Anniversary: 15 Years of WarCraft

Today is a very special day, ladies and gentlemen. Today Blizzard Entertainment are celebrating dual anniversary: the whole 15 years of WarCraft: Orcs and Humans and 5 years of the World of WarCraft. We've decided to commemorate the occasion with a little trip back in time to see how things were back then.

Part I: The Misery of the Year 1994
Lets head back to the year 1994. At the time I was 8 years of age playing my Nintendo on weekends, jealous of my friends who had Sega or Super Nintendo. It really was the good old days as it didn't matter whether you had a newer Intel Pentium machine or an older IBM x86 series, there weren't many good games to come by. You safest bet would be Doom, Dune II, Blizzard's Lost Vikings and Civilization, that's about it.

But, in the cold winter of 1994 Blizzard released WarCraft: Orcs and Humans and at that very moment the whole Real Time Strategy genre changed dramatically, never to turn back to old school basics again.

The game looked sensational. Graphics, effects, animation - everything was much better, the jump in quality felt even more astonishing than the difference between StarCraft and StarCraft II.

But it wasn't the graphics that made WarCraft a landmark, it was the mechanics:

1. Two absolutely different races, not sharing a single unit or building
2. Multiple units with abilities and special-purpose units
3. Two income sources, a feature that only exists in Blizzard RTS games
4. Unit combinations, to win player had to mix and match different units
5. Strategically placed buildings anywhere on the map
6. Advanced interface features

All of those turned the genre upside down. No longer the game was about single player and beating a computer, LAN multiplayer was over-worldly addictive and WarCraft: Orcs and Humans became the hit of LAN cafés at the time.

However, a year later Blizzard took a hit in a form of Command and Conquer. Made by Westwood, creators of Dune series, It offered a familiar Dune-style gameplay still preferred by many, without any shortfalls of Dune II. It had two differentiated races, sci-fi setting and all the excitement of Dune. So began the RTS battle of the 90s, eventually won by Blizzard with StarCraft.


Part II: World Of MMOine

We jump 10 years into the future. Since then Blizzard released WarCraft II with Battle.net service, Diablo I & II and WarCraft III. Little did we know that an MMORPG project was growing in the turnip fields of the world's best RTS producer.

As an ex-MMORPG savvy I can tell you that the anticipation for World of WarCraft wasn't that “Ginormogantious”. First of all there were plenty of successful games on the scene already, to say that the competition was tough is to say nothing.

Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest I and Ultima were in their prime. Sure they were more or less older games, but popular as hell. Then came the new heavyweights. Lineage II managed to capture the whole Asian market in one big bite, plus it became a savior for those who weren't willing to pay for an MMO but got tired of Ultima – countless pirated Lineage II servers flooded the scene.


Next came Star Wars: Galaxies. Bumped by an enormous hype generated by Star Wars movies, the game really was a winner. Over 200.000 beta applications, good graphics and a familiar sci-fi environment of the Galaxy Far Far Away made it what it was, - the best and the most promising MMORPG at the time. Sadly over the years it was ruined by developers, shrunk to a size of kiddies sandbox, but thats another story.


The final 'anticipation blow' to Blizzard came in a form of EverQuest II. The graphics and effects were sensational, top hardware couldn't keep up with performance, plus it had a huge built-in community of EverQuest I.
So thats the competition. All Blizzard had at the time was the hype from WarCraft III, anticipation for StarCraft: Ghost plus the cartoon'ish look on all the screenshots and videos from the World of WarCraft.

Blizzard pulled a joker once again. The game turned out to be exceptional. Personally I started playing the very last day of US beta, ended up playing it for 6 months straight on US servers, reached the “top” then quit forever, still crying over all wasted time.

Here's the recipe of World of WarCraft success:

1. Good performance on pretty much all machines
2. Acceptable looking graphics and effects
3. Familiar WarCraft setting
4. Exceptional storytelling, immersion
5. Option to create third party interface add-ons and modules

And the most important piece of them all:

6. All successful elements of all successful MMOs put together in a blender forming a 9/10 mix of features, executed perfectly.


As it turns out not only it was enough to overcome and basically kill all the existing competition but also reach 11, soon 12 million subscribers.

There you have it, the history of success, innovation, revamping old standards and even more success as a result of it. Congratulations to Blizzard Entertainment, now, can we please have StarCraft II already?

Links
WorldOfWarCraft.com - WoW Anniversary