StarCraft Pt 1: An Enduring Ethos

Memories of StarCraft

I have been in StarCraft for a while. My earliest memories of gaming come from my Grandpa's office as he played Doom and Starcraft amid a fog of cigarette smoke. His yellowing keyboard and slow mouse were a far cry from the modern day peripherals, but it was on those very 90's pieces of hardware that I learned of the miracle that is PC gaming. I had a Nintendo console at the time, but what I remember most from my early days was StarCraft. The anticipation as we dialed into the internet and booted up the game. The menu screen hitting you with iconic StarCraft music. I can remember all of it more vividly than most other memories from when I was 7. This was back when Battle.net wasn't just a game launcher but a message board/chat room where you could directly challenge people to games or load into customs. Those early days truly were the wild west of gaming. I was ignorant to it at the time (as a 7 year old I wasn't much on the early internet), but players were falling deeply in love with StarCraft in a way that was different from Diablo and WarCraft. So what was the main difference with this game? What exactly made StarCraft such a phenomenon? At it's core StarCraft is an isometric real time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998 back when that company gave a shit. This genre of game centers around a macro element which consists of building a base, an economy, and an army paired with micro, where that army was used to defeat an opponent by controlling individual units to win battles. With three races or armies to choose from, one could play as whichever flavor suited their playstyle. The Terran, or humans, with their space marines and industrial mechs using efficient units and siege tactics. The Protoss, an advanced alien race with psychic abilities and energy weapons focused on strong costly units. Finally, the Zerg, an insectoid race which used biology to make swarms of diverse, cheap and expendable bugs. All of the races played differently and were surprisingly balanced allowing for skill to be the biggest factor in victory. Players almost immediately saw the massive potential this game possessed for competition. The story was riveting, the soundtrack was timeless and the map maker allowed for insane custom games just like Forge had for Halo. It was a lightning in a bottle moment for PC gaming. A game which attracted the casual gamers, like me, and the hardcore pro players.

Korea

In 1998, following a financial collapse of South Korea, PC cafes began springing up to allow the disenfranchised youth to play video games to escape their economic issues. This was a huge success and it caused South Korea to favor PC gaming in a way that no other country had. Coincidentally, the game to fill these PC cafes at the time was StarCraft. So, very early on, Koreans developed an affinity for the game. The established rule, thanks in large part to those early days of PC cafes, was that Koreans were the best players of StarCraft. This resulted in a large Korean StarCraft community, sponsorship deals and dedicated pro teams. The game got so huge in Korea that one of the pro teams was sponsored by an airline company! Professional matches and competitions were streamed on national television. It was so popular in Korea that pro players became celebrities and StarCraft became part of popular Korean culture. in 2022, this isn't such a radical concept because things like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft and Halo have done similar things to the public consciousness. These are all more recent occurrences however. StarCraft was doing this back in '98! Keep in mind, StarCraft wasn't like Mario where a single character impacted pop culture, but the entire game holistically left its mark. returning to the competition side of StarCraft, anyone competing outside of the Korean scene was known as a Foreigner. There simply was a huge discrepancy between the interest of a Korean audience and the rest of the world. There were exceptions, of course, where foreigners would live in Korea for an extended period of time and practice with the best pro teams to get better and try to compete with the best, but none of these foreigners ever broke into the top ranks. There was a smaller foreign tournament series in America which boasted some great players and there's an amazing video below discussing what that experience was like.

StarCraft 2 Changes Things

The expansion to StarCraft was called Broodwar and so people will refer to the original game as StarCraft Broodwar. This expansion helped tide us over for nearly a decade before Blizzard finally announced it was making a sequel. Let's just say I was pretty damn excited. After 10 years of anticipation StarCraft 2 had a huge buzz preceding its release and my friends and I played the beta heavily eagerly awaiting the launch. StarCraft Broodwar was a Korean game, but StarCraft 2 changed that. It was a perfect storm of new sponsorships, a much more engaged audience and a larger population of gamers breaking into competitive online spaces. Not only that, Starcraft 2 also had a different type of game, which was faster and rewarded split second decision making over good mechanics like APM (action per minute). This meant that skill from StarCraft Broodwar didn't always directly translate to SC2. A new game meant there was ample opportunity to change the status quo and a few smart foreigners took notice. The foreign scene took off in a way that it never had for the original game. Koreans weren't the only one who saw that magic of StarCraft this time around.

Hell it's about time...

