You know what’s weird? I was cleaning out my old game closet last weekend—much to my wife’s delight since she’s been asking me to do it for about three years—and I found my original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans CD tucked behind a stack of Dreamcast games. Just holding that disc brought back this flood of memories from ’95 when I was sixteen and thought the console wars were the most important thing in the world. Turns out PC gaming was about to teach me a whole different kind of obsession.
I’d been a Sega kid my whole life, right? Genesis, Saturn, the works. But my buddy Mike had this Pentium 90 his dad bought for “work purposes” (translation: his dad wanted to play Flight Simulator), and he kept bugging me to come over and try this strategy game called Warcraft. I was skeptical—strategy games seemed like homework compared to the arcade-style action I was used to. Boy, was I wrong about that.
The first time I saw those chunky little footmen marching across the screen, barking “Yes, milord!” when you clicked on them, something just clicked. This wasn’t like commanding armies in real life—it was like playing with the world’s most elaborate set of toy soldiers, except these guys could actually fight and die and you could build more. The graphics were blocky even by ’94 standards, but there was personality in every pixel. My Sonic games were fast and flashy, but this? This had depth I’d never experienced.
Mike’s mom would make us sandwiches while we huddled around that 15-inch CRT monitor, taking turns playing the campaign missions. I remember distinctly the mission where you had to defend your town from waves of orcs—I must’ve replayed it a dozen times because I kept losing all my peasants to grunt raids. Mike would be backseat-driving the whole time: “Build more farms! You need more gold! Why aren’t you upgrading your blacksmith?” Kid was like a medieval tactical advisor with braces.
When I finally convinced my parents to let me install it on our family computer—after promising it wouldn’t “break anything” and that I’d still do my homework—I lost entire weekends to that game. My mom would call me for dinner and I’d be like “Five more minutes, I’m in the middle of a battle!” which somehow always turned into two more hours. She got wise to that pretty quick.
The thing about Warcraft that hooked me wasn’t the complexity—it was actually pretty simple compared to what came later. Humans vs. Orcs, each side basically had the same units with different sprites. But it was my first taste of this weird power fantasy where you’re not just controlling one character, you’re managing an entire civilization. Building farms, training soldiers, researching upgrades… it scratched some part of my brain that Sonic never touched.
Then Warcraft II came out in late ’95 and absolutely blew my mind. Naval combat! Flying units! Resources beyond just gold and lumber! I saved up my allowance for three months to buy it, which meant giving up trips to the arcade and not buying any new Genesis games. My Sega loyalty was starting to crack, and Warcraft II was the wedge that split it wide open.
The first time I built a shipyard and started cranking out destroyers, I felt like I’d discovered fire. Those naval battles were intense—trying to manage your fleet while also defending your coastal towns from enemy raids. I’d get so focused on the ship combat that I’d completely forget about my land forces, and suddenly there’d be enemy knights knocking down my town hall. The multitasking required was unlike anything I’d experienced in gaming.
Battle.net integration changed everything. Suddenly I could play against people from all over the country instead of just Mike and our other friend Dave (who always played humans because he said orcs were “too ugly”). Going online was humbling, let me tell you. I thought I was pretty good because I could beat the computer on hard difficulty, but these online players had strategies I’d never even considered. Build orders, timing rushes, resource management techniques that made me realize I’d been playing like an amateur.
I started printing out strategy guides from various gaming websites—this was dial-up era, so downloading a single screenshot took forever—and studying them like they were homework. Actually spent more time reading about Warcraft II than I did on my actual history assignments, which probably explains my grades that semester. My parents thought I was being studious because I was always hunched over papers at my desk, but really I was memorizing optimal peasant-to-warrior ratios.
The wait between Warcraft II and III was torture. Five years felt like forever when you’re that invested in a game universe. I played other RTS games—Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, even gave StarCraft a shot—but nothing captured that Warcraft magic. There was something about the chunky, colorful art style and the way units had personality that other games couldn’t replicate.
When Warcraft III finally arrived in 2002, I was in my second year of teaching and living in a tiny apartment with my college roommate. I took a personal day for the launch, which my roommate thought was insane. “It’s just a video game,” he said. Just a video game! This was the continuation of a saga I’d been following for seven years. The introduction of 3D graphics, hero units with RPG elements, four different factions instead of two… it was like Christmas morning.
