Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans from 1994 was the first title from what was then a still little-known studio, Blizzard Entertainment, and opened one of the most successful fantasy series in video game history. The game clearly builds on the model set two years earlier by Dune II, but transplants it into the fantasy world of Azeroth, where the human kingdom of Stormwind must face an invasion of bloodthirsty orcs arriving from another world through a portal.

The player chooses one of two campaigns — human or orc — and across a series of missions builds bases, mines gold and lumber, trains units from foot soldiers to mages and orcish shamans, and commands battles in real time. Between missions, the game was accompanied by illustrated screens with dialogue that gradually revealed the story from the chosen side's perspective and gave the conflict a clearer motivation than mere territorial conquest. Compared to Dune II, the game placed a much stronger emphasis on units with special abilities and magic, such as healing priests or shamans' fire spells, foreshadowing the direction other Blizzard strategy games would later take. Visually and audibly it was an engaging, colorful production with a strong dark-fantasy atmosphere, supported by atmospheric music and unit voices reacting to orders, though technically the game was still limited by a slower engine, minor shortcomings in unit control, and the absence of multiplayer over the internet — players could only face each other over a local network or modem.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was received as a promising debut and a solid competitor to Dune II and Command & Conquer, even though it was later overshadowed in fame by the far more successful Warcraft II. For the series and the entire Blizzard studio, it was a key first step that laid the foundations of the Warcraft world, its factions, and its visual style, opening the way to its later enormous success, both in the strategy genre and later in the MMO genre, where it became one of the most influential game worlds of all.

Why play it: For Warcraft fans curious where it all began — a solid, if now surpassed, debut that laid the foundations of the world, factions, and visual style of a later gaming legend.