Hi folks, my name's Andrew Groen and I'm the author of the Empires of EVE book series about the politics inside EVE Online. During the pandemic I made a hobby of studying other virtual worlds, and I became obsessed with the story of the first player to open the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj in Vanilla WoW.
Kalahad, the first Scarab Lord.
I spent months learning every detail I could about what happened, and I think it's one of the most fascinating moments that ever took place online.
For the uninitiated, the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj was an early patch for vanilla WoW in 2005. The centerpiece was a new set of raids sealed behind a magical gate.
Beyond the gates, within the ancient city, lay the old chaos god C'thun. Imprisoned for a thousand years, his dreamlike whisperings had long since driven mad the Qiraji scarab people who were sealed inside with him.
Unsealing the gate required one player from the server to go on an absurdly long quest. The mission: to find and reassemble the shards of the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, shattered in ancient times.
- The green shard recovered from the dragon Eranikus, tyrant of the Emerald Dream.
- The red shard looted from the corpse of the dread drake Nefarian.
- The blue shard from the belly of the great shark Maws in the Bay of Storms.
However, this was only the beginning of the process of opening the gates. Once the gates opened, an army of Qiraji scarabs would come pouring out. So before they could be unsealed, preparations had to be made.
This new stage of the great quest was called The War Effort. It challenged the entire server with the collection of enormous quantities of raw materials to supply a great combined army of Horde and Alliance warriors to besiege the city of Ahn’Qiraj.
Roast Raptor (20,000) to feed the Alliance host. Baked Salmon (10,000) for the warriors of the Horde. Thorium (24,000) for siege cannons to fire upon the ancient city. Mithril (18,000) for weapons going to the frontline. Arthas' Tears flowers (20,000) from the Plaguelands for potions and reagents. Runecloth bandages (400,000) to heal the wounds of battle.
In total, 1.15 million units of stuff from every corner of Azeroth needed to be collected before Kalahad could lead the server to the walls of the city, and strike an ancient gong with the scepter.
What fascinated me most was that completing this stage of the quest required coordination between Horde and Alliance players.
Vanilla WoW itself was intentionally constructed to create friction between Horde and Alliance players and their guilds to replicate the lore in gameplay.
The War Effort asked them to overcome the very real distrust that had developed over a year of early WoW. The server that would be first to open the gates would be the server that could most successfully set aside a year of differences and find ways to work together.
The Ahn'Qiraj event was as awesome as it was poorly conceived. The devs, by their own admission, did not consider that creating months of mystery about the gates - and then opening them first on only one server - would create a crush of players who made new characters on Medivh to journey out to Silithis to see it for themselves.
I interviewed Kalahad, and he told me about the legions of players who came to Medivh from other servers to witness the moment.
>"I was talking to a Blizzard engineer and he said that there were 30,000 Level 1 players in Silithis alone," Kalahad told me. "You could barely move your character because lag was that bad. He actually asked me to log off and wait to open the gates because he was afraid the server was going to literally explode when I hit the gong."
"The Scarab Gong looms ominously before you," read the gong's text description. "Steel yourself, Kalahad; for once the Scarab Gong is rung, the gates of Ahn'Qiraj will be opened."
After months of work, Kalahad at last, raised his cursor, and clicked the vibrationless, soundless gong. Medivh crashed.
>"When I actually hit the gong, my whole screen froze for 2-3 minutes before it finally started moving again," Kalahad told me, laughing.
The true story of how this event unfolded on the Medivh server allows us to capture early WoW in a tale that acts like a snapshot of a time and place. It spreads across the whole of this virtual world - from Kalahad's quest to lead the realm in reassembling the scepter and gathering the mountain of war supplies, to the journeys of Level 1 characters running across Kalimdor to Silithis with neither mount nor gryphon to speed their journey.
The story helps a reader to visualize an entire WoW server not only as one of the most stunning environments ever built, but also as a complex and unique social organism. Beyond that, the story gives us a chance to understand something core about how early WoW was designed.
When given the chance to select one server where the gates would open first, and one player from that server to be honored as the first ever Scarab Lord…who would the World of Warcraft system choose?
Reconstructing this event historically would give us a chance to answer two priceless questions.
Why Medivh? Why Kalahad?
The answer to the first was complex. Medivh was a server where many high level guilds migrated after the beta. Which meant they were highly experienced and geared up from the early raids, but they were also Everquest veterans who had been playing MMOs for years before WoW even existed.
Medivh had a rival server competing to open the gates first: Mannoroth. It had just as many veteran players, but the difference between the two was that Mannoroth was a PVP server which created deeper distrust between their Horde and Alliance guilds and slowed down the mass cooperation vital to the race.
The answer to the second question was more simple. Kalahad got bad news about his health that year and became depressed, spending most of his days in Azeroth to cope.
>“That was the first time I felt like I was broken, so to speak.”
This is a truncated version of the full epic story. The full version is the centerpiece of my next book, The Archive: Epics of Virtual History.
This sub's house rules against self-promo suggest posting a link would be bad form, but truthfully I am asking for the WoW community's support preserving this event, and others that are just as significant to the histories of other worlds and to the gaming community.
I pitched this story to the gaming press and received no replies. We're on our own if we want our history to survive.
My eternal gratitude to this community for creating one of my favorite stories I’ve had the chance to work on.
I felt a bit like Kalahad going on a journey of my own to understand his.
Thank you.