On November 23, 2004, my life changed forever. It was the day Blizzard’s game-changing massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, launched. 

I had never played a multi-player video game before. In fact, I had never played an online game before. But I knew this was a game I had to check out.

Prior to the game’s launch, I spent months studying the different races and classes. What did I want to be, a priest, a druid, a human, perhaps a troll?  Male or female? What did I want to name my character?

I finally decided that I would play a gnome warlock named Kosmo.

                                Kosmo the Warlock Gnome

On launch day, I downloaded the game, created my account, logged in, and then created and customized little Kosmo. Red hair, no beard – I loved him from the start and we were ready for adventure!

I’ll never forget the excitement I felt as I moved my mouse to the ‘Enter World‘ button. Enter world!?!  Hellz yeah!

Clicking that button launched me into a multi-year odyssey. I found myself in a wonderful and varied community, and Kosmo and his/my many new friends had some pretty amazing adventures. We fought countless monsters, embarked on hundreds of quests, and sometimes even fought each other.

Now, just in time for WoW’s 10th anniversary, its 5th commercial expansion, Warlords of Draenor is about to launch. 

If you’re interested in World of Warcraft‘s new expansion or World of Warcraft in general, you can watch me poke around the new version of the game on TwitchTV this weekend, at http://www.twitch.tv/rayivey. Remember, watching Twitch is free and its a great way to interact! I plan to start the stream around noon Pacific on Saturday, but we’ll make follow-up announcements over the next day or so.

I hope to see you there!