Warcraft began as a copy of a game its makers could not stop playing. At Blizzard Entertainment in 1993, Patrick Wyatt later wrote, the team “were inspired to create Warcraft after playing (and replaying and replaying) a game called Dune 2”, Westwood’s real-time war over spice. They swapped the desert for a fantasy kingdom, spice for gold and timber, and tanks for knights and catapults, and they fixed what they saw as Dune II’s biggest gap: two people could now fight each other. Computer Gaming World spotted the family likeness at once, but when its editors tried the game over the office network, “here is where Warcraft really comes alive”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, California.
- Publishers: Blizzard in North America; Interplay in Europe.
- Released: MS-DOS, November 1994, on floppy disks and CD-ROM; a Macintosh version followed.
- Price: $40–45 on floppy disks, $45–50 on CD-ROM (Computer Gaming World, January 1995).
- Needed: a 386 at 20MHz, 4MB of RAM, VGA graphics and a mouse.
- Players: one, or two by modem or network.
- Sides: the humans of Azeroth and the invading orcs, with a campaign for each.
From Silicon & Synapse
Blizzard had started out as Silicon & Synapse, run by Allen Adham and Michael Morhaime, and made its name converting games and writing for the Super Nintendo, including The Lost Vikings and Rock n’ Roll Racing. Those were well reviewed but did not sell in large numbers, so the company turned to the PC. In September 1993, Wyatt told Retro Gamer, Adham asked him “to take over a new project called Warcraft as producer and programming lead”. Much of the studio was hooked on Dune 2 and argued about its tactics almost every day. “It was obvious to us that Dune 2, despite our fondness for it, had weaknesses,” Wyatt said.
For the first months Wyatt was the whole team, “mostly me writing code as fast as I could”, and before any artist joined he used screen captures of Dune 2’s art as placeholders. A Warhammer licence was discussed and dropped, since the team wanted “to create and control our own universe”, though Wyatt said Warhammer shaped the art style. Ron Millar came in to lead the design and at first pulled it towards Populous: peasants would pop out of farms instead of being trained. Stu Rose, an artist and designer, put forward a simpler scheme “closer to Dune 2 again” while Adham and Millar were away at the Consumer Electronics Show, and they agreed to it when they got back. Sam Didier led the art, and Bill Roper, hired near the end, recorded the unit voices with Glenn Stafford.
Gold, timber and roads
Each scenario starts with a town hall, a few farms and some peasants (peons, for the orcs). Peasants cut timber in the forests and carry gold from the mines, and every building and unit costs one or both. Farms feed the population, so a bigger army needs more farms, built by the same peasants the player has just sent to the mines. A barracks trains foot soldiers; a lumber mill and blacksmith lead to catapults and better weapons; stables (kennels for the orcs) produce knights or wolf-riding raiders; churches and temples produce clerics and necrolytes; towers produce conjurers and warlocks.
The two sides mirror each other closely, with some differences. The human cleric heals and makes units invisible, while the orc necrolyte raises the dead; the conjurer calls down a rain of fire, while the warlock sends a poison cloud drifting through enemy towns. Human archers outrange orc spearmen by a little.
Blizzard changed several things from Dune II. It added two-player play over a network or modem and let the player select several units at once. It also kept some limits it later regretted. Buildings could go up only next to roads the player had laid, so that nobody could build a “stealth” town beside an enemy base; Wyatt called that “a bad decision” and it was the first thing dropped for Warcraft II. Adham insisted on selecting no more than four units at a time, to rule out “tank-rush” tactics and make the player concentrate on the fighting. The limit rose to nine in the sequel. Keeping the two players’ games in step over a network was the hardest problem. At one point Adham proposed shipping without multiplayer; the team argued to keep it, and the game shipped “just two weeks late”.
