Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft, which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it.
Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.
I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua...
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20...
Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...
The planned expansion packs were cancelled, major bugs in the client went unfixed for years, including serious maphacks that allowed a few griefers to completely ruin the once-strong online tournament scene and break apart the community.
The WC3 installer won't even run on Macintoshes newer than 10.6.8. Fixing that would be a matter of recompiling it and making a couple of minor tweaks -- perhaps a week's work, tops.
Even if you have an old version already installed when you upgrade your OS, you suddenly find that network games don't work at all anymore once you upgrade - that is, the major feature that you bought the game for in the first place. It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. The best people have come up with is dual booting into Windows or running Wine.
Perhaps this is why they didn't want WC3 mentioned in the article.
> It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix.
If they are going to get rid of their old packages, they should open-source it so people who care can do something about it. That is the proper way.
That said, given that they haven't, it'd be nice if Blizzard would assign a programmer to this for a month or two and just port it to the current Apple networking stack.