This isn't what makes them endearing, and enduring, though. Just good enough at fighting to make our heroes look cool, but never good enough to pose a real threat. Bad at tactics but too numerous for it to really matter. Generally up for a party but will probably end up killing each other. It was, I thought at the time, even cooler than C.S Lewis. That is, until my Year Five teacher jokingly called a story I'd written a 'Tolkien rip-off' and lent me her personal, faded hardcover of The Hobbit.
I didn't have the language for it at the time, but I'd placed orcs in the realm of folklore, a part of our collective storytelling public domain. I'd even controlled orcish warriors and catapults and giant snapping turtles in Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. I'd defended castles from them in the Dungeons & Dragons board game DragonStrike. I'd fought them in HeroQuest, all protruding lower canines and piercing red eyes, brandishing meat cleavers and falchions above their heads. And just like that, Warcraft's orcs are given something they'd never really had previously:Īs far as I knew at 10 years old, no-one had 'invented' orcs. We can see terror on his face at first, and then. Thrall wakes from his vision and jolts up in bed. Old triumph is revised as cyclical folly. The morally simplistic battles of old are chronicled in the language of regret. But unlike in the previous two games, there's no glory to it. It's rendered stunningly, this battle, in an early progenitor of Blizzard's now-renowned cinematics.
"Like fools, we clung to the old hatreds," a voiceover laments. When we first meet the young orc warchief Thrall in Warcraft 3, he's just woken from a nightmare visions of orc and human armies clashing on a battlefield as the sky burns above them.
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