November 23rd, 2004 is now firmly cemented as the birth of a legend. Announced without much fanfare, and what many thought would be a niche MMO catering to fans of Warcraft, it ended up surpassing 5 million subscribers in its first year.
An Amazing Discovery
Even in those simpler times, the race to World First was a thing of prestige. Wowhistorian brings us a tale of how they uncovered the evidence, and the race to World First Level 60 tables dated back to three days in December 2004.
Wowhistorian found out about a page that tracked the leveling race, via the Wayback machine, Maxmeout.com. The page led them to the first table of players and their progress dated December 3rd, 2004. That’s only 10 days after the game’s launch! We’re not quite sure how the data was gathered, but it was most likely just by player reports. Or perhaps by poking around the servers themselves to see who had progressed the most.
The First Race
The table shows Xenif, an often-mentioned Troll Rogue, as being the first at that moment with level 57. They were closely followed by Pebble, a Gnome Mage at level 54.
Wowhistorian says the exact date Xenif hit level 60 is unknown. But the next table they found, dated December 7th, seems to confirm all the theories that Xenif indeed was the first to level 60, with Pebble coming in second. So that’s between 11 and 14 days to get from level 1 to 60 on Vanilla WoW’s launch. The actual number is tricky to figure out, as we don’t know how close to 58 Xenif was on the 3rd. We also don’t know whether they slowed down towards the end, allowing Pebble to come closer. But if we had to guess, we’d say that it took 12 days.
The last table from December 11th shows the complete list of the first 25 characters to have reached level 60, with a caveat that WoW was only released in North America at that time.
Some notable names are mentioned by wowhistorian here, even some that they recognize, like Lloyd from Death & Taxes, Avatar from the Warsong server, and Kalahad, from one of the top guilds of Vanilla WoW, Fury on the Medivh server.
Player Comments
There’s an incredible amount of WoW history and nostalgia condensed into these three tables, and some of the old school players commenting shared their stories from back then.
Accomplished-Cup-858 was one of the frontliners in those days, among the top to reach level 60 on their server, even racing for server firsts. They share more of their story when prompted by wowhistorian.
A few others also remember WoW’s infancy.
It’s certainly an amazing piece of WoW history uncovered, in a world that has now accumulated over 20 years of amazing stories under its belt, be they personal or public. If you were there at the beginning and have war stories to tell, share them in the comments. We think wowhistorian will be glad to hear them.
