This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game. It was very popular in the mid 1990s on release but it seems like it was immediately forgotten about once Starcraft arrived. It's unfortunate because yes it's a simpler and more straight forward game, and not as balanced, but it is very fun and pure.
Warcraft 1 is maybe too slow paced and basic to be enjoyable, but Warcraft 2 remains very playable, as many of the usability of features core to modern RTS games developed here. There are a few things missing, but that just means you have to be more on the ball with the micro.
The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
One thing that was delightful about this game was how the community discovered that Farms made for better walls than the actual walls, and so an enormous variety of strategies developed around this. As players developed knowledge of how units were pushed out of buildings, walling off buildings to push units past forest was another strategy that developed from this, creating the potential for sneaky tricks.
One unfortunate thing about the game was that during the original battlenet edition they added a new extra fast speed, which everyone moved to, but that speed actually kinda broke the game in that it became entirely possible to accidentally put your townhall too close to the mine, and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining. So in actuality the second to fastest speed is the correct speed for this game.
I hope this got fixed in the remaster but I heard it was a pretty basic art refresh...
All the RTS games are underplayed nowadays. Starcraft 2 is maybe the most active still and has been all but abandoned by Blizzard.
A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest.
Sucks, I love Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
Every time someone tries to re-think the genre they make it worse. Supreme Commander (and Forged Alliance) were near-perfect games, but SupCom 2 tried to simpify the game to appeal to console players and ruined it completely. Dawn of War 2, although not to everyone's taste, was in my view the peak of the series. For the third install they tried to simplify the game and bring it closer to a MOBA and it was an incredible flop.
In my view, if a develop MUST make the game more accessible, they should do so with alternate modes while still maintaining a strong competitive 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 mode with the steep learning curve and competitive nature. Anything else is a betrayal of the genre.
Yes it was one of the most successful PC games of the 1990s, but that doesn't say much today. Have a look at its subreddit and it's a ghost town. Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
In contrast contemporary SNES games have had more remakes and had their audiences grow remarkably over time. The franchise hasn't been cared for and so it's relatively obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
> Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995.
This feels absolutely insane for today's standards. And not just in the gaming world. Somehow with all the advancement of libraries, frameworks, coding tools, and even AI these days, development speeds seem so much slower and it seems like too much time is spent on eye candy, monetization and dark patterns and too few times on things people actually like to see - that's what made us buy games and software in the old days.
(But also in the gaming world, especially the past few years when almost no game studio develops its own engine, assets don't look more detailed than what was used 3 years ago, stories seem hastily written and it feels like 80% of developer's time is spent on making cosmetic items for purchase which often cost more than the base game price)
Also somehow we spend lots of times researching UX and developing tutorials (remember when software had the "?" button next to the close button and no software "tutorials" were needed?) and yet all the games and software are harder to learn than what we had in the 90s and 00s.
Crazy how much bigger modern games are … I wonder how many total pixels were shipped in the art assets of Warcraft 2 vs. StarCraft 2? My guess is at least 4 orders of magnitude higher for SC2
Even smaller games now have ludicrously long development cycles as developers have learned they can exploit mentally challenged gamers by selling them "early access" (unfinished games).
The Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge allowed you to play this multiplayer over the internet, and the style of game was tolerant to low bandwidth and high pings. Which made this one of the first games that really provided a glimpse of the future of gaming (for better or worse, much of gaming has moved away from single person campaigns to multiplayer). I have so many great memories of this era in gaming because of this game and the handful of others that Kali supported (descent, doom 2).
Oh man. I remember having to send a check for $20 to some address to get my key.
That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
The poor floating point performance of many PCs at the time meant that a lot of code used ints rather than floats, making determinism much easier for multiplayer!
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Quake did as well all the way up to Quake 3 I believe. The game was basically on a heartbeat based on the worst latency of the connected player. Everything got synchronized that way.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
Do you or someone reading this know who would be the best person that would be willing to come on a guest on a podcast and has the correct knowledge (ideally the person who implemented in WC3, or something similar enough).
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
In grad school 15+ years ago I took a ‘user-centered innovation’ class and I wrote a paper on the topic of Kali and its predecessor: how gamers, not the game devs, made games built for IPX work across the internet. What is neat is early collab on the first ipx->tcp/ip bridge happened on Usenet, so you can find a record of the first doom deathmatch coordinated and played over the internet. I think I reached out to jay cotton (author of kali) via email and he answered my questions, so I’d try to track him down if I were you.
