First year sales were on the order of 100x that amount, quite the surprise for everyone at Blizzard!

Patrick Wyatt - game developer and programmer (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Guild Wars, battle.net) - co-founder of ArenaNet - blogger: www.codeofhonor.com

Edit: remove backticks

Which brings me to my next point, which is that the community aspect of StarCraft is a huge part of why it remained popular for so long. As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced. One little known fact about StarCraft is that the last balance patch released by Blizzard was in 2001, at the early beginnings of the pro scene. After that, the game was kept fresh and balanced by community map makers.

Combine that with people who created websites where you could follow news about Korean pro scene (TeamLiquid has its roots here), talk with other people about StarCraft, and other people who organized tournaments and did everything else; and you get a formula which almost ensures the longetivity of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people playing and following this game in 20 years time. I know I'll be one of them.

[0] - https://github.com/TheEngineeringBay/Awesome-Broodwar-Resour...

Dota, and so LOL, is often thought of as something coming from Warcraft 3 Defense of the Ancient, but the concept really started as a starcraft mod as well.

Of lot of the gaming culture is born on the original Battle.net.

SC 1 was one of the most influential game ever created.

My career was launched by StarCraft! I've never been to high school or college. I played waaaaay too much StarCraft in my teens, and ended up writing a bot to maintain the chat room my friends were in.

The entire network stack had been reverse engineered, criticized, and documented if you knew where to look. Eventually that documentation made it to the public.

I interviewed with Blizzard a decade ago. I heard one of the interviewers state that the community documentation [0] is better than Blizzard's own internal documentation.

I now write software to fly drones. It's fun as hell and I'm glad of ye olde Blizzard. I know some are here on HN -- thank you guys for being awesome :)

[0]: https://bnetdocs.org/

Starcraft came out when I was a kid, the online community of Battle.net is really what got me into programming and development.

Thank you for the fun memory I wouldn’t have found otherwise, his birthday is around the corner and you’ve made my day.

A lot of very clever custom maps ("use map settings" / UMS) were made.

MOBA genere spawned from a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of strife. Starcraft also had a map called "the unknown" which is basically Among Us - made years ago.

There were "turret defense" maps, RPG maps, maps where you controlled one unit and tried to dodge things (bound maps) and many other maps that just changed the balance.

In the golden times players didnt have to play the cutthroat 1:1 all the timr - you could spend days playing custom maps (archives have tens of thousands of them), custom campaigns, modes with more players like 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4, or even 8 player everyone for themself.

Apart from "difficult" maps, there was a whole community playing maps with (nearly) unlimited resources - "fastest maps" and "big game hunters" (BGH). Those maps were easier so no "ladder anxiety" by having to play the best all the time.

Starcraft 1 gave a lot of freedom to have fun. You didnt have to participate in the incredibly difficult duels. You could play a custom map, or some 3v3 with your friends - where overall skill level was lower, but fun level was high.

Killing custom maps is in my opiniin one of the reasons why Starcraft 2 failed. Blizzard wanted to capitalize on them, but didnt know how. In Starcraft Brood War there was this game list - you could select UMS mode and pick from probably 100 open games. In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.

I guess Blizzard was unhappy that Warcraft 3 spawned the whole DOTA game - which was also a custom map.

Regarding hacking - many people learned java writing bots for Diablo 2.

5 years ago when I played SC2 for the first time there was plenty of (iirc) “Arcade” maps which were UMS, and I’m pretty sure, community made. Are you perhaps talking about early days of SC2 when that still wasn’t a thing or? One map I was most impressed by and had lots of fun playing it, was called “Assassins”. I won’t explain what it is, but if someone took it to develop a game based on it, I strongly believe(d) that it’d be another hit game that spawned from SC

Last time I tried SC2 arcade there was a list o hundreds of maps with zero players inside and you had to pray that some other players wanted to play the same map as you. So you would have to coordinate by a forum or friendlist to even play a game. So arcade was an empty desert.

Killing the "currently open games list" was such a antipattern... does SC2 have it now?

