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IGN has published a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Shane Dabiri and Cory Stockton about the 15th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise and the 5th anniversary of the MMO juggernaut, World of Warcraft. The developers discussed the history of Warcraft, their proudest moments, and whether or not the game franchise will ever return to its real time strategy roots.

IGN: Fifteen years is a pretty big deal for any franchise, particularly in the video game world. Looking back, what are some of your proudest moments and biggest surprises?
Shane Dabiri: For me, when I got my start it was back in '94 after we shipped Warcraft 1 and the company was probably 25 employees at the time. I went to CES and we had a ten-by-ten booth and there were a few dozen people who came by our booth to take a look at the game and they were all excited. I couldn't have imagined from that day that we'd be at Blizzcon in 2005 and have 10,000 people there just ooh-ing and ahh-ing over all of our Blizzard games. It was surreal for me. Those moments were probably some of the biggest highlights for me as far as my experience here at Blizzard.

I got into games because I wanted to make games, work with people that make games. I never thought it would turn into something that was this huge success with something like World of Warcraft with 11 million subscribers worldwide. It's crazy.

IGN: From an outsider's perspective though it seems that none of those resources are being spent to advance the Warcraft RTS brand. Since the release of World of Warcraft we've seen nothing else. Has Warcraft become an exclusively MMO-focused property or are we possibly going to see a return to a more RTS-oriented format?
Cory Stockton: It's definitely not only limited to the MMO genre. That's the direction we are in right now. I think the way we look at it is that the franchise can go in whatever direction we want to take it. World of Warcraft is the direction we're focusing on with Warcraft right now. It's always open in the future that we could go back and continue the Warcraft series as an RTS.

Shane Dabiri: To add to that, I keep bringing this up and it sounds so clichéd but we're gamers and we like to play lots of different types of games. It's easy to look at the success of World of Warcraft and think 'Why don't you just work on MMOs from now on out?' but we put a lot of love, tears and sweat into our Warcraft universe, or Starcraft or Diablo, and we're first in class in all of those games and it would really be kind of a shame to abandon those. There's no plans to do any of that. We want to persist those properties into the future.

IGN: Warcraft Anniversary Interview

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