The Deadliest Pandemic You’ve Never Heard Of

As deaths from the coronavirus continue to soar, we are constantly reminded of pandemics from the past, both as a warning and, well… because they’re fascinating. You had the black death aka the bubonic plague which ravaged Europe, Africa, and Asia for 8 years in the 1300’s with a death toll believed to be as high as 200 million people, or approximately half of the world’s population. Yes… HALF. There was the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 20 to 50 million people in three years thanks to its 10 to 20 percent mortality rate among healthy adults. Let’s see, there was the Asian flu in the 1950s that killed 2 million people throughout China and the United States. There’s the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic that has killed more than 36 million people across the world since it was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. I could go on and on and on naming well known and well studied pandemics throughout human history. But there is one, much less talked about pandemic that separates itself from the rest. 

Like any deadly virus, it spread like wildfire, leaving millions dead in its path. The weak were instantly killed, while those strong enough to fend off the impending doom navigated through mazes of corpses on their way to safety. The panic and fear experienced by millions around the world was real, and it was everywhere. So why don’t you have a god damn clue of what I’m talking about? Why haven’t you learned about this deadly pandemic in school? Because it happened… 

In a video game. That’s right. In 2005, millions of players across the globe experienced a deadly pandemic, not in real life, but in the popular game World of Warcraft. “What the fuck?” is right. Now I’ve never played World of Warcraft, so trying to explain to you how a virtual pandemic spread through a video game would make about as much sense as some conspiracy theorist explaining how birds are a government entity used to spy on us. So here’s an excerpt from an article written by Mihai Andrei that explains just what the hell happened: 

“Hakkar the Soulflayer was introduced as a raid boss in World of Warcraft (WoW) on September 13, 2005. Hakkar was a Blood God, a sort of uber-vampire.

As any self-respecting raid boss, Hakkar was also hard to defeat. Max-level characters would party up, go through the gauntlet, and then challenge him. Without careful planning and powerful spells and items, they would almost certainly fail. But, as it always happens, strong parties would outpower him. As Hakkar would feel that he is starting to lose, he would use his last trump card: a strong lifesteal spell.

To combat this last-resort attack, players would intentionally poison themselves — then, as Hakkar would siphon their blood, he would essentially poison himself. Job done, the boss was defeated, parties took their loot and life carried on as normal on the WoW servers.

Until someone (Patient Zero) de-summoned his pet while the poison effect was still active. Without suspecting a thing, Patient Zero went about his business in the WoW world. But later on, when they re-summoned their pet, it was still infected with Hakkar’s plague — and it started spreading like wildfire.

Weaker characters were killed, resurrected, and then killed again after a few seconds. Entire cities were contaminated, and only strong characters could survive — and most abandoned towns entirely, leaving behind piles and piles of infected character corpses.

The corrupted blood effect was only meant to be active in Hakkar’s realm, but due to a coding bug, it was able to spread, making the World of Warcraft servers unexpectedly mirrored a real-life epidemic.”

Got all that? While a tad complicated if you’ve never played the game, a scenario like this one sounds eerily familiar to what we’re experiencing in current times. And not only are there similarities in how the virus both affected players and how it spread, but when the creators of World of Warcraft tried to prevent the virus from spreading further using methods such as telling players to quarantine, many reacted much as people have with the coronavirus, they simply refused. The whole debacle was surprisingly similar to any real life pandemic. So similar in fact, that many epidemiologists have actually studied the virtual outbreak in hopes of using their findings to create more accurate models of disease origins and how to control them. 

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, eventually gave up and had to reset their servers. A simple fix to a very complicated problem. If only we had that option in real life. 

But we don’t. So mask up and get the vaccine when it becomes available to you. And for those of you who refuse to do either, I hope your miserable lives are added to the death toll sooner than later.