They released it when the online connections were terrible, then everyone left before they got good.

They stopped following the fans and community and started to push for business plans.

It worked, they made tons of money.

But I stopped admiring them.

They deliberately hindered the release of Starcraft 2 by releasing the online experience completely unfinished. No clans, no chat (at all), no PMing, no custom games. Nothing. It was like that for several years.

At that point, with 3 years of hype for the game, people came, played a bit of 1v1 then left. It was a botched job. Blizzard died with the release of SC2.

+1. The first time on bnet venturing into one of those BGH games, I was like, what the hell is this? Loved those custom maps.

Use map settings are the only thing keeping sc2 alive right now.

The game is now free to play which attracted a bunch of players who don't really know how to play melee

The particularly stupid thing is the map editor for SC2 is ridiculously powerful, but afaik nothing interesting came out of SC2 custom map scene.

I remember it being Javascript, not Java. I forget the name of the tools involved, but I do remember creating a lot of Javascript bindings in C or C++, so that scripting engines would have interfaces to various bits of game engine code.

What? Starcraft 2 was a commercial and critical success, selling 6 million copies. It wasn't as successful as the original (11 million), but hardly a failure. It was the leading esports game before MOBAs took over.

The modding scene as we knew it is dead, also for the FPS genre. There are several explanations: games becoming technically more complex, commercial practices, cheating being taken more seriously, gameplay being more refined, with many of the good ideas having already being turned into their own games, the indie scene going for purpose made engines rather than mods, etc...

There’s something really unique with this game, I feel no other RTS has the same depth. I plan on returning to this game when I retire, in 20 years. See you then.

Some things were basically perfected back then.

IIRC the box stated 100MHz Pentium minimum, but we found for LAN sessions that you really wanted a 200MHz MMX CPU to never suffer slowdown.

I worked at another game studio at the time of release and all our titles under production were 3D.

We played the hell out of it at LAN parties but felt that technically it already was dated.

The low polygon count 3D games of 1998 were still not aesthetically superior to 2D games.

Even if you had a GPU back than (better known at the time as "graphics accelerator"), the graphics were not that good.

Add into that the different domestic cryptography requirements, and you get a lot of explanation of the uniqueness of the Korean computing landscape.

Manga and anime were available as well, as long as they were translated and adapted to local references accordingly. Dragon Ball was available by 1989 officially[2] and Crayon Shin-chan by 1995[3]. Music and regular films were the most impacted since Japanese language could not be kept in media.

Reading through the Wikipedia article for it[4], it's quite incomplete as it makes it sound like all things Japanese were banned in Korea. At least for games, anime, and manga, by mid-90s, quite a lot were available officially. While a bit biased (a whole separate issue about Namuwiki[5]), here's a perspective on the history of it if you can read Korean (or want to read through a translator)[6]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_C6azkQ7Mw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBHMmDBKuE [2] https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%93%9C%EB%9E%98%EA%B3%A4%EB%B3%BC#s-1... [3] https://namu.wiki/w/%ED%81%AC%EB%A0%88%EC%9A%A9%20%EC%8B%A0%... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_influence_on_Korean_c... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namuwiki [6] https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%9D%BC%EB%B3%B8%20%EB%8C%80%EC%A4%91%...

Maybe others... that said, anyone that pays attention to both games knows that the lack of complexity in unit and macro mechanics in SC2 leaves room for other actions, such as more intense "micro" mechanics. Neither game is more demanding then the other, it turns out in both games you never run out of things to do.

Personally I think that was a technical limitation of the first game and a huge ergonomic improvement in the second.

Other things like having groups of buildings on hotkeys means you don’t have to go back to your base to order more units and set the rally point (where units go when they’re built) for all those buildings at once. This makes StarCraft to be an insanely micro-mechanic intensive game at high levels.

In the early implementation of Warcraft 1 (1993-ish) I made it possible to select all the units on-screen at once with drag-select, and even more by scrolling and shift-clicking or shift-click-dragging.

