Blast from Blizzard's Past

30th Anniversary Blizzard Legends Portrait Set for Starcraft Remastered and Starcraft 2.

Back in November 2020, I was researching more Warcraft 3 stuff and discovered that various old "games" sites from Blizzard were gone since somewhere around September 15-22 of that year. Eventually that led me to another curious discovery I thought someone would catch on soon enough... It didn't happen and I decided to "fix that" personally as it's one of the few actually interesting things to talk about at the moment when it comes to Blizzard Entertainment.

Warcraft 3's "Games" page. Now available only through Internet Archives.

Since after Novermber 16 2020, Blizzard Classic Arcade games were gone from "Download" page of Blizzard's website: The Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing and Blackthorne vanished from "Classic Games" section. Quietly and unnoticed. Which is odd, considering that Blizzard's 30th Anniversary is right around the corner... Rest in peace. 

Technically, you still can download those games from Blizzard though. They removed a links to download pages for those games, but pages themselves are still intact as of this moment... Modern Blizzard, am I right? 

I'll make it much easier for you and provide required links right here:

• The Lost Vikings

• Rock n' Roll Racing

• Blackthorne

What does it mean?

Most likely, it's a sign that those games will be moved over to GOG. That's the only logical conclusion, given that we already got Diablo (with Hellfire expansion added in later on), Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft 2: Battle.net Edition over there. If it's true, that's a good news... Unless Blizzard decided to change their mind and no longer offer them for free, like they did previously for almost 7 years. That being said, I would like to point out a few things that will be relevant if this transition is a reality.

While The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne had a DOS versions that are offered by Blizzard with the help of DOSBox and not much work is really needed for them, Rock n' Roll Racing got a different treatment since it was never released on any PC platform at the time. They used ZSNES emulator to offer a cut version of the game with first three tracks from Chem VI and looped 16-bit remix of Heroes of the Storm cinematic theme. It sounds similar to demo of Game Boy Advance version of the game based on Adobe Shockwave that Blizzard put online in 2003, but that thing had more variety to it in terms of in-game options.

For example, you can't select character. You're playing as Snake Sanders, deal with it. Taken from MobyGames.

If I'm not mistaken, in this case Rock n' Roll Racing would be the first console game available on GOG and I'm not sure how they could address the issues of current "PC version". There's a huge chance that they'll put on whatever Blizzard gives them or just ditch this game altogether. It's worth noting that there's a fan-made patch that returns this version of Rock n' Roll Racing to its full glory. Maybe they'll do something similar, although I seriously doubt that Blizzard would want to bother with music licensing in order to bring back the soundtrack.

There's more!

Blizzard conveniently ignored the existence of The Lost Vikings 2 for a long time, desipte being its sole developer for Super Nintendo. I suppose there're some issues with Beam Software's version of the game for Windows/DOS, Playstation and Sega Saturn. Perhaps that stopped them from re-releasing it on PC in similar way as Rock n' Roll Racing, except this time they wouldn't have any reasons to repeat the same mistakes again. It would've been nice if they finally acknowledged that game and made (at least) SNES version more easily available to the public.

The Lost Vikings 2 (Super Nintendo and DOS). Taken from MobyGames.

Interestingly enough, there's hope for something like that. Blizzard's Press material for its 30th Anniversary shows that they'll acknowledge all their games (except for a few ports) in some way: even RPM Racing, The Death and Return of Superman and Justice League: Task Force found their way in there! That's probably gonna be just a brief mentioning in order to squeeze more nostalgia from an event, but I'm still surprised by it. 

I mean, I guess I'm easy to impress as I didn't expected to see Kyle Vlaros and Jake Badlands getting their own portraits that you've seen above. If anything, I thought that Snake Sanders would be their Rock n' Roll Racing character of choice. Perhaps BlizzConline will be interesting after all.

Thank you for reading!