Warcraft

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans from 1994 was one of Blizzard's first big successes and, alongside Command & Conquer, helped define the real-time strategy genre: resource gathering, base building, and a conflict between two warring factions, humans and orcs, on the fantasy continent of Azeroth. The game offered separate campaigns for each side, and despite the technical limits of the time it showed how well a simple real-time combat system could work. A year later, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and its expansion Beyond the Dark Portal scaled everything up significantly, adding naval units, air power, and a more elaborate tech tree, and Warcraft II became one of the genre's benchmarks on both PC and consoles.

The real leap came with Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion, The Frozen Throne. Alongside humans and orcs came playable night elf and undead factions, each with its own units and heroes, hero characters with their own abilities, items, and experience were woven into the RTS foundation, and the story moved from a simple conflict toward a more elaborate narrative around Arthas and the fall of Lordaeron. The game also shipped with a powerful map editor, which later gave rise to the Defense of the Ancients mod, the basis of the entire MOBA genre and an influence on games like Dota 2 and League of Legends.

Thanks to its map editor and well-balanced multiplayer, Warcraft III became one of the important competitive RTS games for years, and its custom-map community grew far beyond the original game's scope. Blizzard supported the series for a long time with patches and faction balancing, which helped keep an active player base alive years after release.

Warcraft III's success ironically overshadowed the RTS series itself once Blizzard released World of Warcraft in 2004. The MMORPG set in the same world became a phenomenon that made the franchise famous far beyond strategy players, and the same universe later inspired the card game Hearthstone. Development of purely strategy entries stopped; Warcraft III later received the Reforged remaster, which drew mixed reactions from fans, yet Warcraft as a whole remains one of gaming's most influential franchises, its impact stretching from RTS through MOBA to modern MMOs.