Eighteen years ago, Blizzard cancelled Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans—and probably for good reason. A point-and-click adventure game set in the Warcraft universe, everything we’ve seen of Lord of the Clans looks a bit silly, a bit clunky; Blizzard is a game company with a high pedigree, and when it came right down to it the near-finished product didn’t seem to match their full expectations.
Talking to GameSpot at the time, former Blizzard North vice president Bill Roper said, "We were actually creating a traditional adventure game, and what people expected from an adventure game, and very honestly what we expected from an adventure game, changed over the course of the project." In 1998, years before the adventure game genre imploded, it was likely a good call.
But on the Internet, secrets (and less-than-stellar videogames) never stay buried, and thanks to a user named Reidor on the Warcraft fansite Scrolls of Lore, a near-complete build of Lord of the Clans has leaked. The version has almost all the game’s cutscenes and audio, and seems to be essentially finished, with the exception of some missing assets here and there and desynchronized audio during the cutscenes. Various redditors and writers at other publications have even managed to get it running on modern systems.
