Warcraft
video game series

Warcraft is a fantasy video game series and media franchise created by Blizzard Entertainment. The series consists of six core games: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002), World of Warcraft (2004), Hearthstone (2014), and Warcraft Rumble (2023). Initially a real-time strategy (RTS) series, Warcraft expanded into other game genres beginning with World of Warcraft, a highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The franchise has also spawned novels, comics, a tabletop role-playing game, a trading card game, and a 2016 feature film.
The franchise is primarily set on the planet Azeroth, as well as related planets and metaphysical dimensions. Azeroth is inhabited by various races and civilizations, including typical fantasy races such as elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and trolls, along with original races and creatures unique to the franchise. Its lore and story center on warfare between the races and factions of Azeroth, typically between the human-led Alliance and the orc-led Horde, chronicling the exploits of heroes and villains on both sides. While high fantasy at its core, the Warcraft universe incorporates a diverse assortment of influences, including science fiction and dark fantasy. Warcraft has been noted as differentiating itself from other fantasy universes by highlighting "monster races" such as orcs, trolls, and undead as complex protagonists and giving them significant character development and moral complexity.
The Warcraft franchise has been highly successful, grossing over $12 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
The public source identifies “Warcraft” as video game series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Warcraft, video and game.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q815739. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Warcraft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.