1) ORIGINS
Dabiri: The original idea came about six years ago: a lot of us were playing MMOs, so we just thought, why not make one? The debate at the time was over what kind of MMO it would be and what world we would put it in. We have all these great universes that we based our RTS games around, and Diablo (which was already an RPG), so we decided to just tap into what we already had. People had already experienced the RTS side, they'd fought these battles - but they hadn't actually been able to explore these worlds.

2) WHY NOT STARCRAFT OR DIABLO?
Dabiri: At the time, we were all very much into fantasy-type MMOs and we'd only just finished doing StarCraft: Brood War - so we had this real excitement about the Warcraft universe because we hadn't touched it in a while. There's so much history behind it, there've been books about it, we've even done paper-and-pencil role-playing games - it's a universe that really has a dear place in our hearts and that's why it was the route that we decided to take."