I didn’t mention this before when I brought up WC3 in another thread on the games sublemmy, but the horde are explicitly colonizing new lands, and one of the things you’re told about are the indigenous races you need to wipe out who are conveniently violent and monstrous.
Additionally I’m watching some story about the Zul’amani trolls, and they get into a war with medieval europe themed elves who are there to colonize their lands and lose, and it’s the trolls who are portrayed as the villains who you get to raid to defeat. The elves are also portrayed as being desperate for land to live on as though they’re victims and are forced to do this, and apparently now both see the lands in the area as their ancestral home.
I’ve played other games as well (that I can’t recall off the top of my head) that also seemed to play the whole helping colonizers clear out the local populations, and the local populations are conveniently violent, monstrous, and unwilling to cooperate or coexist.
Being told to kill off indigenous races/populations really leaves a disgusting feeling; this whole cowboys and indians thing really runs deep doesn’t it? Gary Gygax seems to have been of that sort as well, saying of some genocidal general in the past that he ‘observed’ that ‘nits make lice’ in regards to slaughtering every man, woman and child in a nearby native American settlement (again, referring to it as ‘observed’ rather than it being his opinion, as though it was a fact), and apparently his son had made some disgusting comments in regards to native Americans as well.


Making them pale white would’ve made them look really cool without being racist, but thankfully it backfired on them because people fell in love with drow rather than saw them as a faction to hate; everyone wanted to play as their own Drizzt.
In general though evil races have always been ripe for problems; they’re always portrayed as technologically underdeveloped and tribal, and then when they had an evil race technologically equivalent to wealthy human settlements? They’re black.