There are difficult videogame launches. There are servers collapsing under millions of players, catastrophic performance problems, progression bugs and save files vanishing into the ether. And then there’s forgetting to include the videogame.

On August 25th, Ubisoft finally released the original Heroes of Might and Magic III on Steam, complete with both Armageddon’s Blade and The Shadow of Death. For someone like me, who sacrificed an absolutely horrifying number of childhood hours to one of the finest strategy games ever made, this should have been an effortless win. And Ubisoft could do with some wins.

Somehow, Ubisoft fucked it up. Because of course they did. It’s Ubisoft.

Early buyers noticed something was slightly amiss when their shiny new copy of a 27-year-old strategy game finished downloading suspiciously quickly. And by “suspiciously quickly,” I mean the entire download weighed just 23.49 KB.

Instead of Heroes of Might and Magic III, players received a lone Heroes3.exe file. Launching it didn’t reveal Queen Catherine, Erathia, skeleton armies or the glorious sound of another week rolling around so I can recruit an irresponsible number of Marksmen.

Nope. It opened a command prompt.

“Dummy executable. Ensure that you are on the right steam branch.”

Ah.

It appears somebody did not, in fact, ensure that they were on the right Steam branch.

One Steam reviewer dubbed it “23.49 KB of pure nostalgia” and the “Best CMD prompt simulator of 2026,” which seems difficult to argue with.

The problem persisted for around ten hours before France woke up and 770MB update began appearing, so this is almost certainly going to become nothing more than a funny launch-day footnote. Nobody’s save file has been detonated and no lasting catastrophe appears to have occurred. Ubisoft just managed to briefly release Heroes of Might and Magic III: Command Prompt Edition.

Twenty-seven years of development time and they still needed another ten hours.

Still, all’s well that ends well. Heroes III is finally on Steam, the actual game appears to have found its way into the download, and one of the greatest strategy games ever made gets another chance to steal hundreds of hours from another generation.

Easy win for Ubisoft. Eventually.