Warcraft II : Tides of Darkness
Super Obsessive game #1
Type of Game
Plagiarism of The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Dungeons & Dragons, bringing to life one of the most thrilling adventures of all time.
Release date on our machines
December 1995, the version with the manual in French, but the game in English (the beginning of intensive English learning for me).
Developer
Blizzard Entertainment INC, creators of The Lost Vikings and the soon-to-be released Diablo.
Publisher
Still Blizzard Entertainment INC, it's nice not to see Activision written on the box. And it's even better to see the old Ubisoft logo, which distributed the game in France.
Warcraft II: available on GOG... Oh no! The great philanthropists at Blizzard sorely withdrew it at the end of 2024. Well, you can still find it on Battle.net great...
My father gave me this game for Christmas 1995, at my paternal grandparents' house in Dieppe. I stared at the box in silence for ages, transfixed by an emotion I couldn't put into words. A sort of silent euphoria, even if I wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps I was imagining the new possibilities opening up to me on my father-in-law's brand new computer, a futuristic machine that had arrived at the house earlier in the year. People probably thought I was trying to hide my disappointment, given my ability to put on a neutral expression unintentionally, even when I was inwardly jubilant. I'd never seen this title anywhere, not even at my cousin's or my neighbour's, who owned all the games in the world. I was about to discover a crazy universe, coupled with a highly addictive genre. And all on my own!
Merry Christmelf!
16-bits Gravedigger
Aaaaaah! The second half of the 90s... things were speeding up! The arrival of the 75MHz Pentium at home soon made me realise that twenty-four hour days were going to be pretty short. As a result, despite an inexplicable and enduring interest in Warriors of the Eternal Sun, I gradually abandoned the Mega Drive in favour of other video games, in particular Real Time Strategy. The genre already existed for a few years, but I'd never heard of it before. Largely because of Warcraft II, I didn't see any more cartridges arrive in my console after Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, or The Lion King.
You collect resources, build an increasingly stylish base, and throw more and more troops at the enemy, preferably while having done everything faster than him. This genre hasn't really left me since the day I fell into it with Warcraft II. I thought I'd already understood what it meant to be addicted to a video game before, but with Warcraft II my fascination went through the roof. As for my mother, she realised too late that a kid obsessed with all this new software wasn't likely to go to medical school, let alone make her shine in society. She just couldn't understand! All those options available! Soldiers, mages, ships, flying units... all staged in a thrilling scenario!
Seriously, when I find out during a mission as a human, that a camp of fellow guys have made friends with the orcs, I say to myself: ‘Wow, what a complex and deep story! More so than Tolkien, in any case!’ I struggled to finish the two campaigns, it took me weeks, if not longer than that. Then I discovered the custom scenarios, and I got my butt kicked even harder, but I kept on persisting. I even fiddled with the map editor, changing the Orcs' stats to make them stronger. It always seemed silly to me that a huge green brute couldn't hit harder than a fragile moustachioed soldier. It took a coalition of video games to get me out of this time-consuming, but oh-so-stylish spiral.
As much as I loved the gameplay and its intricacies, there's something even crazier about the graphics. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it creates a sick sense of immersion. Maybe it's the fact that I was seeing things other than 8 or 16-bit console sprites. Every unit, every building and every piece of rotting flesh seems to have been drawn with an extreme meticulousness that was unheard of at the time (by me, anyway). It's easy to imagine what life is like for these humans and orcs, who are always beating the crap out of each other; but at the same time, the light coming out of the troll sawmill makes you want to go and have a drink (or a bite of Plane Tree, rather).
Big Shot of High Fantasy
Doesn't a film of snow add a fairytale effect to the human town hall? And when a paladin rushes into the fray with his big inquisitor's voice in the middle of a crusade, doesn't that sound like a real blast? Yes, of course it does, and I have to say that I hadn't yet overdosed on heroic fantasy. All those universes with the same monsters, the same characters and the same stories... there was still room for goblins and dragons in my brain when I was eleven. Fortunately, I've recovered since then.
Harpsichord and Bones
Each of the two camps (humans and orcs, you know) has its own O.S.T., recognisable from the moment any track starts up (that's the only thing that differentiates the two factions). Glenn Stafford has really done some crazy work, all epic, grandiose and whatever other superlatives you want to throw at him. It hasn't aged a hair of an ogre's arse, and it's no accident that the guy has composed the music for almost every Blizzard game to date. To stay with Warcraft II's music, which is often dark and medieval-inspired (whatever that means), it transported me in three seconds to the wonderful (and slightly grimy) world of Azeroth, much to my delight. To be honest, if I'd been able to build fortresses and beat up armored dwarves in real life, rather than reading Madame Bovary or learning trigonometry, I'd have been fine with it (but actually, no, calm down - note from myself to his 1996 child's version). It would have suited me even better to learn how to play a Warcraft II compo on the double bass in music class, instead of singing The Corrs in front of my thirty classmates (well, yeah, I still agree with that one - second note from myself to his 1996 child version).
Head in the hard drive
During my worst period of addiction, I thought about Warcraft all the time. All I did was brainstorm strategies in my notebooks whenever I couldn't sit in front of the computer. I'd talk to my mates at school about it as if it were a major geopolitical issue, and the music would play over and over in my head, which at least saved me from the very questionable tastes of my mother and stepfather. Whenever I went anywhere, on holiday or away for the weekend, there was only one thing I looked forward to: getting home to finish the mission I'd left hanging when I left. I remember a trip in the camper van where even my big sister Elena Vestibule's game boy wasn't enough to keep me waiting. I'd rather grab a pencil and draw new maps on that rudimentary editor called a sheet of paper.
During my childhood, my mother must have accused me a thousand times of being ‘absent-minded’. ‘No, Mom! I'm thinking about how to get revenge for Zul'jin!’ Behaviour bordering on psychosis? Perhaps, but paradoxically it gave me an incredible zest for life. What could be more exhilarating than hoping to get something back after being deprived of it, eh? It works for missing people, cats that have decided to run away for a month or two, and also for video games that are waiting in their box to be taken out again. Even today, the mere sight of a screenshot of the game makes a furtive but intense Proust madeleine resonate inside me.