Have you recently teamed up with a mysterious druid in World of Warcraft that happens to love math puzzles? You could have been on a raid with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov.
“I recently started playing World of Warcraft, and I’m still playing it and enjoying it a lot,” Pajitnov said in a recent interview with Wired.com on the eve of his legendary puzzle game’s 25th anniversary.
Pajitnov is currently playing a level-74 female druid in the popular massively multiplayer online game. And it’s not his first character: He says he’s also played a warlock up to level 70 and a hunter before that.
He never tells anyone that he created one of the most popular videogames of all time, though.
“Nobody even knows that I am male,” he said. “I play just female characters.”
As you might expect, Pajitnov is interested in the MMO world’s complex game design. “It was very interesting for me, how the design works,” he said. “I really enjoyed the design work in Warcraft, because they must have a really huge team, and it was amazing how they distribute their activity and create together.”
Playing WoW has been “a very unusual experience,” he says, because in his 25-year career as a game designer, he has rarely gotten hooked on other people’s videogames. The only other games he’s played with the same level of passion were Nintendo’s Zelda games and the four-color CGA version of Lode Runner. (”I was absolutely addicted for more than a year.”)
Although Pajitnov mostly plays Warcraft solo, he has partnered with others on occasion.
“I’ve joined several guilds,” he said. “I did have a group which I used to play with a lot together, but later we lost each other and now I just have temporary alliances with different groups.”
So now you’ve got to ask yourself: Is that level-74 druid in your guild a game-design legend in disguise?
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