The annual PC gaming show (opens in a new tab) isn’t the only big project we’ve been working on since early 2022. As we just revealed during this year’s stream pre-show, the PC Gamer team has been preparing another very special top-secret production: a short – form a documentary series about wild but true stories from the annals of PC gaming history.
We call it Tales from the Hard Drive.
If you played World of Warcraft on the wrong server in 2005, you may still be haunted by the memory of Angwe, the terror of Menethil Harbor who stalked the docks attacking all who passed by.
Even if you’ve never dared set foot in EVE Online, you know it by reputation thanks to players like Samantha Myth, who once spent 16 months undercover to steal a spaceship worth billions.
Being invaded by another player in Dark Souls is a uniquely terrifying experience…unless you’re one of the lucky few to come across the Fashion Police, elusive figures who rewarded elegant armor with a respectful bow.
These are the kinds of stories that come to life outside of the games that spawned them: true stories enshrined as folklore, retold over and over again over decades on message boards, Discord servers, and skeptical Reddit threads. These tales represent what we love most about PC gaming: the ways that truly passionate gamers can imprint their own personalities on our shared virtual worlds. We have written about them, but for a long time we felt that this was not enough. These stories deserved more.
A docu-series seemed like the only way to do justice to the people on the other side of our screens, but there was one small hurdle: we didn’t know how to make a docu-series. Somehow we figured it out, with a bit of inspiration from the crypt keeper and Jonathan Frakes (believe it, Number one). Tales From the Hard Drive is the result. These tales demanded a world-class storyteller, so we hired the truly incomparable Lenval Brown (voice of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut) to help us tell them.
You can watch the first episode right here, right now, and subscribe to our Youtube channel (opens in a new tab) to see the rest of Tales From the Hard Drive, coming this summer.
Tales From the Hard Drive Episode 1: The Terror of Menethil Harbor
The first episode of Tales From the Hard Drive takes us 17 years back to the early days of World of Warcraft, when there were two names every WoW player had heard of. One was Leeroy Jenkins. The other was Angwe: the terror of the port of Menethil, an unstoppable rogue who sailed for months and became a legend on the forum. Angwe wasn’t just a WoW PvP expert, he was also a masterful troll. Instead of simply massacring all the Alliance players who passed through the port, Angwe and his wife created a website where they posted the frustrated messages that players sent him in-game, capturing his anger. These tantrums became trophies.
One doesn’t just half-retell Azeroth’s first and only serial killer.
For Tales From the Hard Drive, we unmasked Angwe and visited him and his wife to tell the story of those glorious days of ambushes. We also spoke to former guildmates and players who met (or walked away from) Angwe on his day.
Because Angwe’s reign preceded easy video capture on PC, no video evidence of that reign of terror remains other than mirrors of Angwe’s long dead website. That meant we had to recreate it. Here’s what former PC Gamer Senior Reporter Steven Messner has to say about bringing this episode to life:
“It might not be obvious from watching, but making the Angwe documentary basically required taking a crash course in being a World of Warcraft developer. From the start, I wanted this episode to capture all the nostalgia of that bygone era of WoW: everything from character models, armor sets, and zones had to be appropriate for the era. The problem? WoW is not the same game as it was in 2004. Almost every corner of Azeroth has been changed and updated in at some point. So I did what any obsessive nut would do: I created my own WoW.
“Well, to be clear, I started my own private WoW server using sketchy files I found on abandoned forums and YouTube tutorials from 8 years ago. It took forever to get up and running (server programming, not even once!) , and then my problems were just beginning. I had to pore over the documentation to learn the console commands to level up and equip about 20 characters with the appropriate loot. I had to learn how to teleport them all to Menethil, and then I had to figuring out why everyone kept showing up naked (a terrible bug that required me to restart my WoW client windows no less than two billion times.) At one point, I had 11 different instances of WoW running on my PC in windowed mode, where d tab between the different windows to control each character.That’s also not mentioning the small army of NPC’s he was ‘mind controlling’ just so he could avoid l to painful torture of creating a new character and following the steps to equip them. I enlisted the wonderful Leana Hafer to control another batch of characters for me during the more elaborate scenes.
“I’m not kidding when I say it took about two weeks of full eight-hour days to do all of this. But you don’t just half-recount Azeroth’s first and only serial killer.”
Below is a behind-the-scenes look at Steven’s unique WoW Puppeteer setup.
Make sure you subscribe to PC Gamer YouTube Channel to see the rest of Tales From the Hard Drive due out later this summer.