People like Day[9], iNcontroL and Tastosis were critical in those early days of SC2 to ensure the community and interest grew at a rapid rate. These were all former StarCraft Broodwar foreigner pros that never really "made it" outside of smaller tournaments in the states. This didn't deter them from channeling their passion for StarCraft over to SC2 in the form of content creation, excellent casting and driving the hype train behind the game's initial release. The very first StarCraft 2 tournaments I remember were all showcased in the beta, streamed on JustinTV (the predecessor of Twitch) and included both Koreans and foreigners. Against all expectations, the foreigners crushed the Koreans in these early days leading to even more interest in the game. By the time it was actually released in full, it had a massive dedicated player base all ready to grind to the highest ranks. I started at a lowly Silver, but I was determined to make Master (the highest rank at the time). Funnily enough, the software company I worked for at the time had its own group of employees that all played the game, kept up with the tournaments and met at lunch to talk about our love of the game almost every day for 2 years! I even streamed my games. It took me about 3 seasons before I finally made the rank of Masters and was satisfied enough to give the game a rest and just tune into broadcasted tournaments.

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So did this foreigner dominance continue? Definitely not. Koreans eventually got the hang of the game and continued their dominance for a long time. The overall interest in the game endured despite Korean dominance and the StarCraft community was pretty healthy for nearly 5 years! Major tournaments took place in both the US and Europe with things like WCS, MLG and ESL. I was fortunate enough to go to a few of these MLGs when they were hosted in Anaheim and got to meet some of my favorite personalities from StarCraft. I was a huge fan of the foreigners because I love a good underdog. Any reasonably good foreigner who could keep up with Koreans was called a "foreign hope" as they gave us hope that one day a great foreigner would not only compete with the best Koreans but be the best player overall. A few of these players rose and fell over the years including IdrA, NaNiwa, HuK, and Stephano.

Eventually 2 expansions for the game were released with Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. Unfortunately, the popularity of SC2 had taken few hits from the rise of games like League of Legends and other eSports, piggybacking on the success of StarCraft 2, but ultimately leaving it in the dust. Looking back, it's amazing to see just how well early StarCraft 2 tournaments paved the way for platforms like Twitch to grow and games like DOTA2, LoL, and Fortnite to take up the mantle of "best eSport". It's also easy to see just how hard Blizzard punted away the leaps and bounds made with SC2 by failing to support the game in any meaningful way with content and money, causing it to eventually fall behind its competitor games. With hindsight we can see what keeps a modern game 'alive' and populated. In those early years SC2 was truly the pioneer that had to succeed and fail in multiple areas for other games to learn what to do and what not to do.

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Life Finds a Way... To Kill The Game

In 2015, even before the release of the final expansion, the SC2 scene was still large enough to boast 100k tournaments multiple times a year, still drew huge sponsorships and large audiences. Then something happened to rock StarCraft 2 to it's core. The 2015 Match-Fixing Scandal has a lot of details that can be read in the link provided, but the short version is: The best Korean player at the time (arguably) was caught fixing his matches in a betting scandal. The matches in question were not important matches to win or lose, not part of a tournament of any consequence, yet the incident revealed deep and prolific match-fixing within Korean circles. This controversy caused a huge uproar in the Korean scene, which was still larger than the foreign interest in SC2 at the time. It caused a mass exodus of pro teams, sponsorships and audience interest in StarCraft in Korea. In general, games like LoL, DOTA2 and others were already draining SC2 of sponsorships and players, but this was truly the nail in the coffin. All that remained after this came to light was the dedicated core fanbase of the game. People we were heavily invested in continuing the legacy of StarCraft kept making content, hosting larger events and doing their best to carry on despite what had happened.

Personally, I had been out of SC2 since 2013 I didn't rejoin the community until 2018, after a long dedicated love-affair with Magic the Gathering, so I had avoided the scandal. I returned to a very small tight-knit community who was still recovering from the loss of interest in the game and money in the tournaments. Ironically, the foreign scene seemed to be doing much better than its Korean counterpart. They lacked the scandals and still had the passionate content creators they've always had. Unlike most modern eSports which are fueled by money from the developers of the game and huge sponsorships outside of the gaming industry, StarCraft 2's foreign scene relied on individuals putting in extra work to keep everything going. There were still large tournaments with decent sized prize pools and casters who had been carrying the torch for almost a decade. I tuned back in to major events, spent entire weekends hanging out on Twitch, just like I had when the game first started. Funnily enough, it didn't feel like much had changed, the game was timeless. Then, when I randomly stumbled upon a community podcast named the Pylon Show, I realized I was hooked again. Hosted by Artosis and iNcontroL, veterans of the game, this particular episode of the podcast discussed the rising star that was: Serral.