The mistake that made WOW's stealth work

If you've played World of Warcraft, there's a sound effect that'll forever be embedded in your brain. A wooshing noise that triggers an immediate fight-or-flight response as you scan your screen for the stealthed rogue or druid that's about to ruin your day. It's a fantastic tell. It was also, it turns out, a mistake.

This is the first episode in what will now be a weekly video series called Here's A Thing, I hope you enjoyed it. Yes, that's what we're going with for the name. Someone I work with says it all the time and it makes me laugh, plus the acronym is the word 'HAT'. It's fine. I definitely won't resent this decision in about three weeks' time.

Anyway, the idea's pretty straightforward. Each week we'll be taking a deeper look into an interesting story about games and the people that make them. Actually that sounds really vague, doesn't it? Well, that's probably for the best. I've already recorded the next three episodes and they're all over the damned place: from Sid Meier's rulebook for designing a Civilization game, to Nintendo's relationship with emulation, to the people that wrote an actual sex formula for Fallout 2.

I'm hoping to stay quite strict about the running time, keeping the script nice and lean and then maybe publishing any extra interviews or background work on the site, for those that want them. There'll be some examples of this next Thursday!

As ever, we're keen to hear your feedback, so I'll be around in the comments if you want to tell me why you'd rather I'd written this piece as an article instead of wasting everyone's time with a YouTube video.