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Grand Theft Auto and the biggest moments in video game history

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) made headlines as the biggest video game release of all time, selling more than $1 billion worth of copies in three days. But GTA V didn't get to this landmark moment by itself. Find out more moments that changed the course of video game history in this list, from most recent to the beginning of (video game) time.

5. World of Warcraft puts 'massive' in MMORPGs

Derek Bauer/AP
Here, players and fans from around the world played World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria at BlizzCon 2011 in Anaheim, Calif., in October 2011.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) had been around for more than a decade when World of Warcraft was released in 2004. But World of Warcraft, nicknamed WoW, literally wowed a larger audience with its graphics, play, and mainstream appeal of online role-playing games.

MMORPGs had been extremely popular in the video game world prior to WoW, offering virtual worlds in which players could create their own characters and lives while in a game-oriented setting that would continue to exist and change, even when individual players were offline. However, before WoW, it was more oriented toward a niche gaming crowd. WoW changed all that.

After its release in 2004, WoW has seen steady growth and popularity. Its graphics and audio have been critically acclaimed, it was named the 11th best video game ever by Game Informer, and it was honored by the technology and engineering Emmys in 2008 for its outstanding development of MMORPGs. In 2010, the game's subscriber base peaked at 12 million people, each paying the company $14.99 per month. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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