30 Year Anniversary of Warcraft Ii: Tides of Darkness
Key topics
As the 30-year anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness arrives, nostalgia is in full swing, with fans flooding in to pay tribute to the classic RTS game. The conversation quickly devolves into a joyful mess of in-jokes and references, with "zug zug" and "swobu" becoming instant rallying cries. While some lament the decline of the RTS genre, others fondly recall the heyday of LAN parties and competitive play, with many hailing Brood War as the true pinnacle of RTS gaming, citing its impact on e-sports and game balancing. Amidst the nostalgia, a consensus emerges: WarCraft II was a landmark game that paved the way for the modern gaming landscape.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
5h
Peak period
93
0-12h
Avg / period
26.7
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 9, 2025 at 4:13 AM EST
about 1 month ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 9, 2025 at 9:35 AM EST
5h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
93 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 15, 2025 at 9:51 AM EST
24 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
A: Low tar, my friend.
1: https://youtu.be/5h2gVbLlwl8
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/ASL
[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Roaring_Currents
... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the same traction or hype until AOE 2.
I still get a kick out of the fact that the units look completely different in the cinematics as they do in the game and even the instruction manual
Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.
What makes Warcraft 2 the apex for you over StarCraft 2?
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts). One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun but because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is.
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.
lol i kinda ranted but man yeah I love that game.
As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
I like that even when a strong meta develops people can potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
Oh no, large numbers of people were satisfied. The horror! Will no one think of the elitist minority???
WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
Which first came from Starcraft custom game support and the popularity of Aeon of Strife (AoS) leading to Defense of the Ancients (DotA) in WC3.
We had to wait until after mom and dad went to sleep that night, then snuck up the hall to install it and play it as quietly as possible.
I played through the orc campaign last year and had fun. It's definitely aged, but it makes me wonder if something like that could exist today. Story games are popular, and I think always will be (people like stories).
Instead of a solo protagonist, can we bring back the hero (a la WarCraft III) and their army? Or even the invisible god like WC2?
Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
1) you can find the War 2 for PSX source on Archive. It has all the Windows stuff commented out. It might be possible to uncomment and compile with something like Borland C or Watcom C or whatever they used.
2) the modding scene was phenomenal. Not mentioned is StarDraft for obvious reasons but a counterpart to WarDraft. This is where our story takes a turn and the name Camelot Systems emerges, along with a King Arthur who shortly after finishing his comp sci degree went to work for Blizzard and has been with them since. The website is a homage to CamSys (JorSys).
3) War2Bne is a thing to behold. Diablo, Warcraft 2 et al being able to seamlessly chat and DM players across games was pure magic.
Many stories to tell, but we will never step into that river again.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.
2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.
3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.
4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.
5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.
Fun times.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/warcraftIIsourcecodePSX
Maybe I need to re-download it, and check out the differences. I remember playing those six missions so many times before eventually saving up enough pocket money to buy the game, but I don't exactly remember them being different.
And it's actually six maps, three for each faction.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/57961/warcraft-ii-tides-of-da...
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
It's an open-source project that started as a fork of SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of Supreme Commander.
I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_USFDBbymGUwLPiopP2q...
Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase. http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/choose-recoil/
https://recoilengine.org/ (list of games powered by Recoil)
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
Source: been in the BAR Discord for about a year, have contributed tiny bits of server code to the project, and read a few pull request comments.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".
I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too big for human consumption."
Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable exception of lotr (and how many early readers really focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly change the world.
Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard, important and respected but ultimately limited to influencing others to achieve major changes.
On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
[1] https://youtube.com/@artosiscasts
But I will say that WC2 is the last major RTS I can think of with naval combat. After Starcraft streamlined it to be land and air only, it seems the entire industry followed suit. Even WC3 didn't bother bringing ships back, to my memory.
It's got really decent naval combat, with a distinct feel compared to the land and air.
I like the way it's streamlined in Age of Wonders: some tiles are "roads", so land units can move along them quickly, and some units are "seafaring", so they can move over both land and water tiles. You're led to assume that carts and boats are involved, but there's no need for the player to micromanage them.
Total Annihilation (1997) had great naval units. They allowed you to recreate the WWII island-hopping type of warfare where battleships served as floating artillery. The spiritual successor, Supreme Commander (2007), also had them, but you could probably argue that it wasn't a major RTS. TA was though, it sold 500,000 units in its first few months of release, which are good numbers today, but absolutely huge in 1997.
