Future creators of the game worked in the startup company Silicon & Synapse, which later became Blizzard, and at this time played a lot of computer games. One of them was Dune II, which created a "spark", and received inspiration in the future was created by Warcraft. One of the creators of Warcraft, Patrick Wyatt (persistent.). notes that Dune II was significantly different from the released at the same time as Dune and basically determined the game design that were created over the Warcraft franchise, which did not change significantly until Starcraft II. Blizzard employees played intensively in Dune II at lunchtime and after work, trying to identify the strengths and weaknesses of races, as well as find game strategies and tactics. Despite the fact that the game brought a lot of fun, it was noticed that there are a number of drawbacks that are better to fix. First of all, the game offered only single-player mode against the artificial intelligence of the computer, and the gameplay is very well suited for simultaneous play of several players. This was ensured by the fact that the game was in real time, and, unlike turn-based strategies, you could play at the same time. It was this shortcoming that became the starting point for the creation of Warcraft, the development of which began without any attempt to design game mechanics, technical requirements, budget planning or personnel search. Design was not even "on the napkin". The employees themselves called this mode of operation "business plan of one day" (FR. business plan du jour) [2].

The creation of the game began in September 1993[18] when the project was made by one programmer Patrick Wyatt, and the development was carried out without using any graphical resources. Were taken a screenshot of Dune II as the template interface, and on its basis was created the game engine, allowing the initial stage to perform a scrolling map, drawing sprites, combat units and their animations, it was the event Manager for mouse and keyboard, games Manager for the implementation of the behavior of units, we controlled the user interface. The first version after the implementation did not allow even to create new units (which was done by teams from the console), but it was possible to play one player. All subsequent additions were introduced into the game gradually. At this time, there was no implementation plan, and there were no milestones, and decisions were made by the developers themselves, which motivated them very much[2].

The first unique feature of Warcraft was the ability to select several units and give orders to all of them at once. This was not in Dune II, where you can only give commands to each unit separately, which made the gameplay more monotonous. Providing a multiple-selection have significantly improved the gameplay of tactical battles. According to the creators of the game, Warcraft was the first game in which this principle was implemented. The developers themselves note that the appearance of this method of control affected applications such as MacDraw (eng.). and MacDraft (persistent.)., used at the time on Mac OS. Initially, the game was made so that it was possible to allocate any number of units and give them orders, but in the future, monitoring of the gameplay showed that the management of crowds of hundreds of units becomes very simple, as well as the mass number of moving combat units led to algorithmic problems finding a way. In this regard, the developers have limited the number of simultaneously allocated four units that, as a consequence, demanded of the player to pay more attention to the tactical component of the battles. According to the developers, in the sequel Dune II Command and Conquer could allocate an arbitrary number of units, but there was no limit, which had an impact on the gameplay. While Patrick Wyatt said[2]: