VCMI

About

Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia is a 1999 turn-based strategy game developed by Jon Van Caneghem through New World Computing and published by The 3DO Company, regarded as a cult classic of the genre. VCMI is an open-source, GPLv2-or-later recreation of the Heroes of Might and Magic III engine that extends it with new features and possibilities. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, includes full mod support with a dedicated map editor and documented mod/campaign/bonus file formats, and is community-translated into languages including Czech, Chinese, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

How it differs from the original

VCMI extends the original engine with new possibilities such as a touchscreen-friendly radial menu for town sieges and an enlarged spellbook, while still requiring the original Heroes III game data to run.

Getting started

It requires the original Heroes of Might and Magic III game data; platform-specific installation guides are provided for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Daily development builds are available in addition to the roughly three major releases per year.

Media

Licensing & legal

• VCMI's own source code is GPL version 2 or later, while its bundled game assets are separately licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 in a dedicated vcmi-assets repository.