Starcraft: Remastered (!)

Rumors of Broodwar’s death have been greatly exaggerated

Starcraft 1 is back! It’ll come in two forms — first is BroodWar, which will be a *free* version of the current game. The other is Starcraft: Remastered, which takes the same game engine but updates all the graphics into high resolution. The latter version will presumably not be free, but who cares. It will be awesome!

So a few months ago we announced Starcraft was dead. Oops.

Teamliquid.net, the venerable Starcraft community site of over a decade and a professional e-sports organization, recently had a in-depth interview with the developers working on SC: R. Here are some summary points:

• Maintaining gameplay is our first priority: this means that all of Broodwar’s old foibles (or bugs, whatever) are maintained. Mutalisk stacking, clumsy Dragoons, Zealot-proof building formations, etc.
• Features added don’t affect gameplay and are based on popular add-ons the community has adopted: so that means there will be no gameplay related features, right? We can still only control 12 units at a time, we can still use the F buttons to rotate between screens, and so forth?
• We’ve recently let Flash, Jaedong, Stork and Bisu play a build: they are paying respect to the pros and getting their feedback. Amazing!
• No plans to “evolve” the BW meta: “As you pointed out, new strategies are still emerging and we agree that changes are unnecessary”

The entire interview is a great read and we highly recommend you visit Teamliquid.net to learn all about the new update, and catch up on the rich literature and history of the game you may have missed over the past 15 years. Because for the uninitiated, there is the thought that Starcraft ended when Warcraft III was launched. But in actuality, the moment in which developer support ended for Starcraft is exactly when the community took over and morphed it, slowly and steadily, into the forefather of all e-sports, with some of the most colorful heroes and epic battles in all of gaming history.

So you may not have heard of Flash, the boy wonder, or Jaedong, the Great Zerg Hope. Or Stork or Bisu, two members of the 6 Protoss Dragons. Or Savior, he who betrayed the pro scene by throwing games for gambling purposes. You may not have known that Starcraft players regularly averaged 300 Actions Per Minute (APM), meaning they literally performed 5 actions per second, and that watching a stream of their gameplay would likely induce headaches for the newcomers.

You may not know that Starcraft was so popular in Korea that the Air Force, literally the Korean Air Force, made a pro Starcraft team consisting of semi-retired pro players. Or that the pro Starcraft circuit consisted of two autonomous tournaments, the MBC Star League and the OGN Star League, as well as a team-based league called Shinhan Proleague. And that the Proleague championships were played at the beach, and IU would sometimes perform there!

IU singing “Marshmallow”. Look at how young she was!

And you may not know of the announcers, those that screamed such amazing Starcraft-related Conglish insanities like PLAGGUEEEEEEEEEE!

The glory starts at the 9 second mark

Maybe this is too little, too late. This was the update we needed 7 years ago, not the forced bifurcation and splintering of the pro scene that took place when Starcarft II hit the scene. But let’s talk about what could have been at a later time. For now, I urge you all to go back, enjoy the history; go on Youtube and google Broodwar Best Moments:

And with the old pros already coming back to play classic Broodwar, one can only get hype! for the possibilities of SC:R bringing back the e-sports glory of yore.