WARCRAFT II

> How to play Warcraft II online in 2026

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, released in 1995 by Blizzard Entertainment (with the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion arriving in 1996), is the RTS that made the genre huge before Age of Empires and StarCraft took over every LAN room. Two rival factions — Alliance (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes) vs Horde (Orcs, Trolls, Ogres, Goblins) — story campaigns with characters who would later show up in Warcraft III and WoW (Thrall, Grom Hellscream, Anduin Lothar, Khadgar), naval and air units (a real novelty for the genre), decent pathfinding for 1995, and the legendary "Zug Zug" and "Job's done!" still bouncing around people's heads decades later.

On Old Servers you get Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition inside the Private Network, free. Access it with the Launcher available from our Discord, then jump into classic multiplayer with 1v1, 2v2, FFA and team games, original maps, and community custom maps. No paying for Battle.net, no dead classic bnet. Perfect for anyone who grew up on orcs vs humans in '95 and wants to revisit Warcraft's origin point before Blizzard changed the world with World of Warcraft.