How StarCraft beat Chess
Blizzard looks back on the world's best strategy game.
There definitely were. The game really took off when we launched the expansion.
Brood War filled some holes.
Balancing the three races was not easy and when the game launched I wouldn't say it was ideally balanced. I don't know even how many patches we've released; one within the last six months. We have to make sure the game is viable for the e-sport community and we have to keep correcting bugs. We certainly were doing a lot of that in the first year, and the expansion addressed that too.
Warcraft III! We also splintered off another group of people who started work on another product that got shelved. These guys were then moved onto their next big project, something you may have heard of called, erm... World of Warcraft? So the development team that started working on StarCraft seeded the team that ended up working on World of Warcraft and also the team that made Warcraft III.
Xbox Live? Gamespy, Steam.
That's a good question. We've talked about it, but we've not made any decisions beyond our own. We already offer WOW for digi-download on our own site.
I have a theory about that: people were afraid that they wouldn't make enough money. They would think they're selling one copy to eight people when they want to sell eight copies. That's just not the way we think about it. Anyway, now you can download demos right from the internet, so there's not much point to doing it right now.
Delay! [Laughs]
Is that a risk? We felt like the game wasn't ready so we had to hold it until we felt it was. That certainly paid off in spades.
Sure, but generally delaying can be risky for the company. It's just a risk we're willing to take every time. We can delay and the game's going to be great.
[Laughs] Did we look that far ahead?
A lot of the stuff we did then was seat of the pants, impulsive, short-sighted stuff. Ten years ago we were a lot younger than we are today.
Ten years ago it was "let's make a great game and see what happens" rather than really trying to plan it out.
We're gamers ourselves so our focus is always on making games we wanted to play. While we were wrapping StarCraft there were a handful of guys on the team playing Ultima Online. EverQuest came along afterwards, but I don't have to spell out where that took us.
It was on a console. It's hard to do RTSes on a console.
StarCraft was designed with the PC and its peripherals in mind, so it was a different experience. Because it was on the N64 we didn't have the benefits of PC communities, who are critical to our experience today.