Blizzard originally wanted to include Undermine in the original World of Warcraft along with goblins as a playable race, with Johnathan Staats describing it as "tinker town" and "crazy". However, as the team did not have a lot of goblin art assets, building the goblin homeland would have required "a ton" of work, leading to both Undermine and playable goblins being cut from classic WoW.[15]
Note that the Undermine was already concepted in the early World of Warcraft beta not as a city on an island, but as a continent southeast of Kalimdor.