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
There are more high-quality single player campaigns coming out now than there were then. Single-player gaming seems to have grown since then. Just not as much as multi-player.
Kali ruled. I played a modified version of Hellfire (unofficial Diablo expansion that technically didn't support multiplayer) on Kali for the longest time. GTX_Rage, if you're here, I want to talk to you!
I had a lot of fun using Cases Ladder to find matches.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.
If you still want to experience the joys of RTS... but struggle to play after so many years away, I highly recommend catching a few streams from Grubby. He plays WC3 and a few other games and is quite entertaining to watch. He is also crazy good... His typical APM during a game hovers between 200 and 250. He is an absolute beast at leveraging his items and maximizing his heroes' hp.
I would also recommend ArtosisCasts [1]. Dan ‘Artosis’ Stemkoski has been a professional StarCraft play-by-play commentator and colour analyst for decades. He’s lived in South Korea (now in Canada) and cast countless professional matches and tournaments featuring the top Korean players.
On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
I miss the low res aesthetic of WC2. It's so sad that everything has to be high res nowadays. I never really liked WC3, maybe for that reason.
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
WC2, SC1, and things like Heroes III (and somewhat today with Factorio) perfected that 2D art-style. It might not have as many pixels as WC3, but every single one of them was thought about and considered by someone with artistic merit.
It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".
I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too big for human consumption."
Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable exception of lotr (and how many early readers really focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly change the world.
Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard, important and respected but ultimately limited to influencing others to achieve major changes.
Honestly, he doesn’t need to be the best to make it enjoyable. He seems like a generally chill guy and he goes back and breaks down his games. Fascinating to hear what he was thinking and why he did what he did.
The apex of RTS games -- what a great gaming era RIP. Since then graphics are way better but business models have just deteriorated and mass appeal has driven games.
I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.
Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.
the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and was going strong for a good decade or so, before being ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and, primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).
There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that existed in america with quake and friends, and the constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea. Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the culture works.
I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.
And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic completely abandoned the formula and made the next game something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly it stood up to its predecessor.
The game's campaign being what it was made it so people never warmed up to it, the big hero-focused storylines and then mishandling of said characters (Kerrigan's abortive humanization and then rushed redemption, the Protoss being framed in entirely the wrong tone, the half baked epilogue) just made it so that the campaign didn't stick as Brod War's did, even if the gameplay was superior.
I consider WCIII TFT the apex but that is because i really like the hero mechanic and it spawned so many amazing custom games, including the moba genre. I know AoS was first but dota really made it.
Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command & Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.
I feel like wc3 is undersung. To me it achieved the perfect balance of allowing potentially mechanically worse players to win with brilliant tactics or strategy. It put the emphasis on strategy in rts more then anything else.
As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
I like that even when a strong meta develops people can potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
The smaller armies, heroes, economy management, and increased micro-control that came from these things really push w3 to the top of the pile for me as well.
Yet two of the most played games out there in 2025 are RTSes, Dota and League. The genre just progressed forward.
WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
Dota and League are not RTS games. They are Moba. These are completely different genres. Dota happened to utilise Warcraft engine and assets back in the days, but that doesn't make it RTS.
Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
This is probably the best time as any I'll ever get to mention that Patrick Wyatt's[0] blog[1] is a gold mine of frontline, boots-on-the-ground accounts of making WarCraft II and other games.
1) you can find the War 2 for PSX source on Archive. It has all the Windows stuff commented out. It might be possible to uncomment and compile with something like Borland C or Watcom C or whatever they used.
2) the modding scene was phenomenal. Not mentioned is StarDraft for obvious reasons but a counterpart to WarDraft. This is where our story takes a turn and the name Camelot Systems emerges, along with a King Arthur (Andy Bond) who shortly after finishing his comp sci degree went to work for Blizzard and has been with them since. This website is a homage to CamSys (JorSys).
3) War2Bne is a thing to behold. Diablo, Warcraft 2 et al being able to seamlessly chat and DM players across games was pure magic.
Many stories to tell, but we will never step into that river again. Legends never die.
