I have an idea for how Brad Chan and his friends could make a billion dollars.
Last fall I put a post on these forums where I mentioned how I created a Warcraft 3 emulation engine on a different game engine – LibGDX for Java – and how it was fun and it almost played Warcraft III, but it was missing things like the various ability implementations and obscure stuff that makes Warcraft III be Warcraft III. Obviously that’s because it was all clean-room re-engineered by a couple of guys, and it’s not finished. But finishing it might be substantially harder than creating the initial prototype, because of design differences between the remake concept of “ability” and the original concept. So I posted on these forums that I was having more fun than your devs with this game by remaking it, and questioned the notion of ownership – is it really yours, maybe it’s mine? – and in the weeks that followed you guys posted a debug build which was really interesting. I don’t know if those events were related.
But if the Debug build was an attempt to give me the part of the code I was asking for so that I could use it to finish my emulator, in the end, reading debug symbols is kind of boring. It would be much nicer if you published the code of the game itself. I heard the news today that EA published a bunch of the code and open sourced Red Alert and the Command and Conquer or whatever.
Why doesn’t Blizzard do that with the Warcraft 3 RTS? Then, the nerds who want to play the game of modding Warcraft 3 wouldn’t have people telling them they should learn to use NSA debug symbol reader tools or whatever. Using the NSA tools is dumb. I downloaded one of those one time, and after I did a guy reached out to me on Discord and said, “Hey, you downloaded NSA debug tools. I was wondering if you’re skilled at using them and what you’re doing with it?” When you think about it, it makes sense that NSA is always watching. They’re always watching us, you know? Why should we have to think about that?
So please just publish the code of Warcraft III Patch 1.26 and redact the comments with the usernames. Nobody needs to know whether Frank Pearce is the one who wrote the Finger of Death ability. They just want to know how Finger of Death works, so that they can maintain Warcraft 3 custom games that Brad Chan might break sometimes if Brad is focused on making sure melee games work for Grubby.
So, then this gets to my billion dollar idea. The Russians and the Chinese are trying to take my rewrite of Warcraft III that I put on my GitHub and run this code on Android so that they would have an open source Warcraft III that plays on their phone. I think it’s really dumb and I didn’t really help them, because I’m not a phone user. But do you know why I’m not a phone user? Because the phone software doesn’t work. Because it was artificially kneecapped by your company for the last dozen years.
We should have World Editor on my phone. Maybe some MDX modeling tools to make a modified custom elven swordsman version of the Footman on my phone, so that I can develop the custom units for my Warcraft III mods while I’m sitting on a long plane flight. I have been in artificial, software-enforced suffering stuck in the past for so long, we all never even thought of this idea because it was assumed that you would stop us from making the custom games of Warcraft III like you always did, by keeping the code secret. This is 2025. Microsoft believes in ChatGPT and in a future where all code can be generated by AI, so at that point all code is open source. EA gets it, and they’re publishing the code of the Command and Conquer, the Red Alert, and all these things. There is no reason for them to make their customers suffer anymore.
But why do you want your customers to suffer, huh Brad Chan? Why do that? When something is wrong, make it right. I know you don’t have the money to make World Editor run on my phone. You can’t do that, because you don’t have enough money. You’re a poor Microsoft employee, and Microsoft is not a good company. But what if I told you that I do have enough money to do that, but if you would give me the source code so that I could port it instead of having to reinvent it? Obviously we all were working on reinventing it piece by piece inadvertently for the last few dozen years, but that’s very slow, you know?
And this gets me back to my idea. Once everybody could make an play War3 maps on their phone, you guys could step in and monetize that, probably. And phones are for the money anyway, isn’t that what you guys want? Do you guys not have phones? Like, really, do your developers all not have phones? Have you never wanted to attach the Succubus bat wings onto Jaina while you in the back seat on a car trip? Like, seriously?
So anyway, just open source the Warcraft III patch 1.26 and its map editor – the ones from the old days that aren’t secure anymore anyways, so you can leave a note in the GitHub of the game that says, “Don’t play this version online, it’s not secure, only use it offline” which is great and will cause all the people to have to play Reforged online still anyway (and it’s also true). But by open sourcing it like that, then the users would create the phone port, and they would get it done faster instead of using stupid NSA reverse engineer technology nonsense or other funny nasty things that nobody should use.
And that’s how you get a billion dollars by letting me play Warcraft III on my phone, without you even having to build the technology for it, because I already built a working prototype and I already killed a creep camp on my phone, but the Ogre Lord in that creep camp didn’t have Devotion Aura because I didn’t have the code for the abilities and all that other extra sugar that makes Warcraft III into Warcraft III.
Just go for it, you know you want to.