When the Wrath of the Lich King expansion beta started, those who wandered through Sholazar Basin found a mysterious hatch near the western lake’s shore. Hovering the cursor over the hatch showed a popup with the numbers 5, 9, 16, 17, 24, and 43.
Back then, I heard it was a reference from the Lost (TV Series). I never had the pleasure of watching that show. I have been catching up on 1995-2014 TV series I missed. I started playing Blizzard games for entertainment since 2001, and have barely had the need to watch TV series. I had my hands full playing StarCraft, then Warcraft III, some Diablo II, then World of Warcraft beta, StarCraft II, Diablo III, then Hearthstone and finally Heroes of the Storm.
I have watched several sci-fi TV series on Netflix the past couple of months. After finishing Outcasts, I decided to watch Lost — considered the most viewed TV series of this century. It is in Season 1, Episode 11 where the hatch is first introduced.
Beneath the hatch, is a bunker created by the DHARMA Initiative back in 1970. The numbers: “4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42,” are first introduced in Season 1, Episode 18: “Numbers.”
The real usefulness of the numbers are revealed in Season 2, Episode 3: “Orientation” as the code that must be executed into a computer terminal every 108 minutes to save the world from a massive electromagnetic pulse. Back in the 70s, an experiment went awry, and after that two individuals must take turns to enter the code and press the execute button to prevent the incident from happening again.
In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and above expansions, you can find the hatch in Sholazar Basin at coordinates: [38,37] at the Bittertide Lake.
It would be cool if Blizzard Entertainment added new content with these hatches in mind, adding more of them in Un’Goro and other areas. A series of quests leading to opening the hatches and uncovering a bunker with portals leading players through time/space? (dungeons) to find items that help us unlock something rewarding. Think Burning Crusade Attunement questline.
Obviously, these hatches would unearth ancient Titan bunkers where they might have experimented with timeways and maybe the Emerald Dream long before empowering Nozdormu and Ysera. Just throwing an idea out there to visiting developers.
