John Staats

John Staats (Johnathan Staats) was the first 3D level designer on the original World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment. He built or co-built many of the game's best-known dungeons, raids and landmarks, including Molten Core, Blackrock Depths, Blackrock Spire and Warsong Gulch. After leaving the games industry he wrote The WoW Diary, a crowdfunded behind-the-scenes account of how the game was made.

Career before Blizzard

Staats grew up in Akron, Ohio, and earned a BFA in visual communication design from Kent State University. He moved to New York City after graduating and spent about ten years in advertising, working his way up from a small design firm to a department director at a Madison Avenue agency. His work there included fashion editorials and financial and pharmaceutical campaigns.

His route into games came through hobby level design. A roommate showed him the level editor for id Software's Quake, and Staats spent years building 3D maps, many of them walkthroughs of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons adventures, on id's freely available engines. By his own estimate he put about four years and 10,000 hours into that work before his portfolio was strong enough to get him hired. He then moved to California to join the World of Warcraft team.

Work on World of Warcraft

Staats has described himself as the only dedicated level designer on the team when he started, and he has said Blizzard found it hard to hire people for the role. His job was to turn concept sketches and design ideas into the 3D spaces players walk through. Warcraft Wiki credits him with the following original World of Warcraft content, some of it shared with other designers:

He also worked on the Burning Crusade raid Karazhan with Aaron Keller. Staats pitched the ideas for the Azshara zone and for the scorched ground around the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands. In a 2018 MMO-Champion interview he said that the charred landscape came from a childhood visit to Sudbury, Ontario, where he saw rock blackened by acid rain and took it for the scars of meteor impacts. He also built squid and hermit-crab temples for an early "Dragon Isles" area that was dropped before launch.

In later interviews, Staats said the team made the original dungeons very large partly because nobody was yet sure that instanced dungeons were the right approach, and the dungeons could not really be tested until the last year or so of development. Looking back, he said he would have built them smaller. He has also shared frank opinions on individual dungeons, including Razorfen Downs and Wailing Caverns, in an interview with TechRaptor.

In the MMO-Champion interview, Staats said he made the first druid player character in the game. In his book Play Nice, journalist Jason Schreier reports that he sent a teasing email to a country each time World of Warcraft's player count passed its population, with Estonia and Switzerland among the examples.

Later career

According to Warcraft Wiki, Staats spent about ten years on World of Warcraft before moving to Blizzard's secret next-generation MMO project, codenamed Titan, where he worked for about a year. In November 2011, Engadget and other outlets reported, from an anonymous tip, that he had been laid off. Blizzard declined to comment on individual employees. A few years later he developed a medical condition in his hands that rules out sustained computer use, which ended his work as a developer.

The WoW Diary

Staats kept monthly notes during development and later turned them into The WoW Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development. The book is not licensed by Blizzard, though he said Blizzard reviewed it and corrected a few details about events before he arrived. He also interviewed people from the company's founders to his former teammates. It covers the project's arguments, mistakes and surprises, explains basic game development ideas such as what an engine is, and includes about 130 behind-the-scenes images with captions.

His first Kickstarter attempt failed. The second, launched on August 28, 2018, was fully funded within minutes, and Staats has said it became the highest-funded nonfiction book in Kickstarter's history. The book was printed in the United States by Walsworth and went on general sale on June 29, 2019. A second edition, published by Source Point Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster, followed on June 25, 2024. Staats now runs a one-person publishing company, whenitsready, and has been working on fiction and dungeon-crawl board games.

In-game tributes

Later expansions added nods to him. Johnathan Staats, a worgen quest giver at Lor'danel in Darkshore, was added in patch 4.0.3a, and his quest rewards Staats' Fishing Pole. Neither is part of the 1.12 game.

Sources

• Johnathan Staats, Warcraft Wiki
• World of Warcraft Diary, Warcraft Wiki
• About John Staats, whenitsready
• An Interview with John Staats, author of "The WoW Diary", Keen Gamer (2019)
• Vanilla WoW John Staats interview on making dungeons, TechRaptor
• The World of Warcraft Diary: A Designer's Insights into Game Development, Walsworth (2019)
• The WoW Diary, Second Edition, Simon & Schuster
• Rumor: Senior Titan designer laid off by Blizzard, Engadget (2011)
• John Staats Interview, MMO-Champion (YouTube, 2018)
• Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (2024), p. 147