Delay of Game
Blizzard's, Valve's, and id's ability to answer press and publishers' "When?" with "When it's done" is hard-won; unless you've launched a WarCraft or Half-Life, you don't shirk deadlines -- you commit to a date and cross your fingers. We've collected some of the most famous (and infamous) cases of PC game delays, botched launches, and outright cancellations, along with the unfortunate, serendipitous, or sometimes downright bizarre causes.
Time of Departure: 1997
Time of Arrival: Never
Cause of Delay: WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans is one of PC gaming's Great Lost Games, a holy grail to Blizzard geeks, a phantom of a game made 10 years ago, nearly completed, but yanked away from fans at the last second like Lucy with Charlie Brown's football.
Blizzard announced WarCraft Adventures in March 1997, and it was to be a complete departure from the strategy games that had made them famous. Described in the original press release as "the pivotal next chapter in the epic WarCraft saga," it was to take place immediately after the events of WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, but would, surprisingly, be an adventure game. (Or maybe not so surprisingly, given how story-driven the WarCraft universe has always been.) It was intended to be and was in fact designed as a classic, old-school, point-and-click 2D adventure game, modeled after the old LucasArts and Sierra games, with hand-drawn, cel-animated art, fully animated sequences, and a focus on traditional puzzleand dialogue-based gameplay. The plot? The origin story of the Orc named Thrall, raised in human captivity after his parents were killed during the events of WarCraft II, who would grow up to unite the Orcs in Azeroth and lead them in rebellion against the humans.
Unfortunately, production on WarCraft Adventures was difficult from the start. Rather than design the game in-house, Blizzard contracted a St. Petersburg?based Russian developer, Animation Magic, to do the bulk of the production work, including all the animation, artwork, and coding. (The storyline and overall direction still came from Blizzard.) Given that this was the Stone Age for the Internet, however, collaboration and communication were slow and difficult, and the delays were constant. After one year of development, with all of the locations designed, puzzles crafted, voice acting (including the ubiquitous Clancy Brown as Thrall) recorded, and animation completed, Blizzard was still fundamentally unsatisfied with the game and pushed the original release date of December 1997 out a full year so they could reassess.
At this point, Blizzard brought in famed adventure-game designer Steve Meretsky, known for his acclaimed work on old Infocom adventures like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall, as a kind of "script doctor," to help the team tweak the puzzles and gameplay. Meretsky spent the next couple weeks looking at the game, after which it was decided that Blizzard would need even more time beyond the December 1998 scheduled release.
