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May 2026 - News archive

30 year anniversary of WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal<br>2026-05-16 10:19:51 UTC2026-05-16Posted by Ojan

Today, May 16, marks the 30 year anniversary of the release of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. The game is an expansion set for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which was released December 1995.

Both Warcraft: Orcs from 1994, and Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness had been major hits for Blizzard Entertainment, the company that created the games. Their press-release proudly stated that "We have been overwhelmed by the tremendous success of Warcraft II, and since the game’s release, we have been flooded with requests for an add-on disk," said Allen Adham, president and founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "With the expansion disk, players extend their Warcraft experience as they delve into the Orcs' homeland for the first time to experience a entirely new set of challenges."

While Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal was only in development for a few months, and during that time was passed from one studio to another, it still came to be very popular among gamers. Its raw feature set is maybe not so much to boost with, but it arguably marked a turning point in Blizzard Entertainment's game design philosophy, and RTS campaign design as a whole.

Development

During the mid 1990s, Blizzard Entertainment was still a small studio. The development team for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, had only been six core programmers and two support programmers.1

Blizzard Entertainment saw economic success with both Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, but while it was a rising star in the industry, it was far from an economic behemoth. They thus needed to follow up with more releases. Patrick Wyatt, the Producer of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, writes this in one of his very interesting articles about his experiences:

Blizzard’s business strategy was driven by Allen Adham, the company’s president. Allen was a student of both gaming and business, and under the tutelage of Bob Davidson (CEO of Davidson and Associates, the educational software company that first acquired Blizzard), they planned the company’s development pipeline with a keen eye towards maximizing the revenue and profit of our studio, as would any corporate leader. [...] Allen endeavored to build a pipeline with predictable game releases[...]

Patrick Wyatt<br>2012-09-27

There is surprisingly little information available on how Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal came to be. After Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was released in December 1995, the company started working on StarCraft, grinding to release it by the end of 1996 (it was eventually released in May 1998).2 To make sure they could capitalize on the success of Tides of Darkness, they wanted to make a follow up game.3

In 1995, they had contracted Cyberlore Studios to develop an expansion for WarCraft II. Letting another developer handle the work had seemed like a win-win: All Cyberlore had to do was whip up multiplayer maps and a single-player campaign that continued the base game’s story while Blizzard’s internal team devoted its full attention to StarCraft, their next real-time strategy game. During a milestone check-in with Cyberlore, however, Blizzard’s managers had deemed the work subpar. They cancelled the contract, finished the add-on pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, themselves, and resolved that only an in-house team could nurture a Blizzard property to an acceptable level of quality.

David L Craddock<br>2018-06-29

In retrospect, the game might be something of a turningpoint, where instead of simply pushing out the game, Blizzard dedicated people and effort into raising it to their standards, even as these people were direly needed on other projects. One might here see the seed of Blizzard's mentality of "it'll be ready when it's ready" and obsessing over quality. They did not again reach out to other studios to contract away their work, and they also went against conventional wisdom and decided to miss their target of releasing Diablo for Christmas 1996, instead pushing it off until January 1997, so that they could make sure it held their standards.4 And StarCraft famously was "two months from release" for fourteen months.1

New features

The game brings a new tileset, representing the Orc homeworld of Draenor. Online play was in its infancy and widely inaccessible in 1996, so the new single player campaign of 12 Human and 12 Orc missions, in addition to 50 custom maps, were very welcome by players.

The game most memorably introduces several heroes. They don't have abilities beyond what normal units have, but they are much tougher and more dangerous, although most missions that feature them also require them to stay alive through the game. They can be seen as "proto-heroes" and paved the way for characters in later games — and of course Warcraft III, released in 2002, would...