18-Year-Old Point-and-Click WarCraft Game is Leaked

Quite the exciting nugget happened to fall into our laps during the weekend: a Russian gamer going by the username Reidor posted a most peculiar link on the Scrolls of Lore forum: a 500 MB download link to an 18-year-old WarcCaft point-and-click adventure game that was mostly finished, yet remained unreleased, by the folks over at Blizzard. Introducing: Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, now free to download and play.

Surprised? Perhaps you shouldn't be. Blizzard has a history of thinking up, then canceling, spin-off titles for their more popular franchises. Perhaps the best known of these was Ghost, a third-person shooter Starcraft spinoff that put you in the shoes of Nova, who would later show up in StarCraft 2 and its expansions .

Now, despite being nearly finished, with voice acting, cinematic, and a full story following Thrall doing... something, I haven't actually played it yet... it was canceled, according to Mike Fahey in an interview with Kotaku, because the game failed to meet their high standards, and thus, was dropped. Looking at the screenshots, I can kind of see why: WarCraft has never been afraid of cartoon styles, but this looks straight out of one of those cheap '90s cartoons... which, in turn, means it fits the point-and-click adventure ascetic perfectly.

How this Russian gamer managed to stumble upon a copy like this, well, that's something we'll probably never discover. But there's very little doubt it's only a matter of time before Blizzard shuts this operation down, so if you want to experience this particular forgotten gem, better hop on that download soon.

For the rest of us? This is just kind of a fun idea. Hopefully, Blizzard doesn't give up on the idea of spin-off titles: maybe they'd like them, if they'd be willing to publish one for a change. I'll keep my fingers crossed for a Lost Vikings Dating Sim.