Play Warcraft Adventures now- a game that was lost 18 years ago!

I''ve been playing games for a very long time, so it only feels like a mere couple of twelvemonths ago when I was reading about Warcraft Adventures in the pages of PC Gamer.

It was set to be a point and click adventure game set in the world of Azeroth, at that time portrayed most vividly and recently in 1995s Warfract II: Tides of Darkness and its expansion pack. This was a place of orcs and humans which we had only seen from the godlike view of real time strategy, and also a few then-gorgeous pre-rendered cut scenes.

Yea so the CG has imrpoved a bit over the years...

Almost two decades ago I was looking forward to a new perspective on the action, even if the point and click genre was on the wane in the late 90s. Blizzard spent a year trying to revamp the game to bring it up to their high standards but ended up cancelling the project in mid 1998, just a few months shy of release.

And now, through some quirk of fate, you can play it. Someone from the great nation of Russia has uploaded a version of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans which you can go ahead and grab here.

It's a fascinating look at game development and, unlike many other leaks of this nature, the game is remarkably complete. There are animated cut scenes which look kind of scrappy but neat and voice work from the likes of Clancy Brown, who will always be the Kurgan from Highlander to me.

And the gameplay itself seems to be all there - you can both point and click on things and solve the kinds of puzzles which you either enjoy or don't care a jot about. It's pretty much in keeping with the rest of the genre, though the graphics themselves don't seem the best, even for 1998.

Warcraft Adventures might not have made much of an impact if it had been released, or maybe it would have been a huge success and World of Warcraft might never have happened. Who is to know.