Don’t be surprised if you go out in Shanghai on the night of June 7 and see two groups of people charging at each other shouting “For the Horde!” and “For the Alliance!” And if someone stabs a wand in your face and tries to turn you into a sheep, be cool.

The warriors will be out on the streets to catch the premier of “Warcraft,” a Hollywood fantasy movie based on the massively popular online game franchise World of Warcraft (WoW). Interest in China has been brewing for some time, and pre-sales of its debut screenings have surpassed 20 million yuan (around $3 million).

The film’s producers have China’s devout WoW gamers to thank.

A party of 1,300 gamers will occupy a cinema in downtown Shanghai on Tuesday night to celebrate the movie. “For WoW gamers, the movie is of particular importance,” said 41-year-old Chen Xiaojiang, one of the event’s organizers. “For us old WoW gamers, the event is not only a celebration, but also a commemoration of our younger days.”

He told Sixth Tone that many gamers will come from other provinces to unite with their comrades-in-arms.

Shanghai’s event is just one among celebrations happening around the country. Wu Fan, or “Gforce” as he is known to his virtual comrades, has booked a whole theater of 300 seats in his home city of 2.2 million, in China’s northern Shanxi province, for anyone who’s ever played the game.

This is Wu’s way of expressing gratitude to the game, he told Sixth Tone. When he says “World of Warcraft has changed my life,” he isn’t exaggerating. The 31-year-old has made his name as one of the best PvP (player versus player) gamers in China — a reputation that has helped him turn his pastime into a career. He now has his own video game production studio, which has made games for the likes of internet giants Tencent and Netease.

A fairly tepid reaction to the movie abroad so far — according to Rotten Tomatoes, the film has received positive reviews from only 24 percent of critics — has not dampened interest within China. Over the past month, some stores on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, for example, have seen an eight- to tenfold increase in the sales of WoW-themed T-shirts.

“Few movies adapted from video games can be successful, but the Warcraft movie may be an exception, judging from the pre-sale,” said gaming professional Sun Xinceng, who previously worked in the technology, media, and telecom field for 10 years.

He added that the success of such movies depends on how large the fan base is and whether the fans have collective memories of the game.

WoW seems to tick both of these boxes. Released in 2004, the game is one of the most successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games ever. At its peak in 2010, it had 12 million subscribers worldwide, half of which were estimated to be Chinese players.

The game’s popularity is by no means limited to hermits holed away in attics or internet cafes — mainstream culture has embraced the franchise, too. Its maps and characters have been borrowed by media outlets to illustrate news, with one 2008 military documentary on China Central Television using an adapted map of the game’s territories as an allegory to illustrate military drills happening in the Middle East.

That’s not to say the franchise’s path into China has been free of bumps. In its early years, the examination and approval process that foreign games had to undergo delayed release of the game’s expansion packs — enrichment to the game’s original content — by months, even years. The result was a so-called harmonized game world, where skeletons were covered with flesh, and severed heads and skulls were replaced by benign boxes and bags.

But changes and delays to the game didn’t do much to stem its popularity in China. Many of the earliest active Chinese WoW gamers were college students and junior workers. They had enough freedom from the discipline of parents or the burdens of family life, as well as adequate means to fund their passion, as the game bills users according to their playing time.

Over a decade later, WoW has become more than simply an online pastime for many players in China. Its virtual world has expanded into their real world.

Ai Li, a marketing director at a gaming company, is one of them. She started playing WoW when she was a college student, and now, at the age of 31 and with her own family, she still plays. In honor of the game, she and her husband, whom she met through the game when he betrayed his horde to join her, were married in full WoW-themed refinery. She spent the day before giving birth to their son raiding a dungeon with a legion of 10 players.

Ai is also an organizer of the Shanghai gathering scheduled for Tuesday, and she told Sixth Tone that she would sit through the premier even if it turned out to be two hours of blank screen. Her enthusiasm and dedication are shared by her peers, some of whom, she said, have sworn to watch the movie as many times as they have characters in the game. Many players have up to 10 characters.

Like Wu, Ai feels indebted to the game for her career path. “The game has taught me sacrifice and responsibility,” she said.

The game attaches great importance to teamwork, with raids often requiring the collaboration of up to 40 people. Everyone is expected to do their job for the greater good of the team, yet what makes the world even more real is that people who make the greatest contributions don’t necessarily get the best rewards.

“People remember your sacrifice,” said Ai. During the raid on the day before the birth of Ai’s son, the 10-strong raiding party seized a particularly rare beast. Everyone in the group voted to give it to Ai.

“It’s just like how your boss will see your contributions and reward them,” Ai said. “Maybe that reward doesn’t come in the way you want, but you will still get something for your work.”

Chen shares Ai’s belief in WoW’s didactic value. “Many people learn their first lesson of life from the game,” he said. “It teaches people how to get along with others. Say, when there is a conflict of interests among team members, do you fight to get what you want or give it up for others? You can’t always think of yourself.”

Chen also thinks that WoW creates a community via its system of guilds — in-game fraternity-like organizations that enable players to team up and take down stronger enemies. “Members of my guild still meet each other offline,” said Chen. “We’ve grown up together. There is a bond between us.”

However strong those bonds may be, WoW’s subscribers around the world dropped to 5.6 million last year, as aging gamers have reduced their playing time in favor of family and work. Some also complain that the game has changed too much — to them, efforts to make it easier for newcomers to grasp the game seem like “fast food.”

New gamers, however, still find the game’s grand design too complicated to pick up immediately. Wang Yihao, a college student at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, said that the campus now belongs firmly to League of Legends, a popular “multiplayer online battle arena” game now owned by Chinese tech goliath Tencent. “League of Legends is much easier to grasp and therefore more suitable for new gamers,” Wang said.

Additional reporting by Fan Jialai.

(Header image: A still frame from the ‘Warcraft’ film. IC)