'World of Warcraft' Facts You Didn't Know

Everyone's heard of it, and everyone who plays it seems to love it, but it's time to be honest with yourself: How many World of Warcraft facts do you actually know?

You might know that Blizzard Entertainment created it, and you're probably aware that it's one of the most popular games ever made, but do you know exactly how prevalent it is and has been throughout its career?

Do you know how many lines of code it took to create the game, or how big Azeroth would be in real life?

Did you know that World of Warcraft has opened up an entire field of study?

Now is the time to find out!

The rise and fall of World of Warcraft is a spectacle in and of itself.
WoW's popularity grew exponentially over the few years following its release. In early 2005, just a few months after the game's release, 1.5 million people were already playing WoW.

By the end of 2006, the population of Azeroth more then tripled, with five million dedicated players in their base.

The most significant increase in WoW's popularity came a year later when 10 million people were subscribed to WoW.

After that, World of Warcraft's exponential growth started to lag, which could have something to do with the fact that Blizzard Entertainment cut ties with their partners in Shanghai in 2009.

Or maybe it's because one of the guys who helped create World of Warcraft went rogue and built an identical knock-off called World of Fight, though that's unlikely.

Nevertheless, WoW acquired roughly 2 million new players between 2007 and 2010 when its popularity peaked with 12 million players roaming the land of Azeroth.

To put that into perspective, Sao Paulo, Brazil has a population of just over 12 million while New York City has 8.6 million residents.

Those 12 million players represented people of all ages, genders, nationalities, and occupations—even celebrities like Vin Diesel, Mila Kunis, and Dave Chappelle got sucked into World of Warcraft.

Now, the game's popularity is on a steady decline. WoW's player count was last reported in 2015 at 5.5 million players, and it's estimated to continue decreasing over the next few years.

Azeroth would be 80 square miles in real life.

If you think of Azeroth as its own world, country, or city, you'll be surprised at how small it is—especially since it has millions of residents.

If Azeroth were real, it would only cover about 80 square miles (51,200) of land. That might be larger than many other video games, but compare that to London, England, which takes up just under 627 square miles of land and has a population of roughly 8 million people, and 80 square miles seems like nothing.

There is, however, a small town in the midwest of the United States that is exactly 80 square miles. El Reno, Oklahoma is the same size that Azeroth would be in real life.

With a population of fewer than 19,000 people, I imagine it would be an unpleasantly overcrowded area if it had the millions of residents that Azeroth has managed to accommodate.

It took 5.5 million lines of code to create WoW.

For what it lacks in square miles and acres, WoW certainly compensates in its lines of code.

The team at Blizzard Entertainment wrote 5.5 million lines of code to give us WoW. That is equal to 99,000 pages worth of text.

Let's put that into perspective: Leo Tolstoy wrote 1,273 pages of text for War and Peace, and, granted there were no computers back in 1861, it took him six years to write the iconic novel.

Even with modern technology, I doubt most people would be able to whack out more than a thousand pages in that amount of time.

It took Blizzard Entertainment's team of 51 programmers five years to write the 5.5 million lines of code for World of Warcraft. In doing so, they built 1.5 million one-of-a-kind assets for the game, including over 70,000 spells, a variety of settings and props, events, and almost 40,000 non-player characters.

Those 5.5 million lines of code are stuffed with all sorts of hidden clues, places, and things, and it seems that video games have reached a level of artistic expression unlike anything some people ever thought possible.