Conception In the second half of 1996, Blizzard Entertainment's Allen Adham stated that his company was "looking into the possibilities of doing more with the orcs and humans, which includes non-game types of enterprises, but there's nothing in the works at the moment." Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was ultimately conceived at Blizzard late that year, around "four or five months" after the release of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal in May 1996, according to producer Bill Roper. The team's inspiration for the project was a proposal by Capitol Multimedia, a subsidiary of Blizzard parent Davidson & Associates, to use the Warcraft license for a graphic adventure game. Blizzard was introduced to the game development and animation studio Animation Magic, purchased by Capitol in 1995, and was impressed by its art department. The studio had previously produced titles including the Magic Tales series for Davidson, as well as the Legend of Zelda games for the CD-i game console. Roper noted that the company's work "totally reminded us of all of those adventure games we loved playing", and Blizzard chose to co-develop the game with the team. Blizzard had considered a graphic adventure for several years, but lacked the capacity to create the art assets for such a game. The promise of working with a team experienced in the genre clinched the project. At the time, Roper compared Capitol's pitch to seeing Condor's original proposal for Diablo, and called it a "very natural course" for Blizzard and "a perfect fit for who we are." Chris Metzen, writer of Warcraft Adventures, said that Blizzard was also growing tired of the real-time strategy genre during that period. Roper similarly remarked that the company was hoping to branch out beyond strategy games, and to become a developer of varied titles that matched the "eclectic" taste of its staff. The Warcraft Adventures concept appealed to the team in part because it allowed greater room than a strategy title to explore Warcrafts setting, much of which was contained in an internal series bible. It was intended to create the story foundation upon which the series' next strategy entry, Warcraft III, would build. Blizzard's Rob Pardo later said that the project was the first time that the developer "started seeing [its franchises] as intellectual properties", without concrete ties to genre. The team envisioned Warcraft Adventures as the first game in a possible series of story-based