Livestream 7/8/2021 – Warcraft II

We’ve been playing a lot more “modern” games (and take that with a grain of salt of course we’ve been sticking with pre 2010 games hah) lately and I wanted to turn back the clock a bit. This week that ended up being Warcraft II on PC. There was a veritable explosion of real time strategy, or RTS, games in the mid 90s. Really kicking this off was arguably Command & Conquer and Warcraft II both released in 1995.

They both featured brilliant CGI, high production quality and just an incredibly addictive gameplay setup. One of the main strengths of RTS games is that they are so intuitive and approachable. The learning curve comes from understanding the tech tree and the pros and cons of units versus how to play the game. Most of what you expect from the genre was basically defined with C&C and WC2 being the first smash hits that made it take off. Tons and tons of imitators popped up in the late 90s and the genre quickly got flooded with some decent entries as well as terrible ones to say the least. Still Westwood who made Command & Conquer was quite successful with many sequels launched before they were bought out by EA, chopped out and disbanded. Noone needs to look where Blizzard ended up being part of a multi billion dollar juggernaut more or less printing money at this point. Most of that started in the mid 90s with Warcraft II I believe being one of their early top sellers.

Warcraft II still is a joy to play but as we discovered during the stream some creature comforts one might expect from an RTS were missing at this patch and game level (for example CTRL+number to assign groups) that were added later. Still the game is a blast to play to this day and the stream was a lot of fun. Check out the replay below.