Michael: I still remember the very first game of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans that was played over a network. It was truly a groundbreaking day at Blizzard, since we were trying out this part of the game for the first time. After about 20 minutes of heated battle, both of the players ran out of their offices, their eyes gleaming with excitement and yelling at the top of their lungs:

"That was so cool!"
"Yeah it was. I beat you pretty bad!"
"What do you mean, you beat me? You're the one that lost."

We were all a little confused at first. As it turned out, we realized that we hadn't incorporated the code to handle network synching yet, and the two computers had slipped out of sync almost immediately, thereby making each guy the winner on his own system. We were pretty concerned and confused at first, but the programmers laugh about it now.

We knew that we still had some work ahead of ourselves, but that was my first exposure to how fun real-time strategy would be in a multiplayer setting as well as to some of the complexities in doing it right.

Next: Michael Morhaime (cont.)