Game Master Island
Game Master Island was the hideout of Blizzard's Game Masters: a small forested island far to the north-west of Kalimdor, beyond Teldrassil, with a guild house, portals across the world and a room nobody wanted to visit. It was removed from the live game in patch 8.2.0 in June 2019, and today it only exists in WoW Classic.
A hideout for Game Masters
GM Island was a hangout for GMs between tickets: a guild-style house, portals to places all over the world, and nothing else. It sat in water that the world map didn't cover, so there was no way to reach it by normal travel; the only way there was through exploits, and players who used them tended to be banned. Before patch 1.8 you could even add a GM to your friends list and see that their location was "GM Island".
The most famous video of the island shows exactly what happened to visitors:
Going to GM Island and getting banned · Patchychan
The room under the island
About a hundred yards below the island is a bare, white room with a single object in it, named in the game data
The Chair. Until patch 1.3, when GM tickets moved to an out-of-game chat interface, Game Masters brought
players there to talk about serious offences, and the area was scripted so that nobody could find the player with
/who in the meantime.
What happened to it
In patch 8.2.0, released on 25 June 2019, Blizzard reworked unreachable areas across many maps and removed GM Island from the live game. The files still ship with the client, but the map no longer loads it. WoW Classic kept the original island, and in Wrath of the Lich King Classic a group of players famously made it there and "raided" it:
We raided GM Island on WotLK Classic · AzAMOuS
From the archive
GM Island sits far west of Teldrassil. Programmer Island, where development happens, is instanced. There might be an instanced copy of GM Island too, but the original is still out there.
Destro, Nogg-aholics
I was on the beta server today when the World Defense channel announced "GM Island is under attack!" So GM Island exists, and it counts as Alliance territory.
KungPaoChicken
Mira Duskwood is the pen name of the Lost WOW editorial team. Mira writes the secret walkthroughs and the history of the lost areas, and keeps them up to date when a patch changes something.
- How this page was made. Every step was checked against at least two independent sources (Warcraft Wiki, Wowhead and Icy Veins), and against the patch notes for anything that changed over time.
- Last updated . When a patch moves a step or breaks a puzzle, the page is corrected and the date changes.
- Spotted a mistake? Tell us and it gets fixed. Read the editorial policy.
Videos
More videos of the same place from YouTube, old and new.
