In 2005, World of Warcraft was ravaged by a digital plague that, once removed from the raid dungeons where it originated, infected an estimated four million players, spread through servers as they discovered how to transmit it to others, and left cities barren, littered with skeletons wasteland for a month before Blizzard developers managed to fix it. Now, somehow, briefly, someone has managed to spread the terrible disease back into World of Warcraft Classic.
Posted on Reddit a few days ago is a piece of footage showing classic WoW characters in the Alliance capital of Stormwind, spreading the plague among themselves in true 2005 fashion. It’s unclear how the debuff got out of the raid instance this time. Some have suggested that this was not the exact Corrupted Blood effect from the raid, but rather an effect created by a weaker version of the boss Hakkar the Soullayer in another dungeon.
Looks like we’re going back to 2005, someone in the Season of Discovery figured out how to bring the Tainted Blood back to Stormwind, video taken a few minutes ago With r/classicwow
Corrupted Blood is probably one of the most famed events in MMO history, breaking boundaries at the time and even being covered in the mainstream press and attracting the attention of scientific authorities. In 2007, a study on the contaminated blood incident was published in The Lancet, one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
To quote this passage: “The Tainted Blood epidemic in World of Warcraft represents both a missed opportunity and an exciting new direction for future epidemiological research.”
This turned out to be absolutely true. During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, the same researchers referred to this data and took it into account when analyzing the spread of the disease in the real world.
The full story of the Corrupted Blood incident was told in the documentary series Tales from the Hard Drive, hosted by Lenval Brown, the voice actor who narrated Disco Elysium:
World of Warcraft has remained the leader in MMO gaming for a full 20 years since 2004, which we recently marveled at and analyzed in a large senior article.
