Red Shirt Guy

"Red Shirt Guy" is the name the World of Warcraft community gave to the fan who caught Blizzard's own lore team in a mistake at BlizzCon 2010. At the Quests and Lore Q&A panel he asked why a dwarf leader promised in a recent novel was missing from the Cataclysm beta, and Chris Metzen answered by asking whether that character wasn't dead. The clip spread quickly, and within weeks Blizzard put a small dwarf in a red shirt into the game as a tribute to him.

The question

BlizzCon 2010 ran on October 22 and 23 in Anaheim, California. One of its panels was a Quests and Lore Q&A hosted by Chris Metzen, then Blizzard's vice president of creative development, and Alex Afrasiabi, lead world designer for World of Warcraft. Fans lined up at a microphone in front of a large hall and a live stream.

The fan in the red shirt said he had finished reading the novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm the day before. In it, the Wildhammer dwarf Falstad was named as his clan's seat on the Council of Three Hammers, the new three-part government of Ironforge. In the Cataclysm beta, though, the Wildhammer seat went to Kurdran Wildhammer, and Falstad did not appear in the game at all. He asked what had happened to Falstad.

Metzen replied with a question of his own: wasn't Falstad dead, from the novel Day of the Dragon? The fan corrected him politely. Falstad survived that book, he said, and had led Aerie Peak in the original game and through Wrath of the Lich King. Metzen agreed and turned to Afrasiabi, who thanked the fan for pointing it out and said they would fix it. The hall cheered.

Why it was a real discrepancy

The fan was right on every point. Falstad Wildhammer is a gryphon rider in Day of the Dragon (2001) who flies the mage Rhonin across the sea and fights at Grim Batol to free Alexstrasza. He lives through the book. World of Warcraft then placed him at Aerie Peak in The Hinterlands as Falstad Wildhammer, High Thane of the Wildhammer clan, a level 50 NPC in our Classic data.

The Shattering, released in 2010 as the lead-in novel for Cataclysm, had Varian Wrynn put Falstad forward for the new council. The game's beta had swapped him for Kurdran, an older Wildhammer leader from Warcraft II. Warcraft Wiki notes that early beta reports did show Falstad on the council before a later build replaced him, so the novel and the game had drifted apart during development.

Metzen later explained the slip. In a 2018 interview on the FROGPANTS podcast he said he had known Falstad was alive and had mixed him up on stage with Molok, another dwarf from Day of the Dragon.

Reaction and the tribute

Video of the exchange went viral, and "Isn't Falstad dead?" became a catchphrase among players. Not all of the attention was kind: some forum posters mocked the way he spoke. Blizzard community manager Nethaera answered one such post on the official forums, pointing out how hard it is to ask a question in front of thousands of people, a TV camera and bright lights, and praising anyone who asks an informed one.

On October 30, 2010, a screenshot surfaced showing Falstad on the High Seat in Ironforge with a short dwarf in a red shirt beside him, named the Wildhammer Fact Checker. Some suspected a fake until Afrasiabi confirmed on the forums that it was real. The beta build of November 3 contained both NPCs, and they reached the live game with patch 4.0.3a, the pre-Cataclysm update that reshaped Azeroth. Falstad took the Wildhammer seat on the council in place of Kurdran.

The Wildhammer Fact Checker is a young Wildhammer historian who stands next to Falstad in the High Seat and wears a red tunic. He drops a shirt called Red Shirt, and later updates also placed him on Darkmoon Island and quoted him on dwarven history in the Mount Journal. None of this is in our Classic database, since he was added in Cataclysm. On April 15, 2011, Blizzard's short story Fire and Iron, about the Council of Three Hammers, described him as a very thorough fact checker in a bright red tunic.

Later appearances

The fan returned to BlizzCon in 2011 and was placed first in line for the lore Q&A. Metzen came down from the stage to hug him, and he thanked the team for putting him in the game before asking whether players would return to Gilneas. He asked questions at several later BlizzCons, from Azeroth's unexplored southern lands in 2013 to heritage armor in 2019.

He has made his real name, Ian Bates, public himself. He began writing for the fan site BlizzPlanet under that name in August 2013, runs a personal site for his fiction, and has answered fan questions on Reddit as "RealRedShirtGuy". In June 2016 he and Ben Schulz, the player behind Leeroy Jenkins, rode together to the premiere of the Warcraft film in a promotional video by Legendary.

The joke also reached Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's team brawler, where Falstad became a playable hero. Several of his lines nod to the panel, including one asking whether anyone has seen a little guy in a red shirt. The Fact Checker also appears in Hearthstone web comics for Knights of the Frozen Throne, pointing out mistakes in a storyteller's tales.

Sources

• Ian Bates (Warcraft Wiki)
• Wildhammer Fact Checker (Warcraft Wiki)
• Falstad Wildhammer (Warcraft Wiki)
• BlizzCon 2010 (Warcraft Wiki)
• Red Shirt (Warcraft Wiki)
• BlizzCon attendee to appear in Cataclysm (GameSpot)
• Special Interview: Chris Metzen 2.0 (FROGPANTS, 2018)
• Hi, I'm the Red Shirt Guy, ask me anything (Reddit, 2017)