With the announcements of StarCraft 2, it got me reminiscing of the good old days of the original StarCraft. The game was developed by our good friends over at Blizzard and is perhaps one of the best real time strategy games ever made and definitely paved the way for many more strategy games like it. StarCraft first came onto the video game scene in March of 1998 for Windows and then a year later for Mac (back then Mac got no love). The story of StarCraft revolves around three main races: the Protoss, the Zerg and the Terrans. Each of the three races was fighting for dominance of the universe and would stop at nothing to achieve this.

The events of StarCraft unfold in the 25th century where certain humans have been exiled, because of overpopulation during the 21st century, into space and encounter the Zerg and the Protoss. The Terrans were the exiled humans with their Earth technology to aid them in battle, such as tanks, jets, floating buildings and the ever popular marines. The Zerg were an alien race that was part insect and part bad ass. They would spawn their armies from cocoons and could even infect the other races to use them against themselves. The Protoss were the alien race with superior intellect that was a cross between the noble samurai and the cut throat ninja, using their psychic powers to destroy their enemies.

One of the key elements of StarCraft was strategy, from controlling and grouping your troops to where you constructed your buildings. The Protoss could only build if they had crystals powering their buildings so they had a limited radius to build upon. The Terrans (humans) could build supply depots which allowed them to create more units and could float their buildings from one location to another to avoid damage from ground troops. The Zerg pawned from purple ooze that enveloped the ground, as they could only spawn troops and buildings on this purple area. All of this played into how each race was used. Terrans (humans) could barricade themselves in using building and set up tanks to cover from a perimeter, while the Zerg could spawn small dog like Zerglings, which were used for the ever popular Zergling rush. The Protoss started with Zealots that were very strong land based units that came with shields, making them very strong early on but slow to reach an opponent.

Not only were the differences in the races important, but the management of your resources was just as pivotal. The main resources were minerals, blue crystal-like deposits scattered around the map, and gas deposits which you needed to build refineries to harvest. Each unit that you wanted to create had a cost associated as well as a head count. You were capped at 200 units for each race except for the Protoss that could control all three races at certain points of play. If you could eliminate a players source of resources they would be crippled during battle because they could not afford to build troops. This was typically done in a drop strategy where you would drop off units to destroy their harvesting units disrupting their flow of resources.

StarCraft was also one of the first truly on-line games where players could play multiplayer matches against one another and move up and down a ladder system on the Blizzard Battle.Net. The beauty of StarCraft was that it gave you the ability to ’spawn’ copies onto up to 8 other machines. The spawned copies allowed you to play on Battle.Net but locked you out of the single player modes. Multiplayer was a great experience and really introduced the different strategies from players around the world. Some would resort to just having huge armies and upgrades, some would go for rushes where they would try to eliminate players within the first few minutes of a match, and some even would go for all air or all land units in an attempt to throw things off. Multiplayer was a great way to get 8 people into an all out war.

StarCraft was a much anticipated PC title and actual development was begun in 1995 utilizing the Warcraft II engine. Three years of development and many jokes by gamers later, the end version was released (this is where Blizzard began to get their reputation for tardy releases). The game was so well received and popular that an expansion was quickly developed entitled Brood Wars. This expansion pack picked up the story from where the original left off and introduced even more units for each race to use along with some changes to help further balance the different races. An important aspect of StarCraft was that no one race was stronger than the other; it all depended upon the style of play of the gamer.

Some gamers will refer to StarCraft as an intergalactic chess match with unlimited outcomes. StarCraft is actually an official sport in South Korea where professional gamers and teams compete in tournaments for large cash prizes on television. It’s popularity and fanbase continue to fan the flames causing Blizzard to make StarCraft II, which is already in my eyes a best seller off the bat.