"What is WOTLK Classic?" I ask myself this now, and every other day during development, and the answer is never quite the same WOTLK Classic Gold. The game has always been hard for me to describe. It's part beat-'em-up, part free running, and part basketball (Basketbrawl? Freestyle?). And it is still basketball, technically speaking. There are baskets, and there are balls. That's the basics covered, right? Right? Unfortunately, very few of the people who have witnessed the game have ever accused it of being "like basketball."

A lot of folks were kind of surprised to find out that this was the Unreal 2.x engine--it's not typical for a sports game to come out of a first-person shooter-focused engine, let alone on Live Arcade, let alone a sports game that isn't really a sports game. Some people have also just assumed that we've been making WOTLK Classic with Unreal 3 technology, which I guess the artists and coders here at Streamline Studios can take as a great compliment. While the two engines come from the same Epic stable, they're rather different under the hood.

2.x was made with the Xbox in mind, and so it's optimized for that. Unreal 3, of course, is made for next-generation platforms. That means we've spent a lot of time taking the optimizations for the Xbox, and moving it over to the Xbox 360--trying to catch up with Unreal 3, in a sense.

Thinking back, WOTLK Classic has changed a great deal since the first prototype, a good four years ago. It moved from a realistic urban basketball court game into a second prototype: a Looney Tunes-inspired basketball game, set on the craggy rocks of the Grand Canyon. Even then, it was considered "over the top cheap WOW WOTLK Classic Gold." The second version was the first I ever saw, and was the catalyst for the game we've ultimately made: arcade multiplayer basketball that has almost entirely forgotten its own rules.