2. Indeed - I'm happy to hear someone know their Blizzard modding community history. To my knowledge, King Arthur never finished his studies as he got offered a job at Blizzard. He worked at Blizzard from around 2000 to 2020. He's now at Dreamhaven it seems, along with former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. And indeed - Jorsys is very much inspired by Camsys =)
3. I think my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
Warcraft II was the first game I ever played over modem direct connect with a friend across town. Later on there was another friend that lived way outside of town where you could only get dial-up internet who I played Starcraft with over modem. Those were probably some of the most enjoyable moments I ever got out of dial up internet.
WarCraft was a huge part of our LAN parties, but mechanics wise, Total Annihilation was a much bigger leap forward in terms of use of 3D terrain and ballistics and commands, so we played that a lot more.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
Huh. I'm familiar with the Spring RTS FOSS project (https://springrts.com) which started as a reimplementation of TA, and of course Planetary Annihilation, but not "Beyond All Reason" - do you have an authoritative link?
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
It's an open-source project that started as a fork of SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of Supreme Commander.
I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
Well, when I saw the first Supreme Commander video it looked a lot like Sprint RTS running Balanced Annihilation to me. Right down to how the terrain deformation worked and the command queuing.
Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase.
http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
WarCraft II was among the first games that I ever played "online" (direct connection via dial-up modem with my friends). I can't overstate how absolutely incredible that felt to me at the time - pure magic.
The other games we were playing at that time were Doom II and various other first-person shooters (Rise of the Triad, Hexen, etc) - which were also pretty incredible. But the WarCraft II experience really took things to the next level with far richer gameplay.
So happy I bought this game on GOG before they replaced it with the revamped version (modern looking art, etc).
I played through the orc campaign last year and had fun. It's definitely aged, but it makes me wonder if something like that could exist today. Story games are popular, and I think always will be (people like stories).
Instead of a solo protagonist, can we bring back the hero (a la WarCraft III) and their army? Or even the invisible god like WC2?
Ah wow , rip the awesome fonts used in the original game. The new ones are so "clean" and boring :(
Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.
AOL had an amazing warcraft 2 community. There was an online games service in the 90s called Engage and AOL had a partnership with them that allowed AOL users to play multiplayer games through the AOL service. There was a additional charge and it was quite expensive (I believe there was a per minute but my memory is a little fuzzy on the details).
There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.
The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)
I love Warcraft II. My first ever RTS, and one of the all time greats even now. The game just has soul oozing out of every pore; you can feel the excitement of the Blizzard guys for the game as you play it. The expansion was great too.
I played the battle.net rerelease of the game, which came out after Starcraft did. The main feature was (obviously) online play, but I believe it had some other SC features backported as well. Had great times as a kid playing in comp stomp lobbies on battle.net!
I worked backwards from Starcraft, and to my mind WC2 still feels a bit archaic, insofar as the two races feel nearly identical. WC3 did a better job of differentiating the Human and Orc units, and then of course added Dark Elves and the Undead to the mix, too.
But I will say that WC2 is the last major RTS I can think of with naval combat. After Starcraft streamlined it to be land and air only, it seems the entire industry followed suit. Even WC3 didn't bother bringing ships back, to my memory.
C&C RA (1996) and RA2 (2000) both had significant naval units. RA3 (2008) went.. maybe a little overboard with naval units as well. That said, all other C&C games (Tiberium and Generals) both avoided naval units.
I remember being bummed when I played WC3 and there was no oil resource. Lots of sky and ground units, but I guess a navy just wasn't useful enough? Which I suppose I could see. A big benefit in militaries is the ability to quickly project power (from a carrier) or provide tons of logistics - supplies, blockades, etc.
These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
I remember it felt like AGES for the Mac version to come out -- my friends with DOS/Win machines were playing and of course I was out of luck, still clinging to my precious WarCraft 1 in the meantime (apparently the Mac vers came out 8mo later)... I remember visiting a couple friends and playing the game at their house and being so jealous they can just play this amazing game any time. WC2 was such a leap forward and such an improved game (though I did miss the gritty/darker feel from WC1). Great memories of playing modem games with my friends in the area, and AppleTalk LAN games as well of course.
