Warcraft (the original RTS game) on PC - just epic

I enjoyed writing about the "original" RTS game Dune the other day so I figured I would write about the release that solidified my belief in the game type. This was the first Blizzard game I recall ever playing and it was several years after the release of Dune and IMO they improved on a lot of things.

The real title included "Orcs and Humans" but most of us simply knew it as Warcraft and boy did this game spread throughout the nerd circles back in the early 90's like wildfire. You had the option of controlling either the orcs or the humans, and in either path you would at times have to control the other side as well. This became a lot easier once you were familiar with the individual units of both sides, which the game did a good job of introducing you to.

As was established by Dune and Command and Conquer, resource collection was essential to your progression. This was accomplished by the cheapest and easiest to produce units who would go and gather wood and gold.

It followed the basic premise of "build base, build army, destroy enemy" on most levels but also incorporated certain things we had never seen before such as level where you started with a certain number of units, maybe found some allies on the battlefield along the way, but if you used your units incorrectly and they got wiped in an ambush, that was it. No more unites for you!

Those were always my least favorite levels.

The game had a decent, but not excessive amount of units to choose from and each of them had their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, I always liked to have a large amount of catapults to attack with because they could quickly decimate enemy defenses but they were extremely slow and were damn near useless if an enemy got past the footsoldiers you brought to defend them. This was a precursor to my favorite unit of all time which was the siege tank in Starcraft.

One thing that Warcraft did that the other existing RTS games hadn't done was to introduce multiplayer and according to Blizzard, "this will be essential in future gameplay." How true that was. Getting it to work online was extremely difficult unless you were on extremely solid internet connections (which wasn't terribly prevalent in the early 90's) so mostly we just had LAN parties. When I was in college we would take over a computer lab where some friends of mine who worked there had installed the game on multiple computers (without permission from the University.) This is where the real fun happened as you could play vs. a human or co-op against multiple or a single enemy.

Playing against another human familiar with the game was far more complicated because they behaved in a far more intelligent manor than the kind of predictable AI. For one thing, a human opponent would ignore your foot soldiers and head straight for the catapults that were attacking their base.

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I also loved the silly voices that a lot of units would have when you clicked on an individual unit. Blizzard would keep this tradition of humour alive for all future RTS releases.

While it is pretty boring today seeing as how we have progressed a LONG WAYS graphically speaking since 1994, it is a piece of history that helped to build Blizzard into the powerhouse that they are today.

You can have a look at the massive 8.4 MB ROM (for free)