30 Years Later, Warcraft’s Influence on Gaming Still Looms Large

Blizzard Entertainment is about as close to a household name as any game studio can get, and the path that brought it there can be traced back to one game. Back when Blizzard was focused on making ports for publisher Interplay (under the name Silicon and Synapse), an idea emerged that would build the developer’s legacy of charging headfirst into new genres and creating defining works within them.

That idea became Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Released on November 15, 1994, on the Windows precursor MS-DOS, Warcraft is not the first real-time strategy game, but helped kick off a wave of RTS titles whose influence still looms large over the genre today.

“We were inspired to create Warcraft after playing (and replaying and replaying) a game called Dune 2, by Westwood Studios,” programmer and producer Luke Wyatt wrote for Kotaku in 2012. “Dune 2 was arguably the first modern RTS game, with a scrolling world map, real-time unit construction and movement, and individual unit combat.”

According to Wyatt and other early Blizzard developers, Warcraft was inspired both by their mutual obsession with Dune 2 and the fact that no one had tried to replicate it since its 1992 release. Warcraft was made to fill that gap, and its success then inspired other studios to try their hand at the genre, leading to the development of a blueprint games still follow to some extent today.

Warcraft experimented with mission structure, including levels that reduced or eliminated the ability to create more units, and offered more varied objectives than simply crushing your enemies. Just about every RTS that came after it followed suit, and also adopted Warcraft’s greater focus on story. Instead of two faceless armies clashing, Warcraft tells the story of a conflict between humans and orc invaders from another world, which has been built upon by every subsequent game in the series. Despite the importance of story to the Warcraft series, IGN reports that the original game had no script to speak of, with its narration improvised by Warcraft producer turned voice actor Bill Roper in the recording studio.

One of Warcraft’s biggest innovations was online play back in 1994, long before Blizzard had even developed its Battle.net platform and while the consumer internet was in its infancy. Warcraft wasn’t the first online multiplayer game either, but it helped popularize the idea, making it a near necessity for future games in the genre. That’s despite the fact that Blizzard didn’t even have internet access at its own office at the time, meaning developers had to carry around floppy disks to share their work.

Warcraft’s multiplayer aspect likely played a big role in making it as popular as it was. The game’s enemy AI wasn’t particularly advanced, and foes could easily be tricked due to their tendency to simply attack anything that came into their field of view. By enabling multiplayer, Blizzard let players face much greater challenges by going to battle with each other, and laid the groundwork for the much livelier multiplayer communities of subsequent games like Starcraft.

Another signature of the Warcraft series is its distinctively light tone, which sets it apart from the grim darkness of Blizzard’s other big hit, Diablo. According to Wyatt, Warcraft’s bright, cartoony art style was intended to make the game’s graphics more easily readable in the bright rooms where people actually played games. Even more than its color palette, the Warcraft series maintains its tone through jokes and pop culture references, which started in the original game and continue all the way to World of Warcraft. While later games have a stronger sense of humor, even in the original game, units get angry if players click on them repeatedly, eventually snapping, “Why do you keep touching me?”

Not all of Blizzard’s groundbreaking ideas made it into Warcraft, though. According to Wyatt, the team originally wanted to include a player character who would persist between missions, as well as more powerful “hero” units to command. Hero units — named characters who are significantly stronger versions of standard soldiers — did appear in Warcraft 2, and Warcraft 3 is largely centered on even more powerful characters who develop their skills over time, as Warcraft’s player character was originally designed to.

Like most foundational games, Warcraft is a tough game to play today. Not in terms of access — it was added to the Battle.net launcher earlier this year, and a remastered version launched in the Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest just this month — but because of how gaming has changed since its release. Even the features Warcraft introduced to the world have been refined since it started them, making the original a bit of a slog. Whether or not you actually return to the source, if you’re a fan of modern RTS games, you have Warcraft to thank.