Hey everyone!
Custom maps have always been one of the coolest parts of Warcraft III. I’m curious—what’s the oldest custom map you remember playing?
Was it something classic like Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Tower Defense, Footmen Frenzy, or maybe a more obscure map?
I’d love to hear your stories—what made that map so memorable for you?
I don’t know about the oldest or the one I played first, but one of the first I remember is Mort’s Power TD. It was fast, very simple, standard, and I had some usual pattern I would play. It was kind of satisfying when you could clear the wave completely. Most towers could be upgraded as far as I remember and you had to be aware of air waves that you would mostly need special anti-air towers for. It was hosted quite often, but many maps were back then. But I also remember it because it was one of the first maps that I looked into with the World Editor to learn about map scripting like how the wave system works.
Another map(s) were old versions of (The) Weakest Link. The one that is known today came much later. In the old ones you had player units sit around a campfire or similar and you did not have to click the unit whose sound you heard but type its name (exactly), so you needed to learn the English names and I think even with the apostrophes but lowercase like kel’thuzad. You only had one life, so the first time you would not give an answer in time, or the wrong one (even with the slightest typo), you would be out and could only watch the remaining players. Still, you would often find 1 or 2 games of it, since competitive players would remake multiple games in a series.
Footmen Frenzy was very popular when it was released or when I got to know it, but the general genre was actually called Footmen Wars. Before and after, there were other Footmen Wars maps that were not forks of Footmen Frenzy. Some friends and I myself worked on other such maps.
Warcraft: Rogue RPG
That one is definitely the oldest custom map I can clearly remember playing.
It was such an awesome map for its time — the terrain would randomly generate every time you started a new game, you’d get different quests each run, and you could even choose between a small or large map when loading in. For early WC3 custom map tech, it felt way ahead of everything else I was playing.
It’s one of those maps that stuck with me because nothing else since has quite captured that same vibe.
For anyone curious, here’s the Hive link to the old project:
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/warcraft-rogue.79204/