DEADORC

I'm not sure how many people still play World of Warcraft - it has always been a rather controversial game, with people either loving or hating it.

I was an old-school World of Warcraft fan but did not care much for the expansions, as a result I grew more and more annoyed at the changes the game made and when Cataclysm came out I finally had enough.

Now any World of Warcraft player knows that there have been a number of "private realms" for a while now - Blizzard's stand on these has always been strong and as a result they are very much underground.

Yet as much as I used to hate on them I found myself drawn to a "private realm" - one which was what we like to call "vanilla" World of Warcraft (nearest to the original release).

Upon starting up however things went wrong for me as the character select screen was frozen and heavily distorted (not in a gruesome manner, mind you) - a male orc stood in place and to my surprise was already named:

DEADORC

I didn't wish to play on this realm after seeing how distorted the character select screen was so tried exiting, only for a loading screen to appear.

Before I knew it I was standing in the orc starting zone with DEADORC - the background just as distorted as the character select screen: yet DEADORC was clear, in contrast to his surroundings.

I went to close the game again only to jump slightly as DEADORC started running - I hadn't touched any buttons but the orc was already making his way to a nearby quest giver.

I tried typing a few commands at this point but the game just ignored me as DEADORC clicked on the quest giver.

A box of text soon appeared, stating:

NO ESCAPE

DEADORC

NO ESCAPE

DEADORC

The text box soon vanished and DEADORC proceeded to kill the quest giver despite the target being labelled as "friendly" (and thus unable to be killed under normal rules).

No blood or guts, just a normal death sound and the somewhat antidramatic orc death animation accompanied this act as DEADORC once again began to run around the empty starting zone.

I gave up even trying to fix things at this point, everything I tried was failing and even trying to turn the computer off was futile: thus I resigned myself to watching this macabre puppet show.

DEADORC soon found more NPC characters and clicked on them, each time a box of text would appear:

NO ESCAPE

DEADORC

NO ESCAPE

DEADORC

Following that DEADORC would kill the character, who would always fall down in the usual manner.

This continued until DEADORC finally ran out of NPCs to kill.

At this point the camera angle shifted to show a close-up of DEADORC's face - it was the typical in-game model of the time but that in some ways made it all the more shocking.

The screen suddenly turned completely black and I was able to switch my computer off.

Shaken by what I'd experienced I quickly vacated the room and decided to try and calm my nerves by watching TV downstairs for a bit, switching on some cartoons - figuring they'd cheer me up a bit even though I was a bit old for them.

I was just starting to relax when without warning the cartoons stopped and the monitor switched to a close up of DEADORC's face - staring out at me impossibly from the TV set.

NO ESCAPE