I get nostalgic thinking about WC2 on the Mac. I was a teen then, and loved Blizzard for putting the effort into a Mac release. I don't remember how I found IRC and #macwarcraft, but between dial-up internet, coordinating games on an IRC channel, trading IP's, and submitting game results to manual leaderboards, clan wars, trash talking, etc. What a great time it was :)
I spent many hours playing this, C&C, Red Alert, over null modem cables and kali with my friends growing up. One of the most satisfying things is to hit the unit limit!
Yeah! My intro to the series was the 3-level WC1 demo. I was absolutely blown away as I had never played any game like that before it. Instantly obsessed haha
This was the first game I was really obsessed with. I remember having one floppy disc and I wanted to copy the game from a friend, so we split the game to ~10 parts, and for a whole weekend I was going back and forth between our houses, "downloading" those 10mb.
Lucky! my sister and I opened it Xmas morning, then had to wait all day agonizingly to be able to play jt because we hosted the family holiday, we were supposed to be socializing with relatives, not playing computer games upstairs.
We had to wait until after mom and dad went to sleep that night, then snuck up the hall to install it and play it as quietly as possible.
I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
I don’t think I was using Kali. Did AOL partner with them? As I remember, I found it via AOL in a sponsored or semi official capacity. There were a number of RTS games available via the AOL gaming channel, integrated or closely aligned with the AOL app.
Warcraft II was my introduction to the RTS genre and fell in love with it. Warcraft II really gave each unit a unique character and the strategies for almost endless. Spents tons of time playing and replaying it over the years and it's kinda crazy it still has a competitive scene.
Warcraft II and C&C made me fall in love with the genre, all my friends and people on the internet that routinely roflstomped me made me go back to FPS.
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
It was great to play this game when it came out. And it has aged well too. Good gameplay, OST, graphics... never experienced a glitch or performance issue. The only worry was keeping the CD unscratched.
This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game. It was very popular in the mid 1990s on release but it seems like it was immediately forgotten about once Starcraft arrived. It's unfortunate because yes it's a simpler and more straight forward game, and not as balanced, but it is very fun and pure.
Warcraft 1 is maybe too slow paced and basic to be enjoyable, but Warcraft 2 remains very playable, as many of the usability of features core to modern RTS games developed here. There are a few things missing, but that just means you have to be more on the ball with the micro.
The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
One thing that was delightful about this game was how the community discovered that Farms made for better walls than the actual walls, and so an enormous variety of strategies developed around this. As players developed knowledge of how units were pushed out of buildings, walling off buildings to push units past forest was another strategy that developed from this, creating the potential for sneaky tricks.
One unfortunate thing about the game was that during the original battlenet edition they added a new extra fast speed, which everyone moved to, but that speed actually kinda broke the game in that it became entirely possible to accidentally put your townhall too close to the mine, and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining. So in actuality the second to fastest speed is the correct speed for this game.
I hope this got fixed in the remaster but I heard it was a pretty basic art refresh...
All the RTS games are underplayed nowadays. Starcraft 2 is maybe the most active still and has been all but abandoned by Blizzard.
A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest.
Sucks, I love Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
Every time someone tries to re-think the genre they make it worse. Supreme Commander (and Forged Alliance) were near-perfect games, but SupCom 2 tried to simpify the game to appeal to console players and ruined it completely. Dawn of War 2, although not to everyone's taste, was in my view the peak of the series. For the third install they tried to simplify the game and bring it closer to a MOBA and it was an incredible flop.
In my view, if a develop MUST make the game more accessible, they should do so with alternate modes while still maintaining a strong competitive 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 mode with the steep learning curve and competitive nature. Anything else is a betrayal of the genre.
StarCraft I still has a large community. And China has a giant WarCraft III community.
> This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game
WarCraft II sold 3M copies.
Yes it was one of the most successful PC games of the 1990s, but that doesn't say much today. Have a look at its subreddit and it's a ghost town. Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
In contrast contemporary SNES games have had more remakes and had their audiences grow remarkably over time. The franchise hasn't been cared for and so it's relatively obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
> Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995.
This feels absolutely insane for today's standards. And not just in the gaming world. Somehow with all the advancement of libraries, frameworks, coding tools, and even AI these days, development speeds seem so much slower and it seems like too much time is spent on eye candy, monetization and dark patterns and too few times on things people actually like to see - that's what made us buy games and software in the old days.
