Warcraft Adventures

Blizzard - the early days

In the mid-'90s, Blizzard Entertainment burst onto the PC gaming scene with two games, Warcraft I and Warcraft II, cementing its place as a premier developer of real-time strategy games. But what set these games apart was their back-story. Like Westwood's Command & Conquer before it, Warcraft II had a rich, fleshed-out world and included a long history of two cultures at war, with detailed heroes, events, and locations for both the orc and human sides. Names like Medivh, Lothar, Nerzhul, and Zuljin were backed with history. But what was amazing was that this richness came from a strategy game. Such depth of story seemed more appropriate for an adventure game, and so when Blizzard announced that it was indeed working on an adventure game set in the Warcraft universe, it seemed like a perfect match. The Warcraft universe was deep and complex, and the adventure game was the perfect format for delivering the myriad stories that lay dormant in the universe.

The press and fans were eagerly anticipating this telling of the Warcraft story from an orc's point of view. It was to be a first-hand account of a world that heretofore had only been shown from a bird's-eye view, stepping inside the minds and eyes of the "bad guys." Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, seemed to be getting better and better. And the title of the game seemed to hint that Blizzard was going to launch a line of Warcraft Adventures, with Lord of the Clans as the first of many stories. But after a year of hard work, press tours, magazine covers, and fan fervor, the dreams of a Warcraft adventure game ended, as Lord of the Clans was canceled just before the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Atlanta.

What went wrong? How could a game that seemed so perfect get canceled? How could Blizzard, renowned for telling compelling stories in the detached strategy genre, pass up on an opportunity to tell its stories the way they were meant to be told? Did the deteriorating market for adventure games compel Blizzard to give up on Warcraft Adventures? Did LucasArts' Monkey Island III, a beautiful adventure game that would have competed head-to-head with Lord of the Clans, scare Blizzard off? Or did Blizzard Entertainment take a look at a project that had started with the best of intentions and see that it couldn't possibly match the vision set before it?

What's a Warcraft Adventure?