The video game world has been marked by a number of titles. When it comes to real-time strategy games (as pioneered by Westwood Studios’ Dune 2 in 1992), Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft (1998) has rarely been topped, and for a good reason. This is a game that did not just tell an engrossing and far-reaching story; it stage-managed a credible number of ways by which the story’s events could evolve. This was a style of strategy game that opened up the kinds of tactics you could challenge yourself to use while beating the game.
The world of real-time strategy (RTS) games looked extraordinarily different before the days of StarCraft. We might even go as far to say that games like Command & Conquer were a primitive version of base-building, resource-gathering, and unit-managing games. Still, as far as those games might’ve come in, say 1995 or 1996, StarCraft and its 1998 release moved the genre forward in a way that many remember very specifically as a paradigm shift—and for a good reason. On top of innovations like “asymmetric sides,” StarCraft brought together new (or improved-upon) RTS elements with what fans expected from games based on Blizzard-style lore and hallmark gameplay.
The choice to alter the look of the game wasn’t a shallow one. It transformed, in a deep and primal way for the game’s most hardcore players, the very nature of how they played. And by “they,” I mean millions of people who played the game following its release in 1998. Not only did the choice to play as one of three factions produce an unheard-of level of depth for any massive competitive computer game played between two people, but in my not-so-humble opinion, also for any game played in a single-player mode against the machine. Every time one replayed StarCraft, one learned more and became more deadly at using that knowledge to outsmart one’s opponent.
StarCraft was certainly popular with casual gamers, but it might have had the biggest effect on the modern esports landscape. Long before esports entered everyday vocabulary, and with much less help from platforms like Twitch, StarCraft as a title was leading the way in competitive gaming—and this was especially true in South Korea, where StarCraft was nothing less than a cultural sensation. In fact, the average South Korean, who couldn’t give a whit about any celebrity “currently leading the way in StarCraft,” would still remember the name of the last South Korean presidential candidate for whom the story was part of his very political identity.
The supremely well-balanced and intricate StarCraft is one of the most successful esports because of its emphasis on skill rather than luck. It’s probably the best game for demonstrating core esport principles — almost every match is a clear, colorful contest of exactly matched wits, with just about the same chance of climactic reversals and the sort of nail-biting finish you’d get if you watched two people play a high-stakes game of poker.
However, the StarCraft franchise’s most lasting effect on esports might be how it has influenced broadcasting. When Blizzard was developing the original game, one crucial feature it added was an option to watch matches from a third-person perspective. Tumblr user (and software engineer) David Zhou points out that this feature was vital not only to the fledgling esports leagues of the 1990s but also to the game’s passionate fan community. Watching StarCraft matches became almost as popular as playing the game.
StarCraft’s lasting influence extends past the RTS genre and esports and into the broad world of video game design. And while its accessibility might be taken for granted in today’s increasingly “hardcore first, then casual” design paradigm, its emphasis on breadth over depth—on player decisions, happening at almost every level of play, in the name of balance, remains one of its great strengths.
The whole gaming industry has taken a leaf from the “easy to learn, difficult to master” philosophy prevalent in StarCraft and has made it part of its core narrative. Unlike other gaming genres, real-time strategy (RTS) games such as StarCraft don’t rely on fixed mechanics. Instead, they have mutable or changeable mechanics that help make the computer-controlled opponents in the game appear “smart.” So, the path to victory for the player is also a path to the player’s education about the various aspects of the game—when to do this or that.
One of the biggest lessons we can pull from StarCraft is the necessity to iterate and balance. People, the community at large, and Blizzard themselves point to the enduring popularity and even the path-blazing e-sports-breaking power StarCraft managed in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But where the original game’s polish and secret sauce had time to gestate during development, the fanatical following Blizzard has fostered has given StarCraft II wings, relevance, and longevity due to the huge “labor of love” portion of its fan-generated content.
In the end, StarCraft might not just be a game, but a beacon that has drawn players in to share in its experience and world. It’s given us new ways to think about making choices, putting game pieces together, and even just living with the consequences of our actions. And like any group of raving fans, we carry its memory with us fondly, recount the events of the virtual world as if they were our own. Truly, the Reapers, the Primal Zerg, and poor Samir Duran notwithstanding, the experience of the game might be damn near an indelible part of our PC gaming lives.
