people got bored and moved on to something else." Vaughn, Young and Yans all cited Warcraft Adventures as a game that could re-energize the graphic adventure genre, and Yans remarked in August 1997 that Blizzard had considered and dismissed the theory that the field was in decline. During his talk "Are Adventure Games Dead?" at the May 1998 Computer Game Developers Conference, Steve Meretzky likewise called Warcraft Adventures a "particularly encouraging sign" for the genre, given Blizzard's track record of commercial success. Response to cancellation The cancellation of Warcraft Adventures was met with widespread disappointment from players, to a degree that Blizzard Entertainment did not anticipate. By that time, the company believed that the audience for adventure games had shrunk; citing poor sales of The Curse of Monkey Island, Mike Morhaime later noted that adventures with 2D graphics had been "aging fast" as a genre. Bill Roper remarked, "I think that one of the bigger shocks was [finding] that people would be interested in it at all." He considered the blowback to be a strong vote of confidence in the Warcraft license. Following the cancellation of Warcraft Adventures, fans Philipp Schneider and Christian Giegerich created an online petition to support the project's revival, which garnered 1,737 signatures by August 1998. After they sent the results to Blizzard, the company responded on August 19 by thanking its audience but reaffirming its decision to cancel the game. In an open letter, Blizzard stated, At the time, Jeff Green of Computer Gaming World wrote that Warcraft Adventures cancellation "hit [him] hard" and was his "Bummer of the Year". The magazine's Terry Coleman called it a sign that Blizzard had lost its independent status, and theorized that corporate pressure had played a role in the decision. This view was later echoed by Alex Cachinero-Gorman of Hardcore Gaming 101, who cited statements by Mike Morhaime as evidence that the cancellation was "as much a numbers game as anything about game quality", and that "the prospect of a lost investment did not motivate them to apply their characteristic rigor". Conversely, Steve Meretzky said in 2016 that the cancellation "made me sad at the time", but that Warcraft Adventures relatively low quality meant that Blizzard had taken the best route. In retrospect, Amer Ajami of GameSpot opined that the game's cancellation arguably marked "the death knell" of the adventure game genre as a whole. Around two months