Allen Adham (president of Blizzard, and exec producer for Warcraft) argued convincingly that only 4 units (for War 1) should be selected at a time. I argued against it pretty vociferously at the time … and in later days (post launch, most likely) came around to his way of thinking. Attacking with a superfluid of units takes less skill than selecting troops in small batches, and so requires to use more intent & skill.

Warcraft 2 allowed 9 units to be selected, and StarCraft more.

On the unit selection, a personal view on the situation is that nigh-instantaneous unit commands and obedience approaches valley of the dolls. It becomes too much like Wargames calculating theoretical death scenarios, abstracted from the issues of actual army logistics.

It takes some non-zero time. Units are not always doing exactly what they're supposed to. The fog of war is often worse not better than the game abstraction.

Starcraft 2's F2 to select the whole army on the map is the other extreme and where it eventually landed right (I think that was introduced in a SC2 expansion, it was not a launch feature?)

After that I stopped playing Starcraft but when I was in high school I picked it up again and started playing online. The regular matches were cool but the coolest matches were "custom scenarios", my favorite being "mouse hunt". It was a scenario where one team had the weakest players and the other team had the strongest players but the weak team could create barriers that the strong team couldn't destroy. From there the small team would slowly build up and defeat the stronger team or the strong team would wipe everyone out before they could.

It's been years since I played the OG Starcraft but I think I'll be picking it up again soon. It's just such a damn good game and it's really stood the test of time where even if you pick it up today it doesn't feel like a dated game, Blizzard made a truly timeless game with Starcraft and that's not an easy thing to do.

Never played Starcraft II but from what I heard they mostly kept to the original formula and many folks love that game.

Does anybody know the current state of Battle.net emulation for the older non-Remastered game? The bnetd drama was twenty years ago at this point and I would like to be able to play online without the Microsoft-Vivendi-Activision-Zenimax-Blizzard Borg having any say in it. RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

I prefer to patch only up to 1.15.x to keep network compatibility with the Classic Mac OS version of the game :)

It's a project that few of us started almost a decade ago to ensure the longevity of this game. We don't try to emulate Battle.net at all, but instead we take only the gameplay itself and reimplement everything else ourselves.

It's a work in progress, so please let us know what you'd like to see in there that's currently missing if you do check it out.

There is PVPGN, which has recent activity: https://github.com/pvpgn

Microsoft owns both GitHub and all Blizzard IP, so it's only a matter of time before they send a DMCA takedown order to themselves to remove this copyright-infringing material :)

Near as I can tell, circumventing the access restrictions to enable netplay on a video game that is no longer distributed is not a DMCA exemption. (Circumventing DRM for a game whose DRM servers have been shut down is an exemption for local play only.)

You can't copyright a protocol.

So long as these systems aren't enabling pirating these classic games they are free and clear.

Iirc there was a games server that emulated a bunch of thing including starcraft. I'm drawing a blank here.

That's what it was for me.

Additionally, 2d enables more / exaggerated visual effects (like tank shot blast) and consistent visual sprites.

Gameplay-wise, it is still in an incredible place. New builds are still being developed, not just one-off cheese builds but legitimate new approaches to matchups. Depending on matchup and player, you might watch a game where the core build hasn't changed in 15 years or a game that would be unrecognizable from 3 years ago.

Also, I would love for this guy to do a deep dive on the SC:BW approach to balance, which is map-based rather than based on traditional unit-based balance changes. This way the community is effectively able to balance the game themselves.

Yes, that it something really important that the modern landscape of competitive gaming lost and the frequency of patching increasing. Not just in BW, older fighting games, especially those arcade based ones, people found ways (which sometimes blur the lines between exploit or technique) to keep pushing the bounders. Things like Kara-cancels in 3s, were one is using a mechanic meant to facilitate the throw input to extend the range of the throw. Or wave dashing. It is wild how even character tier lists changed in the original SmashBros 64.

And also how people adapt to this meta changing discoveries, like the bisu-build in BW or when Ricki Ortiz unleashed v-cancel in sfa2!

Kara-cancel is a mechanic that lets you extend the range of your moves, in 3s is used for throws.

