Warcraft III

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos arrived on July 3, 2002, as Blizzard's first fully 3D game, and sold a million copies in its first month — at the time, the fastest-selling PC game in history, on its way to 4.4 million shipped. It reinvented Blizzard's own genre: alongside base-building and armies, it added leveling hero units with items and abilities, folding role-playing progression into real-time strategy across four factions — Humans, Orcs, Night Elves, and the Undead. Its campaign told the fall of prince Arthas Menethil, a tragedy that gave Warcraft its most famous villain and laid the narrative foundation for World of Warcraft two years later. The Frozen Throne expansion followed on July 1, 2003, and the game earned a 92 on Metacritic and PC Gamer's best real-time strategy game of the year.

But the longest shadow came from a bundled tool: the World Editor. Players used it to build entire new games inside the game, and one custom map — Defense of the Ancients, or DotA — became a phenomenon of its own, paving the way for the multiplayer online battle arena genre and inspiring League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of the Storm. A free map made by hobbyists inside a strategy game ended up defining the next twenty years of competitive gaming.

For the kids of the 2000s, though, Warcraft III means LAN parties and Battle.net evenings: tower defense maps, hero arenas, that one friend who only played Night Elves. The 2020 remaster, Warcraft III: Reforged, landed to mixed reviews from critics and outright revolt from fans — proof, in its way, of how much the original still mattered.