(But also in the gaming world, especially the past few years when almost no game studio develops its own engine, assets don't look more detailed than what was used 3 years ago, stories seem hastily written and it feels like 80% of developer's time is spent on making cosmetic items for purchase which often cost more than the base game price)
Also somehow we spend lots of times researching UX and developing tutorials (remember when software had the "?" button next to the close button and no software "tutorials" were needed?) and yet all the games and software are harder to learn than what we had in the 90s and 00s.
Crazy how much bigger modern games are … I wonder how many total pixels were shipped in the art assets of Warcraft 2 vs. StarCraft 2? My guess is at least 4 orders of magnitude higher for SC2
Even smaller games now have ludicrously long development cycles as developers have learned they can exploit mentally challenged gamers by selling them "early access" (unfinished games).
Additionally, the product was completed and released on CD, so no hundreds of bug fixes after the release.
They did have downloadable patches for WC2 though.
The Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge allowed you to play this multiplayer over the internet, and the style of game was tolerant to low bandwidth and high pings. Which made this one of the first games that really provided a glimpse of the future of gaming (for better or worse, much of gaming has moved away from single person campaigns to multiplayer). I have so many great memories of this era in gaming because of this game and the handful of others that Kali supported (descent, doom 2).
Oh man. I remember having to send a check for $20 to some address to get my key.
That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
The poor floating point performance of many PCs at the time meant that a lot of code used ints rather than floats, making determinism much easier for multiplayer!
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Quake did as well all the way up to Quake 3 I believe. The game was basically on a heartbeat based on the worst latency of the connected player. Everything got synchronized that way.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
Do you or someone reading this know who would be the best person that would be willing to come on a guest on a podcast and has the correct knowledge (ideally the person who implemented in WC3, or something similar enough).
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
In grad school 15+ years ago I took a ‘user-centered innovation’ class and I wrote a paper on the topic of Kali and its predecessor: how gamers, not the game devs, made games built for IPX work across the internet. What is neat is early collab on the first ipx->tcp/ip bridge happened on Usenet, so you can find a record of the first doom deathmatch coordinated and played over the internet. I think I reached out to jay cotton (author of kali) via email and he answered my questions, so I’d try to track him down if I were you.
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
If TabithaS from Case's Ladder is out there somewhere, thank you for playing teaching games of Warcraft 2 with me!
A free alternative was MSN Gaming Zone.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
There are more high-quality single player campaigns coming out now than there were then. Single-player gaming seems to have grown since then. Just not as much as multi-player.
There was also WarCraft II Battle.net edition, launched in '99
Kali ruled. I played a modified version of Hellfire (unofficial Diablo expansion that technically didn't support multiplayer) on Kali for the longest time. GTX_Rage, if you're here, I want to talk to you!
Oh no way I didn’t know Hellfire was unofficial. I don’t even remember where I got it back in the day but I still remember the CD..
Hellfire was a released commercial product.... But it was released by Sierra On-Line, not Blizzard.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
Kali was awesome!
I had a lot of fun using Cases Ladder to find matches.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.
If you still want to experience the joys of RTS... but struggle to play after so many years away, I highly recommend catching a few streams from Grubby. He plays WC3 and a few other games and is quite entertaining to watch. He is also crazy good... His typical APM during a game hovers between 200 and 250. He is an absolute beast at leveraging his items and maximizing his heroes' hp.
https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb
I would also recommend ArtosisCasts [1]. Dan ‘Artosis’ Stemkoski has been a professional StarCraft play-by-play commentator and colour analyst for decades. He’s lived in South Korea (now in Canada) and cast countless professional matches and tournaments featuring the top Korean players.
On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
[1] https://youtube.com/@artosiscasts
I miss the low res aesthetic of WC2. It's so sad that everything has to be high res nowadays. I never really liked WC3, maybe for that reason.
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
WC2, SC1, and things like Heroes III (and somewhat today with Factorio) perfected that 2D art-style. It might not have as many pixels as WC3, but every single one of them was thought about and considered by someone with artistic merit.
It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".
I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too big for human consumption."
> I can make a difference as a mortal man"
Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable exception of lotr (and how many early readers really focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly change the world.
Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard, important and respected but ultimately limited to influencing others to achieve major changes.
