And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
At the time those cinematics were top tier. Blizzard continued to have some of the best cinematics until Warcraft 3, after that I believe they and many other game developers switched to in-engine cutscenes because the engine visuals were good enough. That said, Blizzard does still make prerendered cutscenes for Diablo 4 and WoW, but they're just... not as impressive anymore as they used to be back then. And a big part of that is that they're not that much different from in-engine. There's some games (FFVII Remake/Rebirth) that have pre-rendered cutscenes that are visually indistinguishable from in-engine cutscenes, but they pre-rendered them because of e.g. wider / zoomed out camera angles or lots of effects.
