Seriously. If you’re already familiar with World of Warcraft and/or Shaman King, or you just don’t care, skip this. You have my blessing.
In 1994, California-based Blizzard Entertainment released a real-time strategy game called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Taking place upon the island-continent of Azeroth, it proved extremely popular and spawned a number of sequels and expansion packs. Ten years later, the third such iteration (Warcraft III) had been out for over two years, and rumors of something totally new began appearing in gamer magazines…World of Warcraft (WoW), released just before Christmas 2004, was a project totally unlike previous forays into the Warcraft universe. While the previous games had been solo affairs, WoW was designated a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, which is pretty much what it sounds like—thousands of players concurrently playing in one dynamic landscape, grouping together or fighting against each other, competing to finish the same quests and kill the same monsters. Not a new idea (viz. 1997’s Ultima Online and 1999’s EverQuest) but WoW, with over 9 million active subscribers at the time of this writing, is far and away the most popular of its genre, and clearly has gotten something right.
Halfway around the world, unconventional artist Hiroyuki Takei began work on a manga (Japanese comic) titled Shaman King. Proving immensely popular with its school-age target demographic upon its debut in 1999, readership gradually fell off. By 2004 the series had been canceled in Japan after spanning 32 volumes, but its popularity resurged when the work was translated and released to an American audience. Currently, thirteen volumes of the U.S. translation have been released to generally positive reviews, but an impatient American fan base has already taken it upon itself to pen and publish fan fiction—peripherally related works that use the likenesses and personalities of Shaman King characters.
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