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When you mention Warcraft these days, most people just assume we’re talking about the MMORPG World of Warcraft, but for a lot of us Warcraft began long before the World came to light.

My personal earliest memories of the Warcraft franchise are of my Grandfather playing Warcraft 1 on the PC my dad had built for him. I was only 6 or 7 at the time but the idea of a game where you built up an army and conquered your foes was incredibly intriguing at the time. A few years later my dad got Warcraft 2 and I was able to watch him play 1v1 matches with a friend over a direct TCP/IP connection. This soon translated into me making 8 player 1v1 free for all custom games and cheating my way to victory over the orc and human scum which stood in my way, combined with my adolescent imagination the possibilities of these custom games seemed endless.

Eventually Starcraft was released and had free play on battle.net so you could test your skills online, against anybody in the world. We finally had cable internet at this time so I spent the summer between fourth and fifth grade playing Starcraft online. I don’t remember much of it other than I tried to rush to carriers every game because of how strong they are. Knowing what I know now due to many hours of playing Starcraft 2, I can’t imagine 11 year old me ever winning a game of Starcraft on battle.net.

A year or so later I happened to be in Radio shack and saw a copy of Warcraft 2 battle.net edition so you could also play online now, without directly connecting to your opponent. A couple friends and I picked this up and played some matches online. There was no doubt it was the same Warcraft game, but finally playing against other real online players exposed me to realize how bad I was at the RTS genre, and getting crushed into oblivion game after game just didn’t have the same magic feeling that 2 day long custom games of clearing out 7 easy AI did.

Skip ahead a few more years and we have the release of Warcraft 3. Within a few days of launch my dad had picked up a copy and I started the campaign right away. I was so drawn to the story and the characters. Specifically Arthas and his quest to save his people. I finished the Human Campaign and was shocked to see Arthas kill his father to take the throne of Lordaeron. I wanted more, I wanted to see what happened next. I struggled in the undead campaign and eventually gave up, resorting to battle.net games like tower defenses and helms deep before ultimately putting the game down for a few years.

Summer of 2004 I finally sat down and played through Warcraft 3 and the Frozen Throne and started looking into World of Warcraft. I recall late nights on the computer with my step brother looking into classes, races, professions, you name it. We had it all planned out that I was going to be a Paladin and him a Warrior, and one of us would mine and the other would blacksmith. That year I started grade 11 and some other guys in my social studies class were also interested in picking up World of Warcraft when it dropped. One of them told me that you could fish in WoW and if thats all you wanted to do, then you could just be a fisherman. For some reason that was amazing to me and I wanted to step foot into an MMORPG to see what it was all about.