Footmen Frenzy and Footmen Wars: a history

Footmen Wars is one of the oldest custom game genres in Warcraft III, and Footmen Frenzy is its best known map. This is the story from the first maps to the games still hosted in 2026, with the people who made them named and a source for every claim.

Checked against its sources on 25 October 2026.

2002: Warcraft III and its World Editor

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos came out in the United States on July 3, 2002. It shipped with a World Editor for making "custom scenarios and maps," and players shared what they made on Battle.net.¹

The first Footmen Wars maps were footmen only, and heroes came later. In what StrategyWiki calls Classic Footmen Wars, each player started with a wisp, built a base by picking one of four races, bought one hero for that race and revived him at the base. It was "at one time very popular," though often unbalanced.²

No source we found gives the year of the very first Footmen Wars map. StrategyWiki files the genre under Reign of Chaos, the game before the expansion, and a player on Blizzard's forums remembers that "the general genre was actually called Footmen Wars."^2,3

2003 and 2004: Footmen Frenzy

The expansion, The Frozen Throne, came out on July 1, 2003.¹ Footmen Frenzy 1.0 and 1.3 followed in late 2003 ("In 1.3, skeleton mages ruled the game"). In May 2004 versions 1.9A to 1.9Z came out, about one a day for a month, and on June 1, 2004 came 2.0, "the first polished version."⁴

Frenzy changed the old formula. There was no builder wisp: you started with a barracks ready to go. Everyone began with neutral Tier Zero footmen before picking a race, you could switch races sideways, and heroes came from shared taverns instead of one hero per race.²

Who made it

The sources credit different people, so here is each one's version.

The blog at urizone.net, written ten years after 2.0 by someone who wrote documentation and patch notes for the map (the site is Brian Uri!'s): "Originally created by Fox^1," with development taking a "very open-sourcey turn" across several mapmakers.⁵
The NoHunters Footmen Frenzy Compendium, written by CattleBruiser: "Footmen Frenzy by HatoUP."⁶
StrategyWiki: made mostly by TheBigGame (formerly HatoUP), Metal.Bark, Cattlebruiser and the rest of the Clan NoHunters team.⁷
The Frenzy wiki: Fox, Metal.Bark, Cattlebruiser and the rest of the NoHunters and Clan HALP team.⁸

We would rather credit too many people than too few. If you were part of it and we have something wrong, email us at support@tinwhistlegames.com and we will fix it.

2005 to 2010: the NoHunters years

The Compendium called Footmen Frenzy "one of the longest-running crazes on USEast and USWest, even gaining a feature spot in Blizzard's Spotlight Map program in 2005."⁹

The map kept growing. Version 4.0 came on October 30, 2005. Version 5.0, on July 24, 2006, added a fifth tier and tier timers. Versions 6.0 and 6.1, in August 2007, added a game mode menu and new terrain, and 7.0 added a stats system "for stats and Frenzy ladder."¹⁰ A fan blog announced 7.0 in May 2010.¹¹

The clan's old site, nohunters.com, is no longer theirs: the address belongs to an unrelated site now. That is why every NoHunters link on this page goes to an archived copy.¹²

2010 to 2026: Windaleblizard, miRaculix and Reforged

The Footmen Frenzy hosted today comes from a different branch. The Reforged map database lists its line as Windaleblizard's Footmen Frenzy 5.4, then a 5.4 Single Draft edit by Madd0x in March 2010, then the 5.5.3 builds, credited "Original Map created by Windaleblizard. Map improved by miRaculix," and then Reforged Footmen.¹³ So its version numbers carry on from Windaleblizard's 5.4, not from the NoHunters line.

On Warcraft III: Reforged it became an official featured map, kept up by miRaculix: 39 versions up to 5.9.6 in November 2022, more than 70 heroes, a Discord of "over 500 players," and weekly tournaments on Thursdays and Fridays on the Americas server.¹⁴

It did not stop there. Version 7.8.9 went up on Epic War on November 2, 2024, "Map by miRaculix," with its Discord and its leaderboard on wc3stats.¹⁵ Games on 7.9.9 were posted to YouTube in 2026.¹⁶ The wc3stats archive holds 3,165 uploaded Reforged Footmen Frenzy replays.¹⁷

The forks and the cousins

Footmen Frenzy XV by Shadowdestroyer of Clan MoRD, a NoHunters-based fork with 30 more heroes and options like all random and no teching.² It was still being streamed in 2026.¹⁸
Ultimate Footmen by MrApples and VG_Emblem: five races with seven tiers each.²
Footman Frenzy by Allmighty Durdell Lumapass: 239 versions on the Reforged map database, the newest 21.7.¹⁹
Custom Hero Footies, played in a W3Champions tournament in 2021.²⁰
A Footmen Frenzy port for Dota 2 by Izo, Noya and MMM, posted in September 2014. Its page still shows 184,477 subscribers, though Steam has removed the item.²¹
Don't Feed by Ravinia, a standalone game on Steam from 2017 that names "Footman Frenzy" as an inspiration.²²
Legion TD by Lisk, a Warcraft III cousin where gold buys defenders and lumber sends attackers. Wikipedia calls it "a foundational work of the auto-battler genre," and Legion TD 2 went standalone in 2017.²³

Why we built one for the browser

People have asked for a footies game they can just open and play for more than ten years. A Steam thread from January 2015 asks for Footmen Frenzy "to become a standalone game," and people were still replying in 2024 and 2025: "Still waiting for this."²⁴

Footmen Wars Online is our try. It is a new game with our own armies, art and rules, and it borrows nothing from the maps beyond the genre itself. It exists because of everyone above: Fox, HatoUP and TheBigGame, Metal.Bark, CattleBruiser, the NoHunters and HALP teams, Windaleblizard, Madd0x, miRaculix, Shadowdestroyer, MrApples, VG_Emblem, Allmighty Durdell Lumapass, Izo, Noya, MMM, Ravinia, and every player who hosted a lobby. Thank you.

Sources

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