Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

1994 · Base-Building RTS · PC/DOS

About Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) is Blizzard's first Warcraft game, a fantasy real-time strategy game pitting the humans of Azeroth against invading orcs, which helped make multiplayer essential to the genre.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in Depth

The player leads either the human inhabitants of Azeroth or the invading orcs. In the single-player campaign most missions involve building a small town, harvesting resources, raising an army and leading it to victory, while multiplayer games are always about destroying the enemy's forces. Both sides have melee units, ranged units and spellcasters, and some scenarios add wild monsters, which can sometimes be used as troops. It expands Dune II's "build base, build army, destroy enemy" formula with new mission types, such as putting down rebels of the player's own race, rescuing and rebuilding besieged towns, freeing friendly forces from an enemy camp, and limited-forces missions in which neither side can build more units.

Non-combatant workers carry gold dug from mines and wood chopped from forests back to the Town Hall; both are finite, so they must be gathered efficiently, and forests double as defensive walls early on when armies are small. Lower-level buildings work the same for both races but look different. Two players can compete by dial-up modem or local network, with DOS and Macintosh players able to face each other, and a random map generator supports skirmishes. It was not the first multiplayer RTS, but it persuaded a wider audience that multiplayer was essential, and its mission design and gameplay innovations were adopted by other developers.

Making Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

Inspired by Dune II and Herzog Zwei, Blizzard Entertainment was surprised that no further RTS games appeared in 1993 and early 1994 and seized on the lull, releasing it for MS-DOS in North America on 15 November 1994, with Interplay publishing in Europe and a Mac OS version in 1996. It made the company's finances secure for the first time, passing 100,000 sales within a year. It won PC Gamer's Editors' Choice Award, Computer Life's Critics' Pick and the Innovations Award at the Winter 1995 CES, and its sequel, Warcraft II, became the main rival to Command & Conquer.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans Trivia

Blizzard copied Dune II's artwork and redesigned every asset, but accidentally kept Dune II's font.
It was originally meant to be an RTS adaptation of Warhammer, but Blizzard could not get a licence from Games Workshop.
Bob Fitch said its theme combined The Lost Vikings with Lemmings-style masses of creatures.
The first game had no script, and its plot was improvised.
It ultimately sold 300,000 copies.