These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
Warcraft 1 is maybe too slow paced and basic to be enjoyable, but Warcraft 2 remains very playable, as many of the usability of features core to modern RTS games developed here. There are a few things missing, but that just means you have to be more on the ball with the micro.
The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
One thing that was delightful about this game was how the community discovered that Farms made for better walls than the actual walls, and so an enormous variety of strategies developed around this. As players developed knowledge of how units were pushed out of buildings, walling off buildings to push units past forest was another strategy that developed from this, creating the potential for sneaky tricks.
One unfortunate thing about the game was that during the original battlenet edition they added a new extra fast speed, which everyone moved to, but that speed actually kinda broke the game in that it became entirely possible to accidentally put your townhall too close to the mine, and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining. So in actuality the second to fastest speed is the correct speed for this game.
I hope this got fixed in the remaster but I heard it was a pretty basic art refresh...
A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest.
Sucks, I love Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
And frankly, that's not fun for a lot of people.
I don't want to win by clicking and mashing hotkeys like a schizophrenic on speed.
Yes, really good players click fast, but they also have impeccable resource management. The group I played with did run the obvious experiment: the best one of us was forced to play against the rest with an artificial click frequency limit. He felt like his abilities were greatly reduced, but he still beat everyone else quite easily.
Not even at the lowest rankings are you permitted to ignore what your opponent is doing and focus on building workers and base facilities. StarCraft is infamous for the ability of anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
Dealing with your opponent is a fact of every strategy game!
Keeping a scouting SCV alive in your opponent’s base while building more SCVs at home, building more barracks, building supply depots, killing the enemy scouting worker, and actually reading and correctly interpreting what your opponent is doing is non-trivial.
At the bottom to upper mid level all you need to win is to figure out the macro game of building construction while also getting enough workers and units. With enough of that no micro is needed, just attack-moving into the enemy is more than enough.
Then at the upper mid level you're going to run into people who often don't build as effectively but they'll micro every unit or they'll be constantly doing raids when you don't expect it, scouting better than you and/or just understanding which units are better vs which so as to counter you.
From that point on it becomes much more of an effort to play the game because then you need to become better in all of those fields, while also becoming faster. But to be honest that point is probably 2/3rd's up the tree of all the people playing.
This was their claim, but it did not pan out in reality. It flopped on launch, hard. Peak player count since launch has been less than 100, and is currently hovering around 25.
It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
Teamfight Tactics and Autochess are interesting newer entries though, allowing time to strategize and adding a lot of randomness to the games, where you can't just play one build. Even then though, as these games get more and more explored, "optimal" strategy gets eventually discovered and the game devs especially in TFT are in a race to try to keep things high variance but also seem fair - its definitely a difficult job!
Thinking that only their way is always right and there's no room for change.
Until somebody comes and builds something different that fucks their world upside down.
Suggestions for improvement and ease of use on their forums got shot down on their forums by the resident shitters like on every other community.
Now nobody cares about that genre, except those of us who grew up on it.
In my view, if a develop MUST make the game more accessible, they should do so with alternate modes while still maintaining a strong competitive 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 mode with the steep learning curve and competitive nature. Anything else is a betrayal of the genre.
Potentially that simplification hurts the genre too much though because then you don't have hardcore players sticking with it for years and years.
Maybe a game could have that as a "simple mode" that players can opt in to.
The potential addictive money making pattern is the same as other games imo. Skins. The units being smaller mean the developer is probably going to have to go to more effort to shove them in to peoples faces. Maybe a screen before/after the match where all the players units in their skins can be clear seen in a more zoomed in manner. Have them marching around the border of the end scoresheet or doing a little dance while waiting for players to load.
WarCraft II sold 3M copies.
In contrast contemporary SNES games have had more remakes and had their audiences grow remarkably over time. The franchise hasn't been cared for and so it's relatively obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
Besides, the Warcraft franchise moved to WoW, which is still highly popular. Sure, I miss the RTS games, and the remaster of the 3rd bombed hard because it was low-effort, but it's not dead.
- "Your sound card works perfectly!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M
- "I am a medieval man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/I%27m_a_Medieval_Man)
It really does pale by comparison to StarCraft, BroodWars, WC3, and of course the scion of the series, SC2.
It’s a shame how far Blizzard has fallen at this point - this era of RTS died a sad little death a decade ago with Nova Covert Ops.
There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.
The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...
I played the battle.net rerelease of the game, which came out after Starcraft did. The main feature was (obviously) online play, but I believe it had some other SC features backported as well. Had great times as a kid playing in comp stomp lobbies on battle.net!
37 more comments available on Hacker News