StarCraft I: The Beginnings

Where it all began.

So before we begin, I don't condone anything Blizzard is doing or has done. From what I can tell, the Blizzard when SC I and II were in the making were much different than who they are now. But I don't know everything and if they were horrible and abusive back in those days, let me know.

I've been playing StarCraft since it was first released all the way back in 1998. I had a barely functioning PC with dial up internet and stayed up playing this game for hours every night. This game was perfect to my teenage (tween?) self. It took everything that made WarCraft 2 great and upped it all in the right places. It expanded the playable races to three who each had their own campaign (which we'll get into later), each race felt wildly different from each other, we're now in space, and things are more gritty here. The control of the game is similar to WC2, just better. You can now control more units at the same time and over all pathing is a bit better (not to today's standards though).

Lately I pretty much only play StarCraft II when I want to put time into video games. So I wanted to go back and re-live the early days of the SC universe and playthrough part 1 while I talk about my history with the game, the history of the game itself, how the game plays, and my overall impression of it as I was back then and based on who I am now. I've done a recent playthrough in the last year in a half so I'm not coming back into this completely blind. But, to change things up a bit, I installed the Carbot cartoon version of the game to give me a new and fresh experience.

This will be a multi-part series as it takes a while to play through these games. Each campaign taking multiple hours each. The original StarCraft has three campaigns while the expansion, Brood War, has another three campaigns.

Let's enter the world of StarCraft! Feels like home. A horrifying home where everything goes wrong and everyone kind of sucks and aliens just want to consume or blow up worlds and the people who are supposed to keep you safe just use you to gain power and influence. Cozy.

My journey with this franchise began with WarCraft II. A fantasy real-time strategy (RTS) game which came out before the hugely popular World of WarCraft. Essentially, these play like a board game; you have a map which is the board, you have a base which you need to expand and build up, and you have units in which you send off to the map in order to explore, attack or defend. Only with RTS you do all of that simultaneously.

So where WCII places you in the traditional fantasy setting, humans vs orcs, StarCraft throws you into space, humans vs alien bugs vs alien cult. What both SC and WC did right was it set up the game in a typical fashion; you play as humans and you fight off the enemy. So in WC, you fight the orcs as humans and win good over evil. In StarCraft, you are the human race and you fight off the alien races (I'm keeping things simplistic for now). Where they really did things right was when you beat the human campaign, now you play as the race whom you've been fighting the whole time and get their point of view during the conflict while also progressing the story and timeline.

I remember being so blown away the first time I was playing as the Zerg race who had been a thorn in my side throughout my entire playthrough the Terran (human) campaign.

The first couple of levels act as a tutorial and assume you've never played this kind of game before which at the time of its release, you probably haven't. We get introduced to the basics like selecting units and buildings, building more units and buildings, harvesting minerals and vespene gas, and unit movement and combat.

This is the basics of this game and can get you to the end of the game if you do those things well. The main issue with RTS' is that you need to do it all very fast and make strategic choices while expanding and finding new places for bases, defending your base from attacks, and sending out your limited units to attack and make progress on the map. It's a lot to do and that's the main reason why it becomes so fun (stressful).

Once the tutorials are complete we meet up with our good friend Jim Raynor. look at him with his little tongue sticking out. This cartoon skin really takes the grim factor down to zero! We mainly follow Jim throughout this campaign and he becomes our eyes and thoughts throughout. He guides us from an overall good perspective, so basically we feel his hurts, his anger, and his thoughts (you pig!).

From here we begin to learn of the Zerg threat and we begin fighting them off and experience how scary they are. Also, from here, you're pretty much on your own. I hope you learned everything in the first levels because it's going to be tested!

If you've checked out the other areas of this website then you know I kinda, maybe a little bit like music. Well for me, playing StarCraft late into the night was the perfect time to listen to music and discover new music. SC came out around the height of Napster and what not and because I lived in the middle of nowhere it was really the only way for me to find new music at the time. I would scower message boards and try to find different kinds of bands - especially when MySpace came into popularity. Yeah, I played SC that long. But it's those memories that have really shaped who I became. Resourceful and always looking for something new, different, and exciting all the while sitting in my comfortable space within the universe of StarCraft.

Even now, as I playthrough StarCraft II for the millionth time I still use that time to find and listen to music. Our modern age of music has given use so many tools that really the hard part is sifting through all of it to find the gems that lie hidden beneath it all. I can sit, listen to music, and play StarCraft II for hours and not get sick of it. And all of that started because of SCI and WCII.

I'm mostly a campaign player because of said dial up internet and so that transferred over to SCII as well. Although I am dipping my toes into it and I think I'll try and capture my journey through the ladder in other entries of both SCI and SCII. For now, let's end this here with the Blizzard special: the defence mission.

The objective: Survive for 30 minutes.

You have one base and two entrances into it. You are situated in the bottom left of the map while the Zerg occupy the rest of it. They are sending an onslaught of attack waves at you and you have to defend. You have bunkers and infantry for the ground units and missle turrets for the air. You don't know when they're going to strike only that they are coming. You have to be ready. Build up your forces and your economy quick because 30 minutes goes by fast (seriously, Blizzard time is whack).

Okay, so all of that sounds intense and as a kid it was super intense. I remember having such a hard time with mission. I would make it until the last two minutes and then get overrun by the Zerg. There were just too many of them and not enough of me. I would focus so hard to beat this level, memorize when and where they came and had my defences ready.

Nowadays, this level is kind of boring. You set up some bunkers and missle turrets in the correct spots and basically sit around for twenty minutes. If you place things in a good spot and make sure to get your upgrades then it's pretty easy to survive.

Side note, you might be wondering why I suddenly went from 30 minutes to 20. Well that's because of Blizzard time! For some strange reason, the countdown timers within the game go much faster than actual time. So it's around 1/3 faster or something like that. So when it says survive for 30 minutes it's actually 20 minutes in real person time.

I'll end things here for now. It's been fun to see how similar and different I approach this game now. I have much better mechanics, better strategy, and a better overall understanding of the game in it's entirety. I also use the time to chill out, find and listen to new music. Neat.

Thanks for reading!

Scott

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