WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

1001 Video Games

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Book

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".

Credits

At the end of the credits section of the game there is a note:

No pixels were harmed during the making of this game.

Cheats

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

Development

• 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.
• 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 existence can still be seen in the cutscene of a footman stealing an Orcish Catapult.

Gags

• If you repetitively click on any of the critters in the game, they'll eventually explode.
• As is typical of all of Blizzard's RTS games, repeatedly clicking on any unit will trigger humorous dialogue.

Graphics

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.

Lumber bug

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.

Reception

• A common nickname for Warcraft II is "Warcrack", a reference to how addictive -- like crack cocaine -- this game can be.
• Rumor has it that Civilization designer Sid Meier remained skeptical of multiplayer gaming until he saw how much fun his daughter had beating him at Warcraft II.

References

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.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • June 1996 (Issue #143) – Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #28 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
  • June 1998 (Issue #278) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame
• GameSpy
  • 2001 – #3 Top Game of All Time
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #9 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• PC Gamer
  • April 2000 - #4 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
  • April 2005 - #5 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
• Power Play
  • Issue 02/1997 – Best Game in 1996

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Chentzilla, KSlayer, Maw, PCGamer77, Roedie, Toadstool; Trixter and Warlock