A Brief History of Starcraft:
How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
What is this about? Who are you?
Hello. Since you don’t know who I am, I’ll briefly let you know while I lay out the assumptions I’m making in this blog series. I’m taking myself as a decent estimation of the average Starcraft fan. So, I’m guessing you are most likely a male, probably in your twenties. You’re probably not a Grandmaster or pro player, so I’m guessing you’re platinum or below. There’s a good chance you haven’t been able to attend a major competition like an MLG or IPL, but have watched the streams online. Most importantly, I’m assuming that you began reading Team Liquid or other Starcraft community sites because of Starcraft II, and didn’t really follow the BW scene at all if you even knew it existed.
The last point is the one that inspired this idea. I am not a good Starcraft player, and know very little about BW other than apparently the Koreans were really good at that game too. I’m not a big eSports personality, I can’t program cool new things like Teevox or Wellplayed.tv, and I’m not especially good with Photoshop or writing funny SC-related songs like Temp0. I majored in history in college, which doesn’t have a whole lot of obvious applications as a Starcraft fan. All I learned how to do is research and write and teach about shit that happened which I wasn’t around for…
With that in mind, I decided to create a history of Starcraft as someone with little to no knowledge of the scene prior to SC2. In other words, this is by a noob and for the noobs. If you closely followed Starcraft and Brood War from the beginning, hopefully you will at least find some value in nostalgia (or can point me toward more sources or correct any mistakes), but you probably won’t learn too much you didn’t already know. In this blog series I’ll be going year by year with whatever information I can find to introduce the players, tournaments, and new developments that you and I missed out on. Please keep in mind that there is much more available information for later years, so this introductory entry will seem somewhat sparse. Hopefully - if anyone actually reads this - new Starcraft fans will have a bit more understanding of the community we’ve joined and the people that have helped make the current scene possible.
Starcraft – 1998
From Humble Beginnings
On March 31, 1998, Blizzard released the original Starcraft. Development had begun way back in 1996 with a very early version being shown at E3 that year. At that point the Zerg were known as the “Nightmarish Invaders” and the game in general was not well received.
Can you spot the overlord?
In 1997 the game became significantly more fleshed out, and significantly less purple. While there was still a lot of work to be done, the units and graphics turned into something that even those of us who didn’t play SC1 can (mostly) recognize.
Marines were originally called Marauders.
While Blizzard had hoped for a release in late 1997, they realized that the game needed further tweaking in order to live up to the hype created by Diablo and Warcraft II. At this point drones could actually fly, instead of just hovering slightly like they do now, marines could throw grenades, and each Zerg building had its own set of larva to produce the units it unlocked, like spire larva for mutalisks and spawning pool larva for zerglings.
Also, Firebats could start forest fires.
It is interesting to read reviews and discussions of Starcraft from as far back as 1996, because most of them mention the idea of three distinct, yet well balanced races that wouldn’t use a rock-paper-scissors model, but would instead have enough options to generally allow a better player to win using their preferred style.
When the game was finally released in March of 1998, it sold even better than previous Blizzard titles, with 1.5 million sales that year alone. To put that in perspective, games like Doom (1993), Quake II (1997), and Unreal Tournament (1999) have all sold around 1 million copies total since their releases. Starcraft was the best-selling PC game of the year, and continued the Blizzard streak of yearly #1 game releases.
If you’re like me, you probably spent 1998 in 7th or 8th grade, playing games like Metal Gear Solid, Star Fox 64, GoldenEye 007, Final Fantasy VII, or maybe even the demos of Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot 2 over and over when you couldn’t afford any real games. Compared to any of those games Starcraft had pretty terrible graphics, and so probably wasn’t as immediately appealing as the others. I had played Warcraft II some with my dad, but the graphics of games like Metal Gear Solid really started to raise my expectations of what games should look like. Most of my friends played the same games as I did, and so I never really got exposed to Starcraft and its deeper gameplay. Maybe if we had seen the trailer we would have been more interested.
Tournaments and Players
Had I been a Starcraft player from the very start, I might have known about things like the Professional Gamers League (sound familiar?) which even then had players like Iain “TillerMan” Girdwood flying from Scotland to New York to compete in early Starcraft tournaments after an online qualifier. The PGL also featured Quake II and gave out $7500 and a new computer to the winners of each game. Almost 14 years later, that still sounds like a pretty decent prize. Back when people were seriously concerned about Y2K bugs that would bring planes crashing to earth, and the looming apocalypse (we really dodged a bullet there) there were already people winning money by playing games, including Starcraft. It is also interesting to note that the PGL tournament took place about two weeks before the release of the Brood War expansion, so the scene had started to develop somewhat even before BW came out. WCG wouldn’t debut for a couple more years, and the OSL hadn’t yet begun, but players were already finding ways to challenge each other and get paid to do so.
As there were very few tournaments at this stage, information is hard to find. However, there was a Starcraft Brood War Beta Tournament that had its finals on the same day as the official BW release. On November 30, 1998, a Protoss player named ExecutorZileas defeated a Random player named Agent911 4-3 in the finals of a 16 man tournament, made up of the best players on the Blizzard ladder. Zileas went on to work for Blizzard on both Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, but some of you may know him better as the Design Director for League of Legends at Riot Games.
Cheating
1998 unfortunately also saw problems with both a resource hack and a map hack, usually accompanied by a virus which Blizzard themselves usually helped to remove for would-be hackers. Once those exploits were patched, many less noble ladder players moved on to win-trading, which was made very easy by the ability to have multiple “accounts” tied to the same battle.net user. In the third battle.net ladder season, nearly 10,000 accounts were reset due to win trading on the ladder, and there was an in-game bug which apparently made it so that Zerg drones were unkillable.
Random Facts
- Blizzard was sued over privacy issues due to a registry edit that apparently gathered information to be used to help sort out problems for users.
- At this time Blizzard had a Map of the Week feature that produced maps which were sometimes adopted for the ladder or later on for tournaments.
- The Zerg were originally called the Nightmarish Invaders, which was changed to Zurg, and then finally to Zerg. Zurg was rejected because they were the enemies of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story.
- [9]Grrrr… spent a good deal of time atop the ladder before leaving the [9] clan. You may recognize [9] as the clan Day[9] has expressed admiration for when explaining the origins of his name.
- Apparently Zerg was really good against Protoss prior to the release of Brood War and the associated balance patch, causing Zileas and others to retire.
- Several new units were released with Brood War, including the Medic, Lurker, Corsair, and Dark Templar. They also added an armor upgrade and a speed upgrade for Ultralisks.
- Sources say the original Starcraft had something called LAN support, where an internet connection wasn’t required to play games. I think this information must be part of an elaborate troll or we’d have the same thing in SC2.
Note
This entry only covers the period from March 31, 1998 through December 31, 1998. With Brood War not released until November 30th of that year, the scene was still extremely small. Future entries will have much more (and likely more interesting) information as the community continued to grow and evolve.
Sources
I’m not going to format these in any particular way because styles can vary so much. I include them out of habit, and in case anyone wants to look at old stuff on their own. Just google this and you’ll find it.
Chan Chun Yew, “Reasons for getting excited over Starcraft” - New Straits Times (June 18, 1998)
Matt Richtel, “Nail-Biting Time in the Game Arena” - New York Times (Nov 19, 1998)
Ron Dulin, “Starcraft Preview” - Gamespot (May 1, 1996)
wiki.teamliquid.net
Courtesy of the Wayback Machine:
sclegacy.com
scinfinity.com
gamers.com
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