“I felt like we needed to have the best.”
A Warcraft adventure game called Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was in development at Blizzard in the mid-90s, but never saw the light of day in part because of Blizzard North co-founder and Diablo creator David Brevik.
On the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered, Brevik revealed why he’s responsible for the cancellation of Warcraft Adventures, which was leaked a couple of years ago. At the time, educational software company Davidson (the parent company of Blizzard at the time) found success releasing a variety of adventure games, and Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to create something similar with a Warcraft skin.
During development, however, he didn’t feel like the game was up to Blizzard’s quality and innovation standards. So Brevik said he told the studio: “Guys, this really isn’t kind of a modern game. It doesn’t feel like a big evolution in Blizzard. It doesn’t feel like this is really something significant. It feels like a me-too product that doesn’t really have anything that’s revolutionary or anything that’s different, and it’s kind of a basic point-and-click adventure game. And I don’t think we should do this product.”
Brevik wanted Blizzard to stand for quality over quantity, so he pushed to have the project scrapped. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be kind of the GM of video games, I want to be the Ferrari of video games—and so is this a Ferrari?’ And they agreed that it’s not, and so it got canceled,” he explained. “It was good, it was fine, it just wasn’t the best. And I felt like we needed to have the best.”
Be sure to check out our full IGN Unfiltered interview with Brevik for his thoughts on the possibility of a Diablo II remaster, what his version of Diablo III would have looked like, and more. While you’re at it, check out our comprehensive look at the history of Warcraft,
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @alexcosborn.