At the point that Brevik WoTLK Classic Gold and his colleagues started making the pitch ready for the game in the early 1990s, however the tide had shifted. Many stakeholders in the industry had no longer seen the slow narrative-driven style of computer RPGs to be viable in comparison to the exciting kinetic excitement offered by action-based games like Doom, and several of the largest publishers in gaming decided to not accept the game. Stung by this rejection, Brevik and his fellow creators decided to return to what they considered to be the roots of the genre, by creating an accessible, modern version of the early randomly-generated Rogue-flavored games that Brevik was a child playing. They created the Tolkien-flavored Moria and its close cousin Angband It was this latter title that first gave Brevik the idea for using specific colors to easily communicate an item's value to players.

"I grew up playing with a lot of the pen-andpaper RPG] Dungeons and Dragons," Brevik told me. "I was never really interested in the role-playing part such as playing the role of an elf or whatever. For me, the enjoyable aspect was going through the dungeon and killing things, and getting loot. In the early days, we considered that to be the most marketable aspect of the RPG genre in general which is why we decided to concentrate on it as the primary focus gameplay. I believe that the color-coding aspect of [Angband] probably just to show off the VGA graphic effects at the time, which were amazing, but it was something that stuck with me as a very useful idea, which is why we included it."

World of Warcraft first introduced the concept of an unicoded, rarity-based color-coded loot system that is now commonplace in RPGs, MMOs, and even action-based games like first-person World of Warcraft.

From the very beginning of World of Warcraft 's development, Brevik and his teammates at Blizzard North knew that the game had the potential to captivate players with the lure of ever-more powerful equipment, and they set out to increase that appeal. By replacing the unwieldy combat techniques of its predecessors with an endless array of loot, they succeeded at making this revolutionary "action-RPG" genre far easier to access and enjoyable for a wide public.

"At it was the moment, we would laugh at games that were less smooth regarding combat." Brevik said of RPGs that had combat speeds slower in comparison to World of Warcraft . "Maybe it was because the game was sarcastic, like 'Oh, I see a horrible monster, I hit a particular key in order to make my blade draw, and then I move my body to make an improved hit, and then I have to take an exact swing' ... we tried to break it down to the essence and replace all that with, basically, a slot machine. We didn't realize that it was a slot machine until the beginning. It's that we had a person from Vegas giving us tips on how to make the machine work better in order to truly attract [players]--but over time we discovered that altering chances and even balancing out the gameplay to ensure that your character's level as well as build buy WOW WoTLK Classic Gold were as important as your winnings made players actually want to play the game. And that's what we focused on."