About

Jorvik Systems is a long-overdue return to an old passion: digging deep into the internals of some of the most iconic games of the '90s — WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, WarCraft II, and StarCraft. These titles defined a generation of real-time strategy gaming, and for many of us, they also opened the door to a world of creativity through modding the games, changing their visuals and dynamics.

Back some 25 years ago, the community reverse-engineered file formats, hex-edited game data, created tools and programs to make it all more accessible, and shared our findings on forums, chats, and IRC channels. It was a different era — less organized, perhaps, but full of curiosity and ingenuity.

This site is my attempt to reconnect with that world. The hope is that this site will grow to host format specifications of files, modding tools, old mod files, tutorials and guides. The hope is also to present tools that hopefully are cross-platform and open source, so that anyone can use them.

The site itself draws much inspiration from the legendary Camelot Systems, or CamSys, and the design is indeed visually very similar. CamSys, its members and forum were in many ways the driving force in the modding community of WarCraft II and StarCraft, although plenty of sites, groups and other forums followed in its wake.

Whether you're a veteran modder from the old days, someone who wishes to understand how the games and formats worked, or just someone with a soft spot for late-90s PC gaming, the hope is that you’ll find something interesting here.

Let’s dive in — there's a lot of magic buried in those old bytes.