I first played World of Warcraft around late 2005 or early 2006, not long after moving to the UK. My parents had signed me up for college to learn English, and I didn’t really know anyone yet.

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One day I walked into GAME and asked someone working there if he could recommend something. He gave me a box of World of Warcraft. Looking at the back, I thought, this actually looks interesting. I had been playing MU Online before that, so I knew the name World of Warcraft, although I didn’t really know much about it.

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I took the box home and started installing it. There were four CDs, and I remember it taking a long time. I mean, a really long time. Then I finally started the game as an Alliance Night Elf Druid. The forests, the trees and the whole design of the world were unlike anything I had seen in a game before. It almost felt surreal.

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As I levelled, I started meeting people. I still remember a Dwarf Hunter and a Human Warrior in particular. I can’t remember who they were anymore, but somehow I still remember their characters. We mostly just typed to each other, but at the time even that felt special.

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When I first arrived in Ironforge, one of the Alliance cities, I saw a Gnome Rogue in armour unlike anything I had seen before. People were standing around inspecting him, and somehow that made him feel special. Until then I hadn’t realised characters could even look like that. It was like suddenly seeing a part of the game I didn’t know existed, and wanting to find out how you got there.

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Levelling was hard, and I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to play. I switched to a Rogue for a while, then eventually made a Night Elf Hunter my main. By then I was spending more and more time in the game.

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Eventually I reached level 60 and started raiding. Back then a raid could mean getting 40 people online at the same time, making sure everyone had what they needed, travelling there and sometimes fighting the Horde before you even got inside. The whole thing could go on for hours.

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One Molten Core raid went on for about ten hours. At some point I genuinely fell asleep at the keyboard and managed to get the entire 40-person group killed. I thought everyone would be angry with me, but nobody was. The next day they were just asking if I was alright.

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Later I left my Alliance guild and, from what I remember, rerolled Horde. I joined a good premade group, and we spent a lot of time playing together. What stayed with me most wasn’t winning battlegrounds. It was the time outside Orgrimmar, just standing around, talking and duelling each other. Twenty years later, those are still some of my best memories of WoW.

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The music stayed with me too. I still have the original soundtrack CD from 2004. Some nights, when everything is quiet, I put on my headphones, place the CD in my Technics player and listen to it. It’s strange how quickly the music takes me back. I might not remember exactly what I was doing or who I was with, but somehow the feeling is still there.

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Recently I decided to try World of Warcraft Classic again. I wanted to see if being back in that world would still make me feel anything, or if what I remembered was mostly nostalgia. At some point I found myself back in the Barrens, in the same place I knew around twenty years ago. The roads were still there, the landscape was still there, and there were people running around just like there were back then. Maybe some of them had been here twenty years ago too. I don’t know.

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I’ve forgotten the names of most of the people I played with and most of the things we achieved. But I remember what it felt like to be there with them. Coming back didn’t really feel like returning to an old game. It felt more like revisiting a place where, for a while, I belonged.

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