Starcraft Brood War - a game that is more than 8 years old, yet still used in international tournaments today. In Korea, top Starcraft players are icons with fan clubs bigger than people in the movie industry, and earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year playing in tournaments.For those of you unacquainted with Starcraft - Starcraft is a game belonging to the RTS genre (Real-Time strategy). The basic concept is: you start off with a base, where you build either (1) worker units to gather resources, (2) combat units to hurt your opponent. The basic trade-off is, the more worker units you build, the more rapidly resources come in, which in turns leads to more combat units you're able to produce. However, if you don't build enough combat units, your opponent can send in his combat units, kill your worker units, and pretty much win the game. Sounds simple, right? Well, this in real-time - which means each second you're spending thinking of what to do next works against you, since your opponent is building his army and planning his attack to you at the very same time.
Actually, Starcraft (and later on, it's expansion set: Brood War) is one of the most balanced games in the industry. Why? Well, in Starcraft, there are 3 races:
Terran - your basic human, with an overdose of redneck-ness
Protoss - a highly advanced (and equally geeky) alien civilazation
Zerg - think of the zerg as the aliens in the movie Aliens.
Each race has a unique set of strategies.
Let's start with the Protoss. Their units are strong, powerful, but are the most expensive to produce. You really have to focus on building only the units you really need, and counter your opponent strategically.
Zerg: these guys are a dime a dozen, but they're weak too. Your strategy as a zerg player is to basically get as much resource spots you can, and just overrun the opponent with your sheer numbers (today, the word zerg has become a verb in video games meaning exactly the same thing - overrunning your opponent with sheer numbers of inferior units).
Terran is kind of tricky - they're in the middle between the Protoss and Zerg, but due to the way Terran units are set up, they require the most micromanagement - you have to control individual groups of units separately and skillfully in order to make them effective. But in the end, they're the most flexible of the races, so you can craft your strategy according to your opponent's.
The beauty of this game is: as vastly different as these 3 races are, there really is no absolute advantage in choosing either race. For those of you in game design, you can appreciate that this is a quality in games that is extremely hard to achieve. This is the single most important quality that has made Starcraft one of the most popular games on the planet, up to today.There are literally hundreds of strategies you can pit against your opponent, but every single one of them has counters. It's kind of like playing speed chess x 1000. Starcraft games typically last anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. Yes, it is possible to win or lose before the 5 minute mark.
Anyway, today, more than 8 years after the game was introduced, the bulk of the good players are in Korea, where the game is played on a professional level constantly (the games are actually shown on TV). Here in the U.S. the major craze has died down a little - however tournaments are still held on a regular basis. In addition, the world cyber games annually features Starcraft as one of its tournament items. It really is a game that other RTS games developers look to as a "standard" for their upcoming games.
Long live Starcraft!!
