with kiosks for StarCraft. On May 22, 1998, Warcraft Adventures was publicly cancelled, after roughly 18 months of development. At the time, GameSpot's Ron Dulin and Curt Feldman called this event "the beginning of a trend" at the developer, citing its 1996 cancellation of Pax Imperia 2 for failing to meet internal quality standards. In retrospect, Roper considered Blizzard's conservative design plan for Warcraft Adventures to be its greatest mistake, and called it "the only thing I would have changed". He felt that the company's lack of forward thinking on the project left it outpaced by more ambitious games like Grim Fandango. Following the game's cancellation, he told GameSpot, Reception Pre-release The announcement of Warcraft Adventures came as a surprise to the game industry, according to Colin Williamson of PC Gamer US, whose own publication had initially been skeptical of Blizzard Entertainment's ability to develop a graphic adventure. In mid-1997, Computer Games Strategy Plus described it as "perhaps the most surprising game of the year". However, excitement grew high for the game among players and journalists; Williamson felt that it could rival LucasArts' adventures. It was the cover story for PC Gamer USs June 1997 issue, and appeared at E3 1997 in CUC Software's display within the Inforum center, where the press highlighted Warcraft Adventures "beautiful cel-based animation" and "Disneyesque graphics, smooth scrolling environments, and rich story and humor." A writer for Computer Gaming World remarked of the showing, "They've conquered the strategy and RPG genres, and now the Blizzard wunderkinds are taking on adventure games in their newest title—and only a fool would bet against them." By 1997, concern was rising inside the game industry that the adventure genre was in danger of dying out, an issue of which Blizzard was aware. At the time, Todd Vaughn of PC Gamer US and Cindy Yans of Computer Games Strategy Plus both wrote that high-quality "traditional adventures" were growing rare, while CNET Gamecenter's Jeffrey Adam Young found that the genre had been flooded by "duds" such as Timelapse, Normality and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. However, a similar decline had been noted among computer role-playing games before the release of Blizzard's Diablo, which had become a mainstream hit in that genre. Discussing Warcraft Adventures in this context, Bill Roper argued that "everyone claimed RPGs were dead, but they were dead only because developers weren't doing enough with them, and