The original Warcraft and Diablo are now available from Battle.net

Blizzard tend to do a good job maintaining even their oldest games, releasing patches sometimes decades after their original release. I therefore assumed that 1994's Warcraft: Orcs And Humans and 1997's Diablo were available via the studio's store and launcher, Battle.net.

Not so, it turns out, because Blizzard have just announced they've added them today, and with working multiplayer for both.

A blog post detailing the Warcraft release explains that it features, alongside the singleplayer campaign, 21 bonus maps to play in skirmishes against the computer, and a two-player versus mode.

A similar post for the Diablo announcement lays out the basics of the genre-defining action RPG, including the ability to play it in four-player co-op. Both these posts also include quick start guides to provide the basic instructions for how to play, as would have been included in their original paper manuals.

Diablo is £8 from the store while Warcraft is just £5. For my money, the former holds up better than the latter, so the £3 extra seems worth it.

Both these games have been available via GOG for a while, with Diablo first arriving in digital form in 2019.

Those were probably happier times, given Blizzard have suffered a round of layoffs this month as part of sweeping cuts by new owner Microsoft. Those cuts involved the cancellation of a Blizzard survival game that had been in development for years.