Did you know that Blizzard was working on a point-and-click game called Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans back in the late 90s, but then canceled the project after two years in development?
Well the project recently surfaced again when a user by the name of Reidor located in Russia posted a download link for the game in the Scrolls of Lore forum a couple days ago.
This post originally appeared 9/11/16.
Footage from the game has been circulating for several years now, but nobody ever had access to a proper build of the game. At a file size of approximately 500MB, you can now help Thrall click hopelessly through dungeons and town squares in search of whatever it is he’s searching for, at least until Blizzard gets it taken down.
Update—1:20 PM, 9/11/2016: When World of Warcraft turned five back in 2009, some guy called Mike Fahey eulogized the never-to-be adventure game at length:
“In a move that Blizzard would later repeat with StarCraft side-story Ghost, the company canceled the game days before the 1998 E3 Expo in Atlanta, despite the game being mostly complete. The animation was finished, the puzzles in place, and even the voice over work had been fully recorded, but Blizzard felt the game wasn’t up to their high standards.In an announcement issued on the 22nd of May, 2008, Blizzard explained the cancellation to fans. ‘The decision centered around the level of value that we want to give our customers. In essence, it was a case of stepping up and really proving to ourselves and gamers that we will not sell out on the quality of our games.’”
Update—8:23 PM, 9/11/2016: Our own Luke Plunkett wrote about the story behind Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans at length a few years back,
“Sadly, dreams were all this game would ever be. While Blizzard and Animation Magic were at work on the game in 1997, the masters of the adventure genre, Lucasarts, released Monkey Island III, which boasted animation and visuals in excess of what Warcraft Adventures was currently showing off. Making matters worse was that Lucasarts then debuted trailers for Grim Fandango, a fully 3D adventure game, and that blew the ‘quaint’ 2D animation of Warcraft Adventures clean out of the water.
Producer Bill Roper said of the one-upmanship ‘I think that one of the big problems with WarCraft Adventures was that we were actually creating a traditional adventure game, and what people expected from an adventure game, and very honestly what we expected from an adventure game, changed over the course of the project.’”