Blizzard Entertainment
On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released "World of Warcraft", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. "World of Warcraft" is the fourth released game set in the fantasy "Warcraft" universe, which was first introduced by "" in 1994. Blizzard announced "World of Warcraft" on September 2, 2001. The game was released on November 23, 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the "Warcraft" franchise.
StarCraft (video game)
Despite the progress, "StarCraft" was slow to emerge. The continual delays inspired a group of "StarCraft" fans on the official forums who labeled themselves "Operation: Can't Wait Any Longer" to write a series of fictional stories in which the members of Operation CWAL attempted to retrieve the beta version of "StarCraft" from Blizzard's headquarters in Irvine, California. To pay homage to their presence on the forums and enthusiasm for the game, Blizzard Entertainment later incorporated the group's name into "StarCraft" as a cheat code to speed up the production of units and gave the group thanks in the game's credits. The game was released for Windows on March 31, 1998, with the Classic Mac OS version following a year later in 1999. Development on a Nintendo 64 version, "StarCraft 64", began in 1999, converted from PC by Mass Media Interactive Entertainment—a subsidiary of THQ—and published by Nintendo. "StarCraft 64" was released on June 13, 2000 in the USA and Europe. It was also released in Australia on May 25, 2001.
The musical score to "StarCraft" was composed by Blizzard Entertainment's composers. Glenn Stafford composed the Terran and Protoss in-game themes, while Derek Duke, who was a contracted composer at the time, wrote all the in-game music for the Zerg. The cinematic scores were composed by Stafford and Hayes. Hayes also collaborated with Stafford on one of the Protoss in-game tracks. Tracy W. Bush provided additional support in composing. The musical score of the game was received well by reviewers, who have described it as "appropriately melodic and dark" and "impressive", with one reviewer noting that some of the music owed much of its inspiration to Jerry Goldsmith's score for the film "Alien". The first official game soundtrack, "StarCraft: Game Music Vol. 1", was released in 2000, comprising tracks from both "StarCraft" and "", as well as a sizable portion of remix tracks and music inspired by "StarCraft", created by several South Korean disc jockeys. The soundtrack was distributed by Net Vision Entertainment. In September 2008, Blizzard Entertainment announced that a second soundtrack, "StarCraft Original Soundtrack", had been released on iTunes. This soundtrack consisted entirely of the original music from "StarCraft" and "Brood War", both from in-game themes to music used in the cinematic cut scenes.