Regular kids celebrate their birthday with a party that has an over-rich cake, lots of screaming toddlers and maybe a creepy clown. But how do you celebrate the fifth birthday of the biggest subscription-based MMO game in the world? Because that's exactly what's happening today to Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

Yep, after years of development and months of free beta testing it was five years ago today on November 23, 2004 that Blizzard finally launched the game for paying customers. Even though MMOs had been around for a number of years before World of Warcraft, the launch of Blizzard's game was the beginning of a new era as literally millions of players decided to fork over a monthly fee to play, fight and socialize in the fantasy world of Azeroth. In fact it's safe to say the genre's history could be split into two parts: BWOW (Before World of Warcraft) and AWOW (After World of Warcraft).

Naturally our sister site WoW.com is celebrating the fifth anniversary as well and even has some cool giveaways they will be giving their readers over the next few days. Make sure you head over their way to partake in some birthday goodness. And stay away from the creepy party clown.