Today’s Lost Classics post is all about the Warcraft series. As such, it may require a bit of foreknowledge – particularly if you’re too young to remember a time before the name Warcraft referred to anything besides Verne Troyer’s favorite MMORPG.

Blizzard’s original mid-90’s Warcraft games were massively successful strategy epics, set in a darkly humorous fantasy world. They tended to involve a lot of scenarios in which green-skinned warriors with Yoda voices (known as The Orcs) engaged in bloody warfare with a bunch of armor-clad psuedo-Englishmen (known as The Humans). These were landmarks in the RTS genre, and the direct ancestors of games like Starcraft, DOTA, and League of Legends. (And yes, they would eventually inspire the most profitable game ever released. More on that later.)

My cousin introduced me to the early Warcraft games when I was about 7, at a time when my half-formed nervous system lacked the capacity for any strategy, realtime or no. Despite this, I loved the series; not because I could make it through a single map without resorting to cheat codes, but because I found the setting completely engrossing. Each race and faction had its own texture and history, detailed in hefty instruction manuals penned by legendary designers like Bill Roper and Chris Metzen. In retrospect, some of their ideas may have been somewhat derivative, but the attention to detail and the sheer volume of story that came with these games is still something that seems pretty special. My cousin and I spent a lot of time poring over these stories, dreaming of what it would be like to assume Orcish identities and travel through the World Of lands of Warcraft.

Point being: you can forgive me for getting really, really excited for this…

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