Blizzard was making its own Minecraft game set in the Warcraft universe

Some time ago, Blizzard was working on its own take on Minecraft...and it would've been set in the Warcraft universe.

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The games industries' collective graveyard is filled with interesting skeletons. Hundreds of games get cancelled and scrapped throughout the years, and Activision-Blizzard has its own collective pile of would-be ideas. One of these games sounds like it could've given Minecraft a run for its money...if it were actually executed, that is.

In his new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, games reporter Jason Schreier delved into the secrets of one of the most iconic brands in gaming history. One snippet highlights one of the more impressive ideas that Blizzard had at one time: Project Avalon, which would've essentially been a mashup of Minecraft and Blizzard's own billion-dollar Warcraft franchise.

"Avalon is one of the big cancelled titles that I'm revealing in this book that has not been made public before," Schreier said in a recent interview with MinnMax.

"This is Warcraft Minecraft, which people have described to me as incredibly fun to play. They were bummed out that it was cancelled. That was in development for a good amount of time, some 2 years or so."

"Jay Wilson was working on that, the much-maligned director of Diablo III, and Mike Booth, who was a lead on Left 4 Dead, was also working on that project. It was cancelled, I believe, in 2015 or so."

As fate would have it, both Blizzard and Minecraft-maker Mojang are now owned by Microsoft. So the odds of anything like Avalon ever happening might be slim--Minecraft was far and away Microsoft's most valuable gaming property, but Call of Duty now has the mantle.

For now, gamers will have to get their Avalon fix by loading up Warcraft in Minecraft via mods and player-created software.