When Blizzard first showed StarCraft at E3 in 1996, it looked like the company’s last hit with the art changed. The demo, Computer Gaming World wrote, “was hastily assembled, and it looked very much like WarCraft II with new art”, and the game picked up a nickname Blizzard spent the next two years trying to shake: “Orcs in space”. The team threw the demo away, started again on a new engine and a new design, and released StarCraft in 1998, late and very different. Its three races did not just look different; they gathered, built and fought in different ways, and that made the game worth playing against other people for years. Nowhere took that further than South Korea, where StarCraft filled thousands of internet cafés and became a televised professional sport.
Fast facts
- Developer: Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, California. Sierra published it in Britain.
- Released: Windows, 31 March 1998 in North America and April 1998 in Europe; Macintosh in 1999; Nintendo 64 in 2000.
- Needed: Windows 95, a Pentium 90, 16MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive (Computer Gaming World, July 1998).
- Players: one, or two to eight by modem, network or Blizzard’s free Battle.net service.
- Expansion: StarCraft: Brood War (1998), 26 new missions and six new units.
- Sequels: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), Heart of the Swarm (2013), Legacy of the Void (2015); StarCraft: Remastered (2017).
“Orcs in space”
Blizzard came to StarCraft straight from Warcraft II, and the first version showed it. By October 1996 Computer Gaming World could report that “Blizzard has since dropped the entire ‘Orcs in space’ feel and gone for a more 3D, high-tech look”, with three races of different abilities and play over Blizzard’s new Battle.net service. It expected the game by Christmas. It did not arrive.
In May 1997 the magazine put StarCraft on its cover. Elliott Chin’s story began at E3. Blizzard had not wanted the game “to merely copy WarCraft II, and right after E3 they scrapped the demo and started work on a completely new engine and an all-new design.” Some at Blizzard still worried that players would see only “Orcs in space”, and invited Computer Gaming World in for an exclusive look to change their minds. Looking back in 2004, Edge put the delay at two years, “in response to a subdued E3 reception”.
The story changed too. Warcraft’s two campaigns had mirrored each other; StarCraft’s three, one per race and ten missions each, told a single story in three acts. The Protoss and the Zerg were rival alien races, and caught between them were the Terrans, humans “trying to scavenge their way to a meager living among the stars”.
Three armies, three economies
Every race gathered the same two resources, crystals and Vespene gas, and there the likeness ended. Robert Coffey’s review in Computer Gaming World set out the differences:
| Race | How it plays |
|---|---|
| Zerg | Cheap units produced fast, spewed out “from their bleeding, organic structures”. Buildings must sit on the Zerg’s own creep, and they heal themselves. |
| Protoss | Units cost more but are deadlier, and much sturdier behind their psionic shields. Buildings must stand within an energy grid, and their shields recharge. |
| Terran | Between the two in cost and strength. Can build anywhere, and can move most of their main buildings. |
“While trolls and archers were more or less the same in Blizzard’s own WarCraft II,” Coffey wrote, “you can’t say that about a Terran siege tank, Zerg ultralisk, or Protoss reaver.” He called it “the most satisfying real-time strategy game to date”. He was fair about what it lacked: it had no true 3D terrain like Total Annihilation, and it limited a group to 12 units. What it had was balance, missions that could be won more than one way, and multiplayer that ate his first night: “I lost a good six hours my first night on battle.net.” It came with a campaign editor, which Blizzard had used to build bonus games on the disc, among them a Space Invaders-style diversion.
Edge was cooler. It found the controls and sprites “antiquated” next to Total Annihilation, and summed the game up in a paradox: “StarCraft is both Warcraft II in space and an abandonment of the Warcraft legacy.” But it agreed about the races: “No other game’s opposing forces have been much more than mirror images. In contrast, StarCraft offers three unique races.”
Computer Gaming World named it its strategy game of the year for 1998.
