Warcraft

Trailing Westwood by a couple of years was a company who are now recognised as one of the greatest success stories in the industry, their first offering to the RTS table unwittingly becoming central to their now epic legacy.  In 1994 Blizzard Entertainment released the first Warcraft game. Allowing you to control the grand sum of 6 units at once and introducing the concept of unit limits. Other revolutionary inclusions included the concept of collectable resources being finite, as well as mixing things up by having two types of resource to collect (groundbreaking stuff! Ed.).

Warcraft: Colourful, violent, and pretty damn tricky...

Warcraft created with it a wonderfully rich Tolkienesque world, and shipped with a manual as rich with stories as the game itself. The AI was also a considerable step up from Dune 2, actually providing a fairly solid challenge at times. A limited multiplayer was also included which did provide for some entertaining games with your mates (If you were able to decipher how the hell to get LAN working back then. Ed.).   

Upping the ante once again after the release of C&C, Blizzard released Warcraft 2 in April 1996, further exploring and polishing the wonderfully rich world Blizzard had created. Deservedly winning game of the year awards after its release, it offered a flawless single player campaign as well as a mind-blowing multiplayer component, which allowed you to play skirmish maps against AI for the first time- soon to become the staple of internet deprived RTS gamers the world over for years to come.

Warcraft 2: Visually spectacular for its time, and with huge depth.

The ‘Dark Portal’ expansion pack not only added more difficult missions to try, but also included more storyline to boot, a feature which many lazier developers have often skipped. If you’re a big fan of the Warcraft universe and aren’t familiar with the first couple of game it’s still worth going back to have a look: surprisingly they’ve held up rather well over the years.