Grubby is good, but Back to Warcraft casts the highest level players these days. Grubby does not compete in the top league any more
Honestly, he doesn’t need to be the best to make it enjoyable. He seems like a generally chill guy and he goes back and breaks down his games. Fascinating to hear what he was thinking and why he did what he did.
i'd also recommend uthermal -- former pro sc2 player, he's got a really good attitude & makes a lot of entertaining videos
sub to the grub!
The apex of RTS games -- what a great gaming era RIP. Since then graphics are way better but business models have just deteriorated and mass appeal has driven games.
I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.
Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
> There were gaming competitions in the 80s
... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...
Flash was an absolute legend.
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.
PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.
the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and was going strong for a good decade or so, before being ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and, primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).
There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that existed in america with quake and friends, and the constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea. Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the culture works.
In the RTS niche, it is definitely the game that started e-sports that had any sort of weight and global audience.
I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the same traction or hype until AOE 2.
But it certainly was the game that made it popular across the world.
I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.
And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
The cinematics were the best part of Starcraft!
I still get a kick out of the fact that the units look completely different in the cinematics as they do in the game and even the instruction manual
I quite like the StarCraft remaster. It plays just like the old one (to me, at least; I am not a competitive player), and it looks much better.
> Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play.
Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.
Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic completely abandoned the formula and made the next game something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly it stood up to its predecessor.
Interesting, I think most RTS players would point to StarCraft 2 as the apex, and they'd probably be correct given how its still played so much today.
What makes Warcraft 2 the apex for you over StarCraft 2?
Funny how many people think Starcraft 2 isn't even better than Starcraft 1, especially when you add in Brood War.
The game's campaign being what it was made it so people never warmed up to it, the big hero-focused storylines and then mishandling of said characters (Kerrigan's abortive humanization and then rushed redemption, the Protoss being framed in entirely the wrong tone, the half baked epilogue) just made it so that the campaign didn't stick as Brod War's did, even if the gameplay was superior.
Buildings as walls and using spawn points to jump through terrain are fun mechanics in WC2.
I remember creating a moat of farms around my town hall.
I consider WCIII TFT the apex but that is because i really like the hero mechanic and it spawned so many amazing custom games, including the moba genre. I know AoS was first but dota really made it.
Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command & Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.
Footies was my favorite and I wish we got a new game out of that too.
I feel like wc3 is undersung. To me it achieved the perfect balance of allowing potentially mechanically worse players to win with brilliant tactics or strategy. It put the emphasis on strategy in rts more then anything else.
As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
I like that even when a strong meta develops people can potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
The smaller armies, heroes, economy management, and increased micro-control that came from these things really push w3 to the top of the pile for me as well.
> and mass appeal has driven games
Oh no, large numbers of people were satisfied. The horror! Will no one think of the elitist minority???
Large number of people were "satisfied" playing Clash of Titans too ...
Yet two of the most played games out there in 2025 are RTSes, Dota and League. The genre just progressed forward.
WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
Dota and League are not RTS games. They are Moba. These are completely different genres. Dota happened to utilise Warcraft engine and assets back in the days, but that doesn't make it RTS.
>WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where DotA originates from
Which first came from Starcraft custom game support and the popularity of Aeon of Strife (AoS) leading to Defense of the Ancients (DotA) in WC3.
> IceFrog choose Valve instead of them
Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
This is probably the best time as any I'll ever get to mention that Patrick Wyatt's[0] blog[1] is a gold mine of frontline, boots-on-the-ground accounts of making WarCraft II and other games.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Wyatt
[1]: https://www.codeofhonor.com/
Some additional stuff:
1) you can find the War 2 for PSX source on Archive. It has all the Windows stuff commented out. It might be possible to uncomment and compile with something like Borland C or Watcom C or whatever they used.
2) the modding scene was phenomenal. Not mentioned is StarDraft for obvious reasons but a counterpart to WarDraft. This is where our story takes a turn and the name Camelot Systems emerges, along with a King Arthur (Andy Bond) who shortly after finishing his comp sci degree went to work for Blizzard and has been with them since. This website is a homage to CamSys (JorSys).
3) War2Bne is a thing to behold. Diablo, Warcraft 2 et al being able to seamlessly chat and DM players across games was pure magic.
Many stories to tell, but we will never step into that river again. Legends never die.
1. Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for sharing!