Brood War
The expansion, StarCraft: Brood War, came out at the end of 1998, made by Blizzard with the studio Saffire. It added about two units per race, most of them answers to weaknesses players had found: the Terran Medic and Valkyrie frigate, the Protoss Corsair and Dark Templar, and the Zerg Lurker and Devourer. Its 26 new missions told a darker story. Coffey reviewed it in April 1999 under the headline “The Best Gets Better”, and Computer Gaming World named it the add-on of the year: “No other add-on released in 1998 so significantly perfected and enhanced the original game as much as Brood War did.” It cost $29.95.
Brood War is the version the competitive game settled on.
South Korea
Blizzard never translated StarCraft into Korean; only the box and the manual were. It sold 188,000 copies there in 1998, and Blizzard expected sales to taper off. Instead, Blizzard’s Paul Sams told Computer Gaming World, it sold more than 980,000 in 1999, when the next best-selling PC game in the country, FIFA 99, barely passed 100,000. By January 2001 Koreans had bought 1.8 million copies of StarCraft and Brood War, more than a third of the world’s sales, and 40,000 more were still selling every month. Bill Roper told the magazine that Korea was “now almost half our market”.
The copies went to the PC bang, or “PC room”, internet cafés where people played together by the hour. Computer Gaming World reported in 2000 that they had grown from 600 to 15,000 in two years, and that the national press put it down to one thing, StarCraft. There were already StarCraft snack foods, music CDs and television shows, and Blizzard’s Korean partners asked for more than it would allow: the latest requests were StarCraft clothes and a StarCraft theme restaurant.
Players came out of the PC rooms. The media scholar Dal Yong Jin dates the first Korean professional gamer to December 1998, when Shin Ju-young won Blizzard’s ladder tournament. In 1999 Shin was playing on Battle.net at a PC room most days from two in the afternoon until eight the next morning, and earning $2,000 to $10,000 for a tournament win. The first esports league televised in Korea, the Hitel KPGL, went on air in March 1999, and its producers went on to found OnGameNet, a cable channel given over to games, in 2000. The first champion of its Starleague was a Canadian, Guillaume Patry, the only non-Korean ever to win one. In 2000 the government approved a national association for professional gaming, which became the Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA), and Seoul hosted the first World Cyber Games (see esports). Lee Gi-suk, who won the first two KPGL championships, became a national star and appeared in television advertising. A team competition, the Proleague, began in 2003, and its finals on Gwangalli beach in Busan drew as many as 120,000 spectators in 2004 and 2005.
Edge noted in 2004 that professional StarCraft leagues in Korea “continue to this day”. They lasted until 2012, when the teams moved to StarCraft II. KeSPA ended the Proleague in October 2016, after 14 years, citing fewer teams and players, the difficulty of finding sponsors and match-fixing. Brood War itself never quite went away: the streaming service Afreeca TV started a new individual league for it in 2016, and a second, the Korea StarCraft League, followed in 2018.
After 1998
Blizzard released StarCraft for the Macintosh in 1999 and a Nintendo 64 version in 2000. A console spin-off, StarCraft: Ghost, went through years of delays and a change of co-developer, was postponed indefinitely in 2006 and never came out.
The sequel was announced in Seoul in 2007. StarCraft II came in three parts, Wings of Liberty (2010), Heart of the Swarm (2013) and Legacy of the Void (2015), one campaign for each race. In March 2017, again at an event in Seoul, Blizzard announced StarCraft: Remastered, with new high-resolution art, and released it that August; the original game and Brood War became free to download. StarCraft II’s first campaign went free in November 2017, and in October 2020 Blizzard said it would make no more paid content for it.
At BlizzCon in September 2026 Blizzard announced a new StarCraft, an open-world shooter led by Dan Hay and planned for 2030.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 147, October 1996: strategy games feature (“Blizzard has since dropped the entire ‘Orcs in space’ feel”; three races; Battle.net; due by Christmas).
- Computer Gaming World issue 154, May 1997: Elliott Chin, “Reaching For The Stars”, cover story (the E3 demo, the new engine and design, “Orcs in space”, the three campaigns of ten scenarios and the story).
