WarCraft: Orcs & Humans

About the game

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is the opening chapter of one of gaming's biggest stories, and a scrappy, foundational strategy game in its own right. Two campaigns tell the same war from both sides: the orcish Horde pouring through the Dark Portal into Azeroth, and the human kingdom of Stormwind scrambling to hold. Gold and lumber feed barracks and towers; peasants and peons are forever being yelled at back to work.

Arriving two years after Dune II defined the real-time template, Warcraft sharpened it with personality and symmetry-with-flavour: the factions mirror each other mechanically but read completely differently, from chapel-and-cleric humans to spiked orcish warlocks raising the dead. Missions branch beyond base-versus-base into dungeon crawls through mines and rescue operations, hinting at the RPG blood in the setting's veins.

Its most consequential feature may have been two-player war over modem and network — a novelty that hooked players on human opposition and set Blizzard's course. Everything that followed, from Tides of Darkness to a certain world-conquering MMO, begins with this box.

Technical notes

VGA sprite engine with modem and IPX two-player play; mission scripting still hard-coded (the editor came with the sequel). Documented in DOS and Mac releases.