Word of Warcraft is owned by Blizzard Entertainment.
Often touted as the little company that could, since they managed to survive competition with Sony and Micro$oft MMORPG's.

Blizzard Entertainment is a PC game developer and publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in 1994, it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates. However, many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come. Blizzard also has a reputation for taking fierce legal action against anyone who reverse engineers their software, copies their game concepts, or publishes third-party server software that is compatible with their games.

Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under USD$10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft.

Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software, in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, including Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the VU Games group of Vivendi Universal.

The upshot to VU purchasing Blizzard is that it kept WoW alive without most gamer's even
knowing their was a chance the company would vanish. Sadly, VU is becoming world renown
for its hostile actions, pour customer services, and excessive greed.

Blizzard presently earns about $60 million per month globally, and yet doesn't even offer tech support.

It is this excessive greed, and high popularity of the game, that led to a private development.

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WAD is the nickname of the programmer behind WoWEmu.
He is a Latvian computer teacher in his early 30's
According to his site-


The user of WAD acknowledges, that through the use of WAD he/she might violate the EULA (End User License Agreement) and/or other written or implied legal constraints of WOW© or other software. The authors of WAD can in no event be held liable for such violations. The authors further can in no event be held liable for any sanctions against the user that might arise from the usage of WAD in any way.

WAD and all the information on the website and the forum is provided to you for INFORMATIONAL purposes ONLY! We strongly disapprove of any illegal activities and will NOT take any responsibility for your actions!

If you deside to buy a legal copie of WAD Software then contact us
support@lin-e.de (SpamFilter Enabled)

"WOW"©, World of Warcraft©, "Blizzard"© refered to anywhere on this webpages
and/or the forum are copyrighted by their respective owner.

Europe/Us Sales Office

E-mail: support@lin-e.de
Tel: +49 (160) 94942141
Fax: currently not avaible
Customer Support

To contact our technical support
team visit our Under Construction pages

for more resources.
General information

For general information
regarding WAD products
contact support@lin-e.de.

Lin-e/D.Zubenko
Telefon +49(160)94942141
Telefon +49(160)94942142
E-Mail support@lin-e.de
Birkenstrasse 31
D-28195 Bremen

Cost: 160 Euro. Updates for WAD Emulator (4month Updates) 140 Euro

In fact, WoWEmu was never sold in the USA, not in most of the world, and toward the end, only to his personal friends.

The program sold for (1€ = about $2) $300 USD and required a $70 USD/mo payment to maintain functionality as it connected directly to his server.

This monthly fee is more costly then signing up with Blizzard and enraged many.

Technical support was never publicly offered and WAD tended to put more effort into encryption and protection than functionality and bug fixes, until the very end when other WoW simulation projects came out, for free.
The phone numbers were fake, and the e-mail rarely responded.

Hackers, crackers, and private database groups began to decrypt, decode, and make freely available WoWEmu.

This led to the reason Blizzard joined the "Entertainment Nazi's" and implemented US laws making work of any private server simulator or emulator, illegal.
Most of the world, simply laughed.
The real tragedy comes from Blizzard attacking persons and groups world wide, well outside of their authority.

At present, WoWEmu while not perfect, and now deceased, is still the best program of its type.