That first night playing through the human campaign, following Arthas’s story, I stayed up until 4 AM on a school night. Had to teach three classes the next day on about two hours of sleep, but it was worth it. The storytelling in Warcraft III was on another level—these weren’t just faceless armies anymore, they were characters with motivations and story arcs. The Stratholme mission where Arthas purges the infected city still gives me chills. First time a strategy game made me question the morality of what I was doing.
The custom map editor was a revelation. I wasn’t talented enough to create anything impressive myself, but the community that sprang up around user-generated content was incredible. Tower defense variants, hero arena battles, and eventually Defense of the Ancients, which would go on to spawn the entire MOBA genre. We had no idea we were witnessing gaming history being made—we were just having fun with these elaborate custom scenarios.
LAN parties became a regular thing in my early twenties. Every few months, my friends and I would convert someone’s living room into a tangle of ethernet cables and computer towers, ordering pizza and playing Warcraft III until sunrise. Dave always insisted on random race selection because he claimed it made him “more adaptable,” which was really just his excuse for not wanting to learn optimal strategies for any particular faction. Tom was the rush king—that guy could have your base under siege before you’d finished your first building upgrade.
The announcement of World of Warcraft created this weird conflict for me. On one hand, more Warcraft content was always welcome. On the other, I was a dedicated RTS player—the idea of controlling just one character instead of entire armies seemed limiting. Little did I know that WoW would become this massive cultural phenomenon that would eventually overshadow the RTS games in most people’s memories.
These days, when I mention Warcraft to younger gamers, they immediately think of WoW. The idea that there were three full strategy games that established all the lore and characters they know from the MMO is completely foreign to them. Makes me feel ancient, like I’m explaining what came before the internet or something.
I still fire up Warcraft III occasionally, usually when I’m feeling nostalgic or want to replay certain campaign missions. The gameplay holds up remarkably well, though my micro-management skills have definitely deteriorated with age. Takes me twice as long to complete missions that I used to breeze through. My nephew watched me play recently and couldn’t understand why the graphics looked “so blocky.” I started explaining about the technical limitations of 2002 hardware before realizing I sounded exactly like my dad talking about black-and-white TV.
The Warcraft RTS trilogy represents this perfect storm of innovation, storytelling, and community that I’m not sure has been replicated since. Each game built on the last, adding layers of complexity while maintaining that core appeal of commanding armies and building civilizations. The transition from 2D sprites to 3D models, from simple resource gathering to hero-based RPG elements, from local multiplayer to online communities… it was like watching the medium evolve in real time.
What made these games special wasn’t just the gameplay mechanics or even the rich fantasy setting—it was how they functioned as social experiences. From those early days playing hotseat matches with Mike to the elaborate LAN setups of my twenties, Warcraft was always about more than just the game itself. It was the backdrop for friendships, the source of inside jokes that lasted years, the reason to stay up all night arguing about optimal unit compositions.
I’ve still got that original Warcraft CD somewhere in my collection, along with the big cardboard boxes for II and III. The packaging from that era was part of the experience—thick manuals you could read on the drive home from the store, artwork that made the game world feel tangible. Installing from multiple CDs while reading about unit stats and lore… there was ceremony to it that digital downloads just can’t match.
Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard realizes what they had with the RTS series. WoW’s success probably makes the strategy games seem quaint by comparison, but those three games established a universe and a style of storytelling that influenced an entire generation of gamers. The current RTS scene feels diminished somehow, like the genre peaked with Warcraft III and never quite recovered.
Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking—maybe I’m one of those old-timers who thinks everything was better back in the day. But I don’t think so. There was something magical about that era of PC gaming, when strategy games could capture mainstream attention and hold it for months at a time. Before gaming became this massive industry, when a relatively small development team could create experiences that would define entire genres.
Those Warcraft RTS games taught me that gaming could be more than just entertainment—it could be social, strategic, even emotional. They bridged my transition from console kid to PC gamer, from someone who just wanted fast action to someone who appreciated depth and complexity. And honestly? Even with all the innovations that have come since, I’m not sure I’ve ever been as completely absorbed by any games as I was by those three Warcraft titles. Some experiences just can’t be replicated, only remembered.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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