Cal 🅱️ @CalBCool13 - Twitter Profile

This is the OG WoW team. Journalists and grifters really did them dirty. This is the real story. This was not a "frat house run amok" as they want you to belief. I should know. I was the Team Lead. Every HR incident would have to cross my desk. (I'm on the left, holding out the champagne bottle from the launch celebration). None of them were SA or even "Frat Boy" style incidents (we did have one GDC drinking binge that ended up with flooding a hotel room and getting the company banned, but there were no women involved nor anyone harmed). So many articles were written that claimed Blizzard was a haven for some kind of "wild" and out of control environment. They are wrong. Instead what we were was a group of geeks, many of us socially awkward, all of us with a passion for games and absolutely driven to make the best game we could. "Frat Boys" would have stuffed us in lockers and given us swirlies. We worked hard, we were gamers, geeks, nerds. Many were married, with kids, or starting families. Many others were extremely shy, and introverted. We worked really long hours, but that's kinda what it takes to accomplish the exceptional. I know it's popular to paint OG gamers (and even DnD players/creators) as some sort of toxic group that pushed out women and minorities. But that's a lie. That's the narrative they use to explain why teams were majority men back then. They were men because women wanted nothing to do with games (until it became popular in culture). We would have loved to see more women interested in what we were doing, and we would not cared if they wanted to join the team. There was only one requirement: You had to be a gamer and passionate about making games and have the skills to back it up. We were the quiet, awkward nerds who were driven to excellence. It is such a terrible wrong to paint this team as some sort of menace to women. It's sad that this is the legacy people want to force on not just Blizzard, but all the OG teams from other companies that defined the IPs that carry gaming even today. They were all attacked. They want to destroy the past, tell a false history, so they can supplant it with their modern agenda (and people). It was done for clicks. It was done for money. It was done for clout. But when you point that out, they just call you a "woman hating grifter". All they do is lie and project.