Unreleased WarCraft Adventure Game Leaked After 18 Years

[Steven Bogos]

Unreleased WarCraft Adventure Game Leaked After 18 Years

A fully-playable build of the WarCraft adventure game Blizzard cancelled 18 years ago is circulating the internet.

Once upon a time, when World of WarCraft was simply the name of the world of the WarCraft RTS games, Blizzard was working on a WarCraft-themed point-and-click adventure game in the vein as Manic Mansion or Grim Fandango. Unfortunately, the game was cancelled around 18 years ago, and while we've seen videos of it pop up here and there, a playable build was never released or leaked. Until today, that is. A Russian fan somehow got his hands on a full pre-released version of the game, complete with in-game cinematics, and posted it on a gaming forum [http://www.scrollsoflore.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1511626].

Way back in 2009, Blizzard's Mike Fahey talked at lengh about the cancelled game with Kotaku [http://kotaku.com/5408287/world-of-warcraft-turns-5-how-blizzard-built-a-nation]. "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," he said.

[gallery=6473]

Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans' file size is 500 MB, and while we won't post the download link here you can go ahead and find it at your own risk on the aforementioned forums. We're guessing it won't be too long before Blizzard comes in and takes this one down so if you want to play it, now is your chance!

Source: Kotaku [http://www.scrollsoflore.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1511626].

Permalink

 

[Naldan]

Holy. Shit.

Who cares about e-mails? THIS is a leak.

 

[Gennadios]

Holy crap. The game may not meet old Blizzard standards, but I suspect it will sure as hell surpass that of modern Blizz.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I wonder if this is more complete than the version I saw on youtube in 2011 or so by some Russian gamer. I hope so.

 

[Vern]

Wow... I had almost completely forgot about this game. I think it was my original Diablo CD that had a trailer for it, and I was super hyped for it. Then it disappeared... same thing with Ghost I guess, that looked like fun. Something of a MGS game in the Starcraft universe, I really think it could've worked well for Blizzard. But anyway, looking forward to giving Warcraft Adventures a go.

 

[Dalisclock]

I remember hearing about this so many years ago and then being disappointed when they canceled it. Nice to see something of it survived.

 

[Quellist]

Excellent! Now if only some kind soul could do the same for Ghost...

 

[Bobular]

I'm getting the image of a young Russian hacker who has dedicated the last 18 years of his life to hacking Blizzard's servers to get hold of this game. I think they should make a movie out of this plot.

 

[RealRT]

I'm getting the image of a young Russian hacker who has dedicated the last 18 years of his life to hacking Blizzard's servers to get hold of this game. I think they should make a movie out of this plot.

The truth is, likely, more mundane: the graphics in the game were outsourced to a Russian company, namely "Animation Magic" (yes, THOSE Animation Magic, the CD-i Zelda Animation Magic; to their credit, they have improved a lot since THAT game), so whoever leaked the build was probably a tester or an ex-employee or a relative of an ex-employee of Animation Magic.

 

[Obbi]

I wonder if this is more complete than the version I saw on youtube in 2011 or so by some Russian gamer. I hope so.

I've seen some dev build longplays a year or so back. The difference with this build is that it seems to have all the cutscenes and dialogues in place. Though some lines seem to not have been recorded, and has this weird placeholder text-to-speech thing.

 

[Bobular]

I'm getting the image of a young Russian hacker who has dedicated the last 18 years of his life to hacking Blizzard's servers to get hold of this game. I think they should make a movie out of this plot.

The truth is, likely, more mundane: the graphics in the game were outsourced to a Russian company, namely "Animation Magic" (yes, THOSE Animation Magic, the CD-i Zelda Animation Magic; to their credit, they have improved a lot since THAT game), so whoever leaked the build was probably a tester or an ex-employee or a relative of an ex-employee of Animation Magic.

Yeah that's more likely, but let me live in my fantasy world of 90s style hackers fighting against big corporations.

Its interesting to know they did the CD-i Zelda stuff as well though.

 

[Baresark]

I was so disappointed when this got cancelled. It was going in such a good art direction and I wanted to see more Warcraft beyond what was available at the time. It had the same quality standard feel as Curse of Monkey Island. Those hand drawn cells were awesome and engaging, and I wanted to experience that in the Warcraft Universe.

 

[Hawki]

Holy crap. The game may not meet old Blizzard standards, but I suspect it will sure as hell surpass that of modern Blizz.

I'd say it's opposite.

I might be in the minority, but Warcraft 3 was the first game I thought was actually good, until Starcraft 2 came out.

As someone who's played Blizzard games since The Lost Vikings, I'm actually fairly spread out over their time periods. Honestly, I think the 2000s might have been their best era. 1998 gave us StarCraft. The 2000s gave us Diablo II, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft, and while I'm not that fond of D2 or WoW, Warcraft III, like SC1, is an absolute gem. And personal thoughts aside, I can't deny the influence of D2 and WoW. The 2010s I think will mostly be remembered for Hearthstone and Overwatch, even though SC2 does surpass SC1 and WC3 for me, and as much as I like D3, I can't ignore that it if asked, most Diablo fans would nominate D2 as their favorite game in the series.

So, honestly, I think Blizzard's output has more or less remained consistent, and if I were to rank their games, they'd be fairly spread out over time. My top three (SC1, WC3, SC2) belong to the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s respectively

 

[Gennadios]

Holy crap. The game may not meet old Blizzard standards, but I suspect it will sure as hell surpass that of modern Blizz.

I'd say it's opposite.

I might be in the minority, but Warcraft 3 was the first game I thought was actually good, until Starcraft 2 came out.

As someone who's played Blizzard games since The Lost Vikings, I'm actually fairly spread out over their time periods. Honestly, I think the 2000s might have been their best era. 1998 gave us StarCraft. The 2000s gave us Diablo II, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft, and while I'm not that fond of D2 or WoW, Warcraft III, like SC1, is an absolute gem. And personal thoughts aside, I can't deny the influence of D2 and WoW. The 2010s I think will mostly be remembered for Hearthstone and Overwatch, even though SC2 does surpass SC1 and WC3 for me, and as much as I like D3, I can't ignore that it if asked, most Diablo fans would nominate D2 as their favorite game in the series.

So, honestly, I think Blizzard's output has more or less remained consistent, and if I were to rank their games, they'd be fairly spread out over time. My top three (SC1, WC3, SC2) belong to the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s respectively

To be clear, I'm not talking about quality as in balance of mechanics or overall polish, I'm just talking about personality. The games themselves are extremely well done, but Every Blizzard story from Warcraft 3 onwards was basically the same. It's all pretty much generic Blizzard story with a different coat of paint. Once I get around to it, I'm more curious as to how the story itself will feel.

 

[Plucky]

I'm only curious about the cutscenes because they're apparently done by the same people who did the cinematics for Hotel Mario and the Zelda CDi games. tell me there's a compilation or at least Deathwing smoking a hookah? could see this becoming youtube poop potential if the VA/clips are narmy enough.