Starcraft

StarCraft is a real-time strategy game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, released in 1998 for Windows. It was later ported to Mac OS. The game was designed by Chris Metzen and James Phinney, and produced by a team of around twenty people at Blizzard.

The concept for StarCraft emerged after the completion of Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness. Rather than making a direct sequel, Blizzard's team wanted to explore a science fiction setting — partly inspired by the success of the Command & Conquer franchise, which had proven that military and gritty settings could work well in the RTS genre. The decision to go sci-fi was, according to Metzen, also a deliberate reaction to the Warcraft series, with a desire to create something more grounded and realistic in tone. Interestingly, Blizzard briefly considered making a Star Wars-themed RTS in collaboration with LucasArts, but those talks never came to fruition.

The game features three distinct races — Terran, Protoss, and Zerg — each with radically different units, buildings, and strategies. The Terrans are a versatile human faction that relies on combined arms and flexibility. The Protoss field powerful, expensive warriors and machinery, favouring quality over quantity. The Zerg overwhelm enemies with sheer numbers and speed. This three-way asymmetry, inspired in part by the card game Magic: The Gathering, was a major departure from most RTS games of the time. Warcraft II had featured two factions that were largely identical in mechanics, and even Command & Conquer's GDI and Nod, while different in style, shared many similarities. StarCraft went much further, making each race feel genuinely unique to play. Despite this complexity, the game achieved near-perfect balance — refined through the expansion pack and fifteen subsequent patches.

The single-player campaign follows all three races in sequence, telling an epic science-fiction story of war, betrayal, and survival. The storyline was rich enough to inspire novels and other media beyond the game itself. Voice acting and dialogue were of unusually high quality for the era, and the music perfectly matched the tone of each faction.

Graphically, the game used an isometric perspective — a step forward from the top-down view of the Warcraft games. The art team hand-drew units pixel by pixel, initially struggling as the industry was moving toward 3D graphics. Their solution was to render units in 3D first, then convert them to sprites, resulting in a bold, exaggerated visual style known as the Blizzard Style. Shape language was used deliberately for each race: Terran structures are rectangular and industrial, Protoss structures are smooth and elliptical, and Zerg structures are jagged and triangular.

StarCraft built on the real-time strategy foundations that Dune II had helped establish and became one of the defining games of its generation. It was the best-selling computer game of 1998 and, by 2004, had sold an estimated 9.5 million copies — 4.5 million of those in South Korea alone, where it became a genuine cultural phenomenon and laid the groundwork for professional esports. In 2009, the Guinness Book of World Records recognised it as the best-selling RTS game of all time.

In November 1998, Blizzard released the expansion StarCraft: Brood War, adding new units and continuing the story. In 2017, Blizzard released StarCraft: Remastered, with improved graphics, music, and support for modern resolutions. At the same time, they made the original StarCraft and Brood War available for free via a Battle.net account.