He admits to the Warhammer influence. Mass fanboy seppuku in 5, 4, 3...
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The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
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Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#12Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
[note: I wrote the Warcraft article] /agree If the patent-standards for the 80's and 90's were as awful as today, I'm sure that some CAD company would have locked up the idea of drag-select, and the Macintosh WIMP interface (and hence MacDraw/MacDraft) would have been legally impossible to create. On a related note, after Blizzard Entertainment was acquired along with Sierra Entertainment in a corporate merger, I got…
Well, apropos of nothing, i just wanted to say this was a great article to read, and I hope you won't mind me indulging in a fan-boy moment by saying that the original Warcraft was a formative experience for me, and I spent much of middle school dreaming up and sketching out a game that was almost identical to Starcraft. :)
Glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks for the kind words. It was very exciting to build the game, particularly after the multiplayer code was functional -- we just knew folks were going to like it!
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that influence was common knowledge?
Ditto. Especially for Starcraft.
Actually the influences for Starcraft were -- I think -- much broader than those for Warcraft.
Warcraft was heavily inspired by Tolkien and Warhammer, whereas Starcraft drew inspiration from basically every sci-fi series ever made, most particularly the Alien series (compare the Zerg Hydralisk to Giger's Alien) and of course from the art direction of Starship Troopers. But yeah, Warhammer 40K was inspirational too.
The artwork for the two alien races in Starcraft were each redone three separate times. The biggest challenge was that players couldn't easily (and quickly) grok the differences between the various units.
In Warcraft, you look at a lumber mill or barracks, and you have an idea what it is and what it might be used for. In Starcraft the difficulty was that -- upon initially playing the game -- it was tough to tell what any unit or building did for you.
Consequently making game units that looked visually familiar by including known sci-fi elements is useful in that -- when done well -- gives players a clue as to the function of a unit.
Or at least that's what we told ourselves when we ripped elements from other games & movies :)
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#15> While Warcraft was a DOS “Protected Mode” game, the modem driver could be called from both Protected Mode and Real Mode due to quirks in the DOS operating system and the 80386 chip-architecture it ran on [...]
Could someone provide more information on this? I'm guessing it had to do with the fact the serial interrupt could occur while some DOS system call was executing 16 bit code (or perhaps BIOS code)?
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#16What about Dune II? It was way ahead of its time. If I remember correctly it had unlimited unit select.
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#17> It’s surprising now to think what might have happened had Blizzard not controlled the intellectual property rights for the Warcraft universe — it’s highly unlikely Blizzard would be such a dominant player in the game industry today.
This seems a very important observation. Its interesting how most of the major pre-computer fantasy universes with big fan-bases (Battletech, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Star Wars etc.) never managed to really transition seriously into computer games (a few hits but lots of misses and certainly no dominant series like warcraft and starcraft). I think the licencers of these worlds have been guilty of being far too greedy over the years as a general rule, and hurt their own pockets through doing so...
Also - great article. I loved playing Warcraft 1, and despite the fact that the 'RTS race' soon exploded and left it in the rear-vision mirror, it was still incredibly important in defining the genre... (as a side note, most of the other Blizzard games around this time were great too - must have been a great team).
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#18I read that World of Warcraft was born when playtesting prototypes of Warcraft III, the first 3D version in the Warcraft series. People were having so much fun just running around with their 3D heroes that the concept grew. This is a great example of letting the product lead you.
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#19> Before I started in the game industry I had worked extensively with several low-end “Computer Assisted Design” (CAD) programs like MacDraw and MacDraft to design wine-cellars for my dad’s wine cellar business, so it seemed natural to use the “click & drag” rectangle-selection metaphor to round up a group of units to command. > I believe that Warcraft was the first game to use this user-interface metaphor. When I fi…
[note: I wrote the Warcraft article] /agree If the patent-standards for the 80's and 90's were as awful as today, I'm sure that some CAD company would have locked up the idea of drag-select, and the Macintosh WIMP interface (and hence MacDraw/MacDraft) would have been legally impossible to create. On a related note, after Blizzard Entertainment was acquired along with Sierra Entertainment in a corporate merger, I got…
'we decided to allow players to select only four units at a time based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once.'
Damnation! Sometimes I would just build huge mobs for the fun of it, but trying to get them to attack at the same time was a pain.
Great game though, artistically I enjoyed it more than Warcraft II.
Re: The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
#20What about Dune II? It was way ahead of its time. If I remember correctly it had unlimited unit select. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II
The article mentions that. Apparantly it was playing Dune II at lunch that inspired Warcraft, and the unit selection was put in since Dune II only allowed you to select one unit at once.
It was apparently Command & Conquer that added unlimited unit selection.