Reception
Computer Gaming World’s Chris Lombardi reviewed it in January 1995 under the headline “War Crime In Real Time”. He called it “a pretty good game set in the Tolkienesque mythos”, and said Blizzard had “performed a perfect bit of creative larceny” with its mechanics: replace the orcs and humans with Atreides and Harkonnen, and the timber and gold with spice, “and you have Westwood Studio’s Dune 2”. Anyone who had played Dune 2, he wrote, could “probably get halfway through the game without looking at the game manual”, and he added that it was “a good thing for Blizzard that there’s no precedent for ‘look and feel’ lawsuits in computer entertainment”. He found the computer opponent “predictable at best, and very gullible at worst”, and each scenario a puzzle with one trick to find. Against another person, it was a different game: “Fast-paced, fun, and flexible enough to support a wide variety of tactics”, it ranked “with such classic two-player slug-fests as Command HQ and Global Conquest”.
PC Gamer‘s James Leach said the same in Britain: “Dune 2 players will be instantly at home.” He liked the hidden map, which made every new scenario a venture into the unknown, and the troops’ spoken replies, though he thought the base-building in each scenario too alike. The manual was printed in two halves, a human account of the war on one side and the orcs’ on the flip side.
By September 1995 Computer Gaming World was calling it “the best real-time strategy game since Dune II”. It had won several awards and sold well enough for Blizzard to put out a shareware version and a Macintosh version.
Westwood’s view
Westwood noticed too. Westwood’s Adam Isgreen told Retro Gamer in 2008 that “the similarities between it and Dune II were pretty… blatant”, and that “even the menus of the two games are arranged in exactly the same order, in the exact same pixel positions on the screen”. Mike Legg “definitely noticed it, but we also really liked their games”. Isgreen recalled that relations between the two studios were not always easy in the early years. Joe Bostic, Dune II’s lead programmer, took it as a compliment: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And in this case, we were very flattered indeed.”
The series
Warcraft was the start of Blizzard’s longest-running series. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) added ships, a map four times as large, and fog of war that closed back over areas the player had left. By early 1997 Computer Gaming World reckoned that it and Westwood’s Command & Conquer had sold “somewhere near two million units” between them. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) brought hero units, and one of its custom maps, Defense of the Ancients, grew into a genre of its own (see modding). World of Warcraft (2004) took Azeroth online as a subscription role-playing game, and made Blizzard the prize in the 2008 merger that created Activision Blizzard (see Activision). Blizzard released Warcraft I: Remastered in November 2024, thirty years after the original.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 122, September 1994, p. 26: Warcraft announced as a two-player real-time strategy game “reminiscent of” Dune II, for modem or network.
- Computer Gaming World issue 124, November 1994: release schedule, Warcraft, Blizzard, 11/94.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 12, November 1994, p. 80: James Leach, Warcraft review (Interplay/Blizzard Entertainment).
- Computer Gaming World issue 126, January 1995, from p. 228: Chris Lombardi, “War Crime In Real Time” (price, requirements, players; the two sides and their units and spells; the comparison with Dune 2; the AI; the network game).
- Computer Gaming World issue 134, September 1995, p. 22: “The best real-time strategy game since Dune II”; awards, shareware and Macintosh versions; Warcraft II preview.
- Computer Gaming World issue 151, February 1997: Terry Coleman on sales of Command & Conquer and Warcraft II.
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008, p. 74: “Blizzard vs Westwood”, with Adam Isgreen, Mike Legg and Joe Bostic.
- Retro Gamer issue 111, February 2013, pp. 86–89: Graeme Mason, “The Making of Warcraft”, with Patrick Wyatt (Silicon & Synapse; the start of the project; Dune 2 as inspiration; the design changes, roads, four-unit limit and multiplayer; Stu Rose, Ron Millar, Sam Didier, Bill Roper and Glenn Stafford; Interplay as publisher).
- Patrick Wyatt, “The making of Warcraft part 1”, Code of Honor, 25 July 2012 (web, secondary): “inspired to create Warcraft after playing … Dune 2”; Dune 2 screen captures as placeholder art. https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-1
- Wikipedia, “Warcraft” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release years of Warcraft II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft
- Wikipedia, “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates and regional publishers; the 2024 remaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft:_Orcs_%26_Humans