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Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

Trivia

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was named as #9 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking by German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 12/1999).

In the mission objectives screen, the text written in the book on the background is actually English with letters substituted with similar sounding (or, in some cases, not) Cyrillic ones. For example, "орцисч чордес" is definitely "orcish hordes".

Warcraft II was named #28 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on May 01, 2008.

Warcraft II was ranked # 5 in the 50 Best Games of All Time list published by PC Gamer Magazine in its April 2005 issue.

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Mar 19, 2005.

You can type in "gilttering prizes" instead of the cheat "glittering prizes" and still have it work. Joke? Glitch? Coincidence? We will never know...

As is typical of all of Blizzard's RTS games, repeatedly clicking on any unit will trigger humorous dialogue.

If you select a sheep four times (keep clicking it with the left mouse button), the sheep will say: bo-ram-u (that's what it sounds like). This is the sheep password from the 1995 movie Babe.

Warcraft II was voted #4 overall in PCGamer Magazine's Readers All-Time Top 50 Games Poll (April 2000 issue).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Jan 21, 2001.

Rumor has it that legendary Civilization designer Sid Meier remained skeptical of multiplayer gaming until he saw how much fun his daughter had beating him at Warcraft II.

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Jan 21, 2001.

This game is a member of Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.

If you repetitively click on any of the critters in the game, they'll eventually explode.

In games that began with only one peon (no townhall), you could click on a tree and then build your townhall. This would result in 100 extra lumber even though the tree was never completely chopped down. This was known as the "lumber bug" and came in very handy in low resource multiplayer games. However, this only worked in the DOS version of the game and was fixed in the BattleNet version.

All of the buildings and units for WarCraft II were originally created from 3d models. Then, after the frames of animation were set, these were given to artists to draw over, giving the game an animated look rather than a 3-D look.

At one point in development, Blizzard planed to have Catapults and Balistas manned. This means that you would need a unit to move and fire the catapult. If this unit was killed, the enemy could then capture your catapult. For whatever reason, this idea was taken out of the final version, however evidence of its existance can still be seen in the cutsceen of a footman stealing an Orcish Catapult.

Blizzard originally wanted to include more than two races with the game. However, memory constrictions forced them to stay with two. As a compromise, they included Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Ogres, Goblins, and Gnomes as part of the two official races, Orcs and Humans.

A common nickname for Warcraft II is "Warcrack", a reference to how addictive -- like crack cocaine -- this game can be.

Contributed by Trixter (8865) on Apr 13, 2000.

At the end of the credits section of the game there is an interesting note:

"No pixels were harmed during the making of this game."