Just for the handful of people who haven’t seen it yet …
The Cinematics department at Blizzard takes more than a year to work on a cinematic, answering the persistent question of “why don’t these guys make a movie?” They’d love to, of course, but it would mean hiring a lot more folks very quickly, with a possible (perhaps even probable) loss in overall quality. And, of course, someone would need to make a cinematic for whatever Blizzard’s next release in that period as well.
In any case, for those who don’t know what the heck that cinematic is about, Illidan, the narrator, is a night elf whose story is told in Warcraft III: The Reign of Chaos and its expansion, The Frozen Throne. Thousands of years ago, he was part of the night elf forces seeking to keep the Burning Legion (an army of demons that travel from world to world, sucking the magic out of it and laying waste to it) from Azeroth.
Unlike his (goody-goody) brother and his brother’s girlfriend, he was more interested in defending the world’s magical resources than in fighting the Burning Legion. In thanks, the night elves through his immortal butt into the equivalent of night elf Sing-Sing, until he’s freed during the course of the Warcraft III storyline, when the night elves decide that, it might be nice to have Illidan back, now that the Burning Crusade is invading again. Naturally, this is something of a mixed deal, and after the Burning Crusade are routed at the end of Warcraft III, he decides he’s not going back into stir and takes off to the former orc world of Draenor, now known as Outland after it was blown into chunks in the expansion to Warcraft II and put the smack down on the night elf marshal (essentially) sent to drag him back to pointy-ears prison.
In the expansion to World of Warcraft, the Burning Crusade opens the door between Outland and Azeroth. This is bad news for Illidan because, not only will it mean yet more damn night elves coming after him (and really, I pretty much feel the same way about the night elves that he does), he’s worried that the Alliance and Horde will reactivate all the other portals on Outland that he’s worked to shut down. And that, in turn, will alert the main army of the Burning Crusade that Outland is still a strategic asset and, oh yes, your old nemesis Illidan is still around.
Anyone who’s said that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” never met Illidan.
So, I was wondering, what forthcoming MMORPG has stiff-but-detailed figures, a generic “high fantasy” flavor and absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever?
Well, Microsoft has done it: By caving into the music industry’s insistence that people only want MP3 players to listen to stolen music (and somehow ignoring that iTunes is a top 10 music retailer now) and paying a “pirate tax” to the music industry on all 10 or 11 Zune units they’re going to sell this holiday season, it’s apparently opened the door for Universal Music to go after Apple:
Universal, the world’s largest music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, was the first major record label to strike an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to receive a fee for every Zune digital media player sold.
“It would be a nice idea. We have a negotiation coming up not too far. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do that… but maybe not in the same way,” he told the Reuters Media Summit, when asked if Universal would negotiate a royalty fee for the iPod that would be similar to Microsoft’s Zune.
This is the same level of thinking that brought us the motion picture agency shrieking that the VCR would be the end of the movie industry. Old guys who don’t use modern technology should not be in charge of information industry companies. (And yes, that includes newspapers. Incidentally, Stephan Wingert, the publisher at the Daily Press, once told me he owns one of every model of the iPod. Neither old nor technology-averse.)
VCRs ended up being a huge boon for the movie industry, as were DVDs, which were supposed to kill the movie industry due to their “perfect” image quality. Instead of fighting MP3s, the music industry needs to be figuring out their own counterpart to the movie rental industry that will give them a fat new revenue stream.