2. Indeed - I'm happy to hear someone know their Blizzard modding community history. To my knowledge, King Arthur never finished his studies as he got offered a job at Blizzard. He worked at Blizzard from around 2000 to 2020. He's now at Dreamhaven it seems, along with former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. And indeed - Jorsys is very much inspired by Camsys =)
3. I think my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
Warcraft II was the first game I ever played over modem direct connect with a friend across town. Later on there was another friend that lived way outside of town where you could only get dial-up internet who I played Starcraft with over modem. Those were probably some of the most enjoyable moments I ever got out of dial up internet.
WarCraft was a huge part of our LAN parties, but mechanics wise, Total Annihilation was a much bigger leap forward in terms of use of 3D terrain and ballistics and commands, so we played that a lot more.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
And now Beyond All Reason keeps it alive and free software
BAR is a really great RTS game. By far the best one today. It is very balanced and has a lot of depth. Highly recommended for any RTS enthusiast.
Huh. I'm familiar with the Spring RTS FOSS project (https://springrts.com) which started as a reimplementation of TA, and of course Planetary Annihilation, but not "Beyond All Reason" - do you have an authoritative link?
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/choose-recoil/
https://recoilengine.org/ (list of games powered by Recoil)
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
Source: been in the BAR Discord for about a year, have contributed tiny bits of server code to the project, and read a few pull request comments.
The official website is https://www.beyondallreason.info/
It's an open-source project that started as a fork of SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of Supreme Commander.
I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_USFDBbymGUwLPiopP2q...
Well, when I saw the first Supreme Commander video it looked a lot like Sprint RTS running Balanced Annihilation to me. Right down to how the terrain deformation worked and the command queuing.
Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase. http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
BAR is a great RTS
WarCraft II was among the first games that I ever played "online" (direct connection via dial-up modem with my friends). I can't overstate how absolutely incredible that felt to me at the time - pure magic.
The other games we were playing at that time were Doom II and various other first-person shooters (Rise of the Triad, Hexen, etc) - which were also pretty incredible. But the WarCraft II experience really took things to the next level with far richer gameplay.
So happy I bought this game on GOG before they replaced it with the revamped version (modern looking art, etc).
I played through the orc campaign last year and had fun. It's definitely aged, but it makes me wonder if something like that could exist today. Story games are popular, and I think always will be (people like stories).
Instead of a solo protagonist, can we bring back the hero (a la WarCraft III) and their army? Or even the invisible god like WC2?
Here is a comparison of the original vs the remaster: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9Ac4WVW6Q&t=100s in case anyone else is interested too.
Ah wow , rip the awesome fonts used in the original game. The new ones are so "clean" and boring :(
Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
Visually at least it looks like a pretty tasteful remaster. Mostly just sharpening things up. Thanks for posting
One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.
AOL had an amazing warcraft 2 community. There was an online games service in the 90s called Engage and AOL had a partnership with them that allowed AOL users to play multiplayer games through the AOL service. There was a additional charge and it was quite expensive (I believe there was a per minute but my memory is a little fuzzy on the details).
There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.
The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...
I love Warcraft II. My first ever RTS, and one of the all time greats even now. The game just has soul oozing out of every pore; you can feel the excitement of the Blizzard guys for the game as you play it. The expansion was great too.
I played the battle.net rerelease of the game, which came out after Starcraft did. The main feature was (obviously) online play, but I believe it had some other SC features backported as well. Had great times as a kid playing in comp stomp lobbies on battle.net!
I worked backwards from Starcraft, and to my mind WC2 still feels a bit archaic, insofar as the two races feel nearly identical. WC3 did a better job of differentiating the Human and Orc units, and then of course added Dark Elves and the Undead to the mix, too.
But I will say that WC2 is the last major RTS I can think of with naval combat. After Starcraft streamlined it to be land and air only, it seems the entire industry followed suit. Even WC3 didn't bother bringing ships back, to my memory.
Age of empires always had naval combat. Supreme commander too. There’s a bunch.
C&C RA (1996) and RA2 (2000) both had significant naval units. RA3 (2008) went.. maybe a little overboard with naval units as well. That said, all other C&C games (Tiberium and Generals) both avoided naval units.
I remember being bummed when I played WC3 and there was no oil resource. Lots of sky and ground units, but I guess a navy just wasn't useful enough? Which I suppose I could see. A big benefit in militaries is the ability to quickly project power (from a carrier) or provide tons of logistics - supplies, blockades, etc.
