How Blizzard chose the names for Warcraft and Starcraft
Blizzard‘s top managers told why such names were chosen for the Warcraft and Starcraft series.
The first c-craft game in the title was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Blizzard did not tell about the history of the titles for these series — until recently.
Game journalist Bryan Menegus has always been worried about the “mystery of postfix -craft”, which he writes about on Kotaku. He himself had three theories.
- First. The English word craft means “art” or “craft”. The developers could have been inspired by words like spycraft (“the art of espionage”) or stagecraft (“stagecraft”). Warcraft, accordingly, would mean “the art of warfare” — as a synonym for strategic thinking.
- The second. The word Warcraft can refer to mobile machines for war with orcs or humans. For example, in English there are the concepts of spacecraft and hovercraft — these are vehicles. However, the only mechanical unit in the original game is the catapult.
- Third. The name of Warcraft consists of two words: war (“war”) and craft (the game term “crafting”, i.e. the creation of resources). Thus, Blizzard could put the essence of the entire gameplay into the title.
Subsequently, the journalist went to the former vice president of research and development Patrick Wyatt (Pactrick Wyatt) and Blizzard co-founder Allen Adam (Allen Adham). And they refuted his theories.
Here’s what Wyatt says:
“Allen Adam, co-founder of Blizzard along with Mike Morhaime, wanted to create a whole series of games about various military eras — both historical and fictional. All of them would be called Warcraft and would have their own subtitle (for example, “Warcraft: Vietnam”). In the early 90s, a lot of titles with overlapping names on store shelves opened up cross-selling opportunities. After all, it is logical to assume that a well-established business is behind a brand that unites so many games. <…> The first c-craft game in the title was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. It received its title before the start of direct development. He was chosen only because of the “coolness”, and game design has nothing to do with it.”
Allen Adam fully supported Wyatt’s story:
“The story of how we came up with the name Warcraft is really quite simple. We’ve all played Dune 2 from Westwood (probably the first RTS ever created), and we wanted to do something similar, but in a fantasy setting. The name Warcraft was suggested by Sam Didier: he always wanted to use that word in some game. We thought it sounded really cool. That’s all. Patrick is right: we were hoping to use the Warcraft title for a whole series of games in different settings: fantasy, fantasy, modern, historical, etc. But we only developed Warcraft and Starcraft.”Also on the topic:
