Author's note: The following chapter comes from Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I, now available along with Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II as part of StoryBundle's "Boss Battle" Game Bundle. The promotion features 10 DRM-free digital books for $15 and runs through the end of April; a portion of all proceeds will go toward Doctors Without Borders to aid medical professionals as they battle the novel coronavirus.
It wasn't the numbers we sold that made us realize we had done something special with WarCraft. I think it was the play experience. WarCraft was really fun to play. It had a different look and feel from the other games out there. It was more like a cartoon. I hadn't seen anything like it before. It was amazing and just so damn fun.
-Frank Pearce, co-founder, Blizzard Entertainment
If you look at the title credits for our early games, they say "Design by Blizzard Entertainment," and that was a conscious decision. A lot of people were deeply involved in the design process, and it's hard to single out all of those folks.
-Pat Wyatt, vice president of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment
We definitely make games that we want to play. By making games that we want to play first, we're able to make better games.
-Samwise Didier, artist, Blizzard Entertainment
BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT'S PUSH TO GET WarCraft: Orcs & Humans on shelves in time for Christmas 1994 left Allen Adham's team weary yet satisfied. Like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, sales started off slow then picked up through January as critics took notice. PC Gamer magazine gave the game an Editor's Choice award and named it runner-up for Strategy Game of the Year. Computer Gaming World magazine and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chimed in, granting Blizzard's maiden PC title Best Strategy Finalist status.
Bob and Jan Davidson gave Blizzard's boys little time to recoup. The Davidsons wanted a sequel, and they wanted it by Christmas—only eleven months away. Allen and his team saw the wisdom in following up WarCraft sooner rather than later, but they also saw the value in tempering haste with careful consideration. Every developer had suggestions to make WarCraft II bigger and better.
One school of thought was more modern era stuff where humans had fighter jets and modern technology, and Orcs rode around on dinosaurs and cast magic spells. A lot of people in the office thought, That's a cool idea. Let's not just do the same thing over again. Let's go somewhere different.
It was probably best [that WarCraft II retained its fantasy theme] because we didn't know that Command & Conquer was in development [at Westwood Studios], which meant our game would have been too close to C&C's modern warfare-themed units.
-Pat Wyatt
That was a huge fight between me and Allen. Allen wanted to take WarCraft II into space, and I was like, "No, that will destroy the title. That will kill it." Allen and I went back and forth, back and forth on this. At one point, a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip [printed 1-1-1995] had come out showing Calvin playing with a dinosaur toy, and he made the dinosaur [pilot] jet fighters. The last frame of the comic showed Calvin playing and saying something like, "This is so cool!" And Hobbes was saying, "This is so stupid."
Someone pasted that comic on the doorway with "Stu" written under Hobbes and "Allen" written under Calvin. Allen saw the comic. I saw his shoulders kind of slump, and he said, "Okay. I get it."
-Stu Rose, artist, Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard's team had no intention of phoning in a quickie sequel. They wanted to add more units, more strategies, more maps, more players able to mix it up in multiplayer—more everything.
