This is a full transcript of the BlizzCon 2016 Blizzard Publishing panel. Among the panelists directing the event were:

Cate Gary (senior editor)

Christie Golden (author)

Micky Neilson (author)

Robert Brooks (senior writer)

Matt Burns (senior writer)

Greg Weisman (author)

Timothy Zahn (author)

BlizzCon 2016 Blizzard Publishing Panel Transcript

Cate: Hello, Blizzcon. Thank you all for coming. It’s so wonderful to see so many people here today. You are proof that the written word is alive and well. Give yourselves a round of applause.

Welcome to Building Worlds: Inside Blizzard Publishing, where we’re going to give you up behind-the-scenes look at how writers translate Blizzard games into unforgettable novels, comic books, short stories, and other forms of prose. My name is Cate Gary, I am the senior editor for Blizzard Publishing, and here we’re going to bring out your panel. First, we have Christie Golden, a familiar face to many of you Next, Micky Neilson, Matt Burns, Robert Brooks, Greg Weisman and Timothy Zahn.

Warcraft: Lord of the Clans

And we’re going to start with Christie (New York Times bestselling author) here today to talk to us about re-releases of two of her classic Warcraft novels: Lord of the Clans and Rise of the Horde.

Now Christie, you originally wrote these 10 and 15 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. World of Warcraft has released its sixth expansion, there was a little movie called Warcraft, which incidentally featured one of the characters you created in Rise of the Horde — Draka. How did it feel to see her on the big screen?

Christie: It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing. I actually had my first glimpse here at BlizzCon, when you treated everybody to snippets of the movie before it came out, and I knew she was going to be in the movie; but I didn’t know that I would see her. So I’m sitting here with everybody else and then she’s on screen and I went (shriek). I literally shrieked and it was pretty amazing, and very gratifying to see how she was treated, and see her. Something that you created, and gave life to in a name in a personality on the screen.

Cate: I’m a fan. I was excited to see her too, but now it’s 2016, your novels are being re-released, and the audience for Warcraft books has grown astronomically to put it mildly. What do you think in these stories will resonate with audiences today?

Christie: Well, the nice thing about both of these books is they take place before World of Warcraft even existed. So these are real historical stories. 2001, and I do believe 2006. So they’re not empinching on anything that’s going on now. This is a set up, and this is going back to the roots. This is going back to where we see Thrall as a baby, picking up right at the end of the movie. We see baby Thrall, and we see him grow up to become such a pivotal character in World of Warcraft, and then we get to see the literal Rise of the Horde; and how that all began in the game setting as opposed to the movie setting. So we have a chance to go even deeper into it; and I think that people will enjoy revisiting this and kind of brushing up on their roots.

Cate: Fantastic, alright now the story of how you wrote Lord of the clans. This is the stuff of Blizzard legend. Tell us what happened there.

Christie: Oh, this is totally epic. I was just coming off not working with another gaming company who shall remain nameless. It was a very bad experience, and I was a little a little bruised from it, and an editor over at Pocket Books with whom I had worked with doing my Star Trek novels contacted me, and said this company Blizzard has a game that they never finished, that they chose not to produce, but they want the story turned into a novel. Is that something you’d be interested in?

And I’m like: “Oh, I don’t know… gaming companies.” A good friend of mine though who was familiar with Blizzard games, and he said: Christie, Blizzard really cares about what they do. They do quality work. They’re known for it. They have a great deal of passion. I think you’d like working with them.

So I said: Well, alright. Well, little did I know that on the other end of this Chris Metzen was talking to this editor, and saying: “Ugh! Star Trek writer? I don’t know. I don’t think a Star Trek writer could really be able to do justice to orcs, you know. The mighty orc Horde. I’m just not sure,” and she said: “You know, Christie really knows her stuff. She’s very passionate about what you do. I think you’ll like working with her.”

So like a matchmaker, almost; and sure enough, in six weeks I worked with Chris and produced Lord of the Cans. Really loved it. Really loved the world. Chris was excited about it, and the rest is history. And there’s a fun footnote that you may not know, which is that that editor is Jennifer Heddle who is now licensing over at Star Wars. So it’s a very small world.

Next: StarCraft II: Nova: The Keep