenever your worried family members tried to get you to stop playing. “For everyone out there whose compulsive WoW habit lead to them failing a class in college or getting fired from their job, our faithful recreation of the game servers as they were over 10 years ago will be a real treat,” said Senior Producer Calia Schie, adding that they’ve spent countless hours making sure the old title runs smoothly on modern hardware configuration so players can be completely reimmersed in the period when the most important thing to them in their sad, pathetic lives was earning enough gold to afford a mount.




“As soon as you step into Stormwind as it was back then, it’ll feel like walking into that bleak era when you would sit for days on end in dirty, unwashed sweatpants, and the only social contact you had was coordinating Zul’Gurub runs with your guildmates, all while people your age went to parties with their friends, nurtured relationships, and had important life experiences,” Chie added.



The game doesn’t come out until August, but until then, make sure to start preparing by getting your sweat-stained futon ready, neglecting your relationships, and skipping out on professional obligations. Also, don’t forget to stock up on Mountain Dew—you’ll need it when the fatigue headaches start kicking in.

