"Let There Be Gnomes." And There Were Gnomes.

Eurogamer has an interesting piece interviewing Blizzard on the making of World of Warcraft.

Blizzard would soon learn that playing and talking about EverQuest was a world away from actually building its own MMO.

“We knew that it was a mammoth undertaking, but I think, at the time, we had no clue just how big and complex something like this would be,” Metzen says now. “Perhaps it was a little bit of naiveté – ‘oh yeah, we can bang out one of those, no big deal’ – and certainly as we got into it, we would learn that these things are just… very, very complex in their scope.”

Oh, and this bit from Tom Chilton:

“If we wanted to have a PvP game, we would want it to be team-based – in a lot of ways, it was like Dark Age of Camelot had done. I was on board with the idea, because I felt like that was one of the advantages that DAOC had over Ultima Online, which I’d worked on.

“DAOC had pre-determined teams, you were either Albion or Hibernia or, er, the other one.”