These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
Try 'Beyond All Reason', a passionate FOSS recreation of the core of Total Annihilation.
It's got really decent naval combat, with a distinct feel compared to the land and air.
Zug zug
I’m convinced “zug zug” is a reference to a scene from the 1981 movie /Caveman/[1].
1: https://youtu.be/5h2gVbLlwl8
Q: What kind of cigarettes do orcs smoke.
A: Low tar, my friend.
Job's Done
Ready to work!
Train train
swobu
I remember it felt like AGES for the Mac version to come out -- my friends with DOS/Win machines were playing and of course I was out of luck, still clinging to my precious WarCraft 1 in the meantime (apparently the Mac vers came out 8mo later)... I remember visiting a couple friends and playing the game at their house and being so jealous they can just play this amazing game any time. WC2 was such a leap forward and such an improved game (though I did miss the gritty/darker feel from WC1). Great memories of playing modem games with my friends in the area, and AppleTalk LAN games as well of course.
I get nostalgic thinking about WC2 on the Mac. I was a teen then, and loved Blizzard for putting the effort into a Mac release. I don't remember how I found IRC and #macwarcraft, but between dial-up internet, coordinating games on an IRC channel, trading IP's, and submitting game results to manual leaderboards, clan wars, trash talking, etc. What a great time it was :)
I spent many hours playing this, C&C, Red Alert, over null modem cables and kali with my friends growing up. One of the most satisfying things is to hit the unit limit!
I still remember the 3 level demo CD they made. Awesome demo levels that made me buy the game, which is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Was the demo version a separate story campaign like the Starcraft one was?
My parents never bought me the full game so I probably played those demo levels 100s of times. Thanks for the memory trigger haha.
Yeah! My intro to the series was the 3-level WC1 demo. I was absolutely blown away as I had never played any game like that before it. Instantly obsessed haha
This was the first game I was really obsessed with. I remember having one floppy disc and I wanted to copy the game from a friend, so we split the game to ~10 parts, and for a whole weekend I was going back and forth between our houses, "downloading" those 10mb.
I still have a bunch of the sound bites in my music folder. Nothing says playlist filler like "Leave Me Alone"
Very distinct memory of getting this for Christmas, then installing and playing the first time that afternoon.
Lucky! my sister and I opened it Xmas morning, then had to wait all day agonizingly to be able to play jt because we hosted the family holiday, we were supposed to be socializing with relatives, not playing computer games upstairs.
We had to wait until after mom and dad went to sleep that night, then snuck up the hall to install it and play it as quietly as possible.
Soundtrack and game book art still solid too.
It really does pale by comparison to StarCraft, BroodWars, WC3, and of course the scion of the series, SC2.
It’s a shame how far Blizzard has fallen at this point - this era of RTS died a sad little death a decade ago with Nova Covert Ops.
This game lead me down a path that resulted in me becoming a software engineer. Good game.
No doubt. My friend learned how to hex edit because of WC1 -- editing his savegame files haha
Was this the one AOL charged me to play by the minute when I was a kid?
Yes it was!
I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
It is not and has never been an AOL game. Unless you were paying by the minute for internet access for multiplayer via Kali.
I found this: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/aol-initiates-new-game-pri...
I don’t think I was using Kali. Did AOL partner with them? As I remember, I found it via AOL in a sponsored or semi official capacity. There were a number of RTS games available via the AOL gaming channel, integrated or closely aligned with the AOL app.
It was a partnership through a multiplayer service called Engage.
Warcraft II was my introduction to the RTS genre and fell in love with it. Warcraft II really gave each unit a unique character and the strategies for almost endless. Spents tons of time playing and replaying it over the years and it's kinda crazy it still has a competitive scene.
Warcraft II and C&C made me fall in love with the genre, all my friends and people on the internet that routinely roflstomped me made me go back to FPS.
And now that disco easter egg is stuck in my head... (although technically I think that was part of Beyond the Dark Portal).
wha-wha-wha-wha-what do you want
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
Two memorable things
- "Your sound card works perfectly!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M
- "I am a medieval man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/I%27m_a_Medieval_Man)
It was great to play this game when it came out. And it has aged well too. Good gameplay, OST, graphics... never experienced a glitch or performance issue. The only worry was keeping the CD unscratched.