There is no cow level

This is a silly article.
The content of this article is not part of official Warcraft lore, but has nevertheless become part of the World of Warcraft culture or community.

Note

There isn't one. Go away.

As a Saying

Blizzard has, for years, been denying allegations of hiding secret "cow levels" in their games, especially the original Diablo, where the rumours first began. Descriptions vary from report to report of what exactly a "cow level" is, but they are generally accepted to be secret areas that contain significant numbers of bovines (sometimes including powerful, magic-wielding bovines) and little else. So prevalent were claims by fans to have found the "secret cow level" in any number of Blizzard's games that their repeated, pithy response became a common utterance for fans:

There is no cow level.

The fact that, taken out of context, this comment just sounds bizarre and practically invites one to look for a cow level because someone felt it was important enough to deny something so bizarre has probably contributed a large part to its spreading as a saying among fans. And it's just damn funny to blurt out.

Not helping rumors is the fact that there was, actually, a Cow Level in Diablo II, and there have also been numerous other cow jokes and "there is no cow level" jokes hidden in Blizzard's other games. For example, it was the cheat code in StarCraft used to skip the current level. The line lives on in the hearts of long-time Blizzard fans and as an occasional "loading screen tip" in World of Warcraft.

Curiously, the phrase bears resemblance to the perhaps most famous quote of a later movie, The Matrix. When the protagonist of the movie, Neo, meets a young boy with telekinetic abilities bending a spoon with his mind, the boy explains "There is no spoon." This phrase in turn has been interpreted as a reference to the Buddhist concept of dependent origination. There is no spoon, only Neo's idea of the spoon. Likewise, there is no cow level, only our imagination of it and maybe, by extension, of the game.

In the hit PC shooter games Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2, to enable cheats one must use the command console to set the value of the variable 'ThereIsACow' to 1337.

The Blizzard Entertainment-only band L80ETC has composed a Diablo-inspired song named "Raise some Hell", which features the phrase "There's no cow level".

Despite Blizzard's continued insistence that there is no cow level, it only seems to have increased the incidence of rumors, as seen below.

Tributes to the Cow Level in WoW

There seems to be tributes to the cow level in the World of Warcraft.

• A rare BoE mace named Wirt's Third Leg.
• A rare BoE leather chest named  [Cow King's Hide].
• Mulgore, Thunderbluff and the entire tauren species can be interpreted as a tribute.
• A wandering robot in Gnomeregan named Techbot saying "There is no cow level"

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