Starcraft, The Memories

I have to say that Blizzard has always gone above and beyond when it comes to cranking out ridiculously fun and addicting games. I’m not basing that on the tens of millions of games they sold or the numerous game of the year award they receive, I am basing that on my personal experience and endless hours spent in front of a computer monitor clicking happily away.



Like many other, my first blizzard game was Starcraft. I was initially drawn in by its Sci-Fi elements and lets face it, freaking big ass space battles that made even grown men weep tears of joy. I played SC very casually at first. It was mostly with a couple of friends on money maps such as Big Game Hunter and other 8-player type maps. I started during my high school years, and played SC on a 32k modem connection. Our 3v3 and 2v2 games were epic, and the backstabbing was rampant. I even met one of my many good friends, Huy, through SC. We have been friends now for 10 years, and from SC until The Burning Crusade, he has been the torch that lit the way to owning success. Huy is by far the most hard core gamer I know, and for a while, he was also a pro gamer in Warcraft 3, The Frozen Throne. Him and one of his clan mates sat at the top of the 2v2 and 3v3 ladder on the East Coast region.

We would play until the sun rose with its blinding light and emerged again when the night sky settled in. We lived the lifestyle of vampires, only our thirst was not for blood, but for something much more addicting, and much more deadly. We craved the high of winning, of knowing we outplayed another being, both in skill and in the mind game. It was then that we started getting serious about SC, and joined the ladder league. That’s where we really learned what it was like to be amazing at SC, and unfortunately, we were anything but amazing. Being as how we were all accustomed to money maps, the ladder maps crippled us and open our eyes to not only micro-management, but also the importance of micro-management in the grand scheme of your macro game. Some ladder games would only last 5 minutes due to the harassment rush, and this is where we first learned our build orders and rush strategy. My world was completely engulfed by SC, and we still retell some of our most epic games to this day.



After Broodwar game out, we sort of stopped playing SC because of the way people would turtle and tech. The game evolved, and we were too slow to evolve with it. That was around the same time that WC3 came out, and we all shifted our attention to that instead. From there we moved on to WoW, but all of that is another story, for another time.



The BNET community and the ability to talk to your enemies after a game was what made things so personal. It gave you the drive to become better, so that you would always be the one on the other end of the “gg.” I don’t think there has ever been another game that gave me the same feeling as SC did back in the day. It was my first, and by far, the most unforgettable experience of my gaming career.