So the input for throws in 3s is lp+lk. Now, what happens if while one is trying to press the buttons at the same time they press one slighty before the other? A move will start to come out and then you can't throw because you are doing another move. To make it easier to input throws, devs made so that _any_ move can be canceled into a throw in the first 5 frames of the move. 5 frames is 5/60ths of a second.

Separate to that, some moves move the character forward. Ej. Chunli's HK. So people figured out that if you press a move that moved your character forward and then canceled that into a throw you can extend the effective range of your throw.

Mind you doing this means pressing a button 83 milliseconds before the other one. Which is of course not something you can do by thinking about it, instead you learn to position your hand in a way so that when you move it down together one finger lands before the other two. The name kara-cancels comes from the Japanese word for empty, because you are canceling a move that never came out.

Now I don't know the history, whether the mechanic was first found in 3s and then in SF2T or not, but it is an example of a mechanic intended to ease the input of something being used to expand the toolkit of a character.

V-cancel (not sure if that was the name ppl used for it, didn't play sfa2) refers to the fact that in sfa2 the number of frames to go from standing to downblock is more that the number of frames a character needs to go from standing to a low attack if the character is in v-ism. This means that if two characters are standing next to each other and one activates their v super, they have a guaranteed hit.

This was first used by Ricki Ortiz in a tournament setting in a finals and that is how it became wildly know. The story of it was documented in Sirlin's Play to Win book, which is how I learned about it. https://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Anyway appreciate the indepth answer.

There were a lot of units that could single handedly turn the tide in the right scenario. Vulture mines could stop a rush in their tracks, storm could wipe an army, dark swarm could negate a dug in fortification, a reaver in a shuttle could take out all production.

It led to crazy chaos and it was an incredibly entertaining spectacle.

Easy to hardest to play: Protoss, Zerg, Terran

Best when mastered: Terran, Zerg, Protoss

I wasn’t tapped into the pro/competitive side so I’m sure it played out differently for them.

Does anyone know what's the special sauce?

The commenter was talking about army movements, units which actually collide with each other.

I also wish we saw more AI leagues and gameplay

One of the best games of all time.

and no lan play.

wonder if that kind of friction kills things.

The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.

If you didn't intend to play on Battle.Net or play the single player campaigns, you never needed more than the Spawn installation

I would seriously question if these were actually pirates copies at all ...

Or maybe they did, and people like you and me were just left behind. Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.

I think this is it more than anything. If all you know is "quick match" matchmaking, it's hard to realize what you're missing. LAN parties were really awesome.

If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.

Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.

Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.

If you already need permission to even boot your PC, what more is it to need permission to start a game?

It’s a sad age we’re living in.

Also, it is still interesting to see the diversity of grandmasters' personal play styles. In a mature game, one would expect it to converge to a single "optimal" playstyle. Yet, even after the dust of a new balance patch settles, it is impressive. And for a reminder, SC2: Legacy of the Void is over 8 years old.

General question, how do you balance between trying to get everyone's feedback vs just being more fast and efficient?especially in the early stages where time is usually pretty critical

In some markets it's better to be slower to market with a better product, e.g. Apple

Of course people figured this out and managed to exploit it for other purposes, but those were seen to be too minor to bother fixing.

I did check was there any follow-up on the story and found out the guy in question has since gotten into NFTs, an irony so great I can only laugh.

I'd say M.A.X. was no less tactically intricate - albeit through infinite configurability of things.

The first residential availability of cable modems was by @Home Network in 1996 and served only the San Francisco Bay Area. By the end of 1996, @Home Network had 20,000 users.

I highly doubt you were one of them but I suppose it's possible.

It wasn't until the latter part of that decade that home broadband became relatively common, and it wasn't particularly fast (ca. 10 Mbps IIRC) nor symmetrical (upload speed was a small fraction of download speed). I had a friend out in the sticks who had to contend with satellite+dialup past 2010.

Decent speeds (50 Mbps+) didn't roll out en masse until the middle part of the 2010s, especially as Netflix exploded.