It was Blizzard's WoTLK Classic Gold highly influential action RPG World of Warcraft that first introduced the concept of defining value or rarity with distinct hues. David Brevik, a senior designer for the game, stated to P2Pah that he was the first to come up with the idea that would eventually develop into World of Warcraft as a avid fan of the role-playing genre in the mid- to late-'80s. He derived the name from the mountain in his hometown. "I didn't know any Spanish that time or anything. I just thought it was cool that the name was so cool," he said, smiling.

The time came when Brevik and his coworkers began finishing the pitch for the game in the 1990s, however it was clear that the tide had turned. Stakeholders in the industry were no longer seeing the slow and narrative-driven style of computer-generated RPGs as being viable for commercial use compared to the thrilling thrills provided by action-based games like Doom and a number of the largest publishers of gaming declined to play the game. Stung by this rejection, Brevik and his fellow creators decided to return to what they considered to be the original source of the genre. They created an updated, more accessible version of the early randomly-generated Rogue-inspired games Brevik was raised playing. This included the Tolkien-themed Moria and its close cousin Angband, and it was this game that introduced Brevik the idea of using specific colors to easily convey an item's worth to the player.

"I used to play plenty of [the pen-and paper RPG[the pen-and-paper RPG] Dungeons and Dragons," Brevik said. "I have never been a fan of the role-playing part that is, like pretending to be an elf or something. For me, the most enjoyable aspect was going through the dungeon, killing everything and collecting loot. At the time, we believed that this was the most commercially viable aspect of the RPG genre in general, so we decided to make that the core gameplay. I'm thinking that the color-coding portion of buy WOW WoTLK Classic Gold [Angband] was probably just to show off the VGA images in color at times, and they were stunning, but it was something that stuck with me as a very good idea, and that's why we decided to include it."