In 2016, an unfinished build of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans leaked online and gave fans a look at what they had missed 18 years earlier. Animation Magic outsourced Lord of the Clans’ cutscenes to an animation studio in South Korea, but the work was clearly subpar even by 1998 standards. Many also felt that Blizzard’s adventure game puzzles were fairly generic and uninspired. Turns out, fans who had petitioned for Lord of the Clans’ release hadn’t missed much.
I was doubting this was an Internet error: In my talks with ex-employees who worked at CapDisc and Animation Magic, I learnt that Animation Magic was taken over by CapDisc in 1995, after working on John Dark: Psychic Eye on CD-i. CapDisc stopped business around 1997. Maybe the people behind it worked on it, but technically Animation Magic didn't exist anymore! At least, that was what I heard, but apparently this is not the complete story:
The game was in the end not released and cancelled. But it's interesting that this seems like the final efforts by development studio Animation Magic. We know Animation Magic from Link:Faces of Evil and Zelda:Wand of Gamelon, which they produced in 1993 for the CD-i. After that, they produced Mutant Rampage, also exclusively on CD-i and we have stories from old employees who worked on an unreleased CD-i project: John Dark: Psychic Eye. In our stories with these people, we learnt that Animation Magic was taken over by CapDisc after that, but CapDisc (Short for Capitol Multimedia) was by itself also taken down around 1998. It appears, they were again taken over by Vivendi, who took over more CD-i developers by that time. Vivendi was also owner of Blizzard. This is the reason how it cam to be that the new WarCraft game by Blizzard was supported by Animation Magic. The title was WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans but remained unreleased.
 |
| If you look closely you can resemble the Animation techniques as they used in Link: Faces of Evil and Mutant Rampage on CD-i |
Interesting quotes are in this article: "Blizzard's sister company, Capitol Multimedia" (=That's CapDisc) - "Blizzard partnered with a subdivision of Capitol Multimedia called Animation Magic" - It makes sense, perhaps they kept the name Animation Magic alive longer.
[Thanks, FLbond, Game Informer]