- Edge (Australian edition) issue 2, November 2004, pp. 63–66: “Cold Calling” (the two-year delay after “a subdued E3 reception”; the Korean leagues “continue to this day”; StarCraft: Ghost’s delays and change of co-developer).
- PC Player (Germany), March 2000, pp. 74–76: “Firmenhistorie: Blizzard Entertainment” (the fear that it would be nothing but “Orcs in Space” proved unfounded).
- Computer Gaming World issue 168, July 1998, p. 172: Robert Coffey, “Strategy Supernova”, StarCraft review (requirements, the races, the 12-unit limit, the campaign editor and bonus games).
- Edge issue 59, June 1998, pp. 91–92: StarCraft review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 171, October 1998, and issue 173, December 1998: Brood War previews. Issue 177, April 1999: Robert Coffey, “The Best Gets Better”, Brood War review ($29.95, the new units, 26 missions, “1998’s Strategy Game of the Year”), and the Premier Awards (add-on of the year).
- Computer Gaming World issue 191, June 2000: “Heart and Seoul: the Korean StarCraft Craze” (no Korean translation; 188,000 copies in 1998 and more than 980,000 in 1999; FIFA 99; game rooms from 600 to 15,000; Paul Sams).
- Computer Gaming World issue 198, January 2001: Korea feature and sidebar (1.8 million copies, a third of worldwide sales; 40,000 a month; PC bangs; Bill Roper; clothing and restaurant requests). Edge issue 79, December 1999: copies sold in Korea, one million.
- Dal Yong Jin, “Historiography of Korean Esports: Perspectives on Spectatorship”, International Journal of Communication 14 (2020), pp. 3727–3745: KeSPA formed in 2000 (p. 3731; approved by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism as the 21st Century Pro-Game Association, renamed in October 2003, p. 3737); Shin Ju-young and Lee Gi-suk (pp. 3734–3735); the World Cyber Games of October 2000 (p. 3735); the Hitel KPGL broadcast and OnGameNet (pp. 3735–3736); Guillaume Patry (p. 3736); the Proleague from 2003 to 2012 and the Busan finals (p. 3737). https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/13795
- Eric Van Allen, “South Korea’s KeSPA discontinues StarCraft ProLeague after 14 years”, ESPN, 17 October 2016 (web, secondary), and Leonard Chung, “KeSPA announces discontinuation of Proleague”, Inven Global, 2 November 2016 (web, secondary): the end of the Proleague and the reasons given. https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/17821061/south-korea-kespa-discontinues-starcraft-proleague-14-years and https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/248/kespa-announces-discontinuation-of-proleague
- Wikipedia, “StarCraft (video game)”, “StarCraft” and “Professional StarCraft competition” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates for Windows, Macintosh and Nintendo 64; Saffire’s part in Brood War; StarCraft: Ghost’s postponement in 2006; the announcement of StarCraft II in Seoul in May 2007 and its release dates; the Afreeca and Korea StarCraft leagues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “StarCraft: Remastered” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary), citing Michael McWhertor, “StarCraft: Remastered coming this summer”, Polygon, 26 March 2017: the announcement at a StarCraft event in Seoul and the release on 14 August 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Remastered
- “StarCraft: Brood War Patch 1.18 Patch Notes”, Blizzard News, April 2017 (web, secondary): “StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War are now free.” https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/20674424/starcraft-brood-war-patch-1-18-patch-notes
- “StarCraft II Update – October 15, 2020”, Blizzard News (web, secondary). https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/23544726/starcraft-ii-update-october-15-2020
- “‘STARCRAFT’ revealed at Blizzcon: the squad shooter is coming in 2030”, Windows Central, and “BlizzCon 2026: Blizzard announces new open-world StarCraft shooter”, Massively Overpowered, 12 September 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/blizzard/starcraft-revealed-at-blizzcon-the-squad-shooter-is-coming-in-2030