StarCraft is still one of the best strategy games ever made, even after 24 years of existence. While Blizzard's RTS series have certainly been a force to be reckoned with in terms of quality, potential for competitiveness and replayability for a long time, going as far as to pioneer the industry itself, only one game has been able to stand the test of time and not only be recognized as one of the all-time greats, but be played as frequently as Starcraft was for the past decade. Even though Starcraft 2 hasn't met the lofty expectations set in its predecessor, it has come very, very close. And with the help of its dedicated players and the community at large, that success has helped keep Starcraft a pillar in competitive gaming for the better part of the past two and a half decades.
StarCraft's synopsis and premise is as formulaic as you would expect it tobe in an RTS of its era: As Earth becomes grossly overpopulated, with diminishing natural resources, the global governing bodyissues the scorched-earth of sending all of earth's prisoners to establish a colony on the fringes of the galaxy. After centuries of isolation, where the planet they landed on was a wasteland ravaged by nature, and all their lives were threatened by the dangers of the galaxy's harsh terrain, a series of systems were devised that would ultimately culminate as the Government of Man: the Terran Dominion, first formed to protect establish order in an environment of chaos, and later used to fight against the Zerg race, and most recently against the Protoss during the Zerg Swarm war as the human colony gets entangled in an intergalactic war.
StarCraft isn't just a game, it's a relic of the past. From the outside it's only a simple space RTS, and inside there are intricate features. From an RTS' perspective, this is the very reason why they do not survive in today's competitive gaming climate. In the grand scheme of things, Starcraft is just an entry in the genre. But to the competitive scene, especially to the South Korean one, its longevity is a marvel. As a player, it's just a joy to look back on this brilliant strategy game from years ago, even today.
To date, StarCraft sold nearly 10 million units of which at least 500,000 of those were copies of Brood War and its many expansions and mod packs. By any metric, StarCraft is one of the most successful PC games ever released. Not only that, it managed to become one of the biggest eSports with massive events and viewers in multiple regions. And that was just a few years ago.
With StarCraft now 24 years old, you might think that the game is on its way out. You would be wrong. The game is still going strong, not because of its compellingness of its story, its superb voice acting, its potential for long-winded campaign levels, or even for its ultra-refined balance between all the races, which a lot of RTS games struggle with. Rather, its thanks to its devoted player base that is still active to this day, as well as its competitive merits and standing in the South Korean scene.
Loyal fanbase
For any game to foster and culture a fan base that is willing to stand tall even 2 decades later is testament enough to how great that game is, and an honorary thing for it as well. StarCraft features a custom campaign editor embedded within it, allowing players to create not just their own levels, but also introduce and implement novel assets, units and all of their associated voice acting clips and special sound effects as well. 2 decades later, the game still receives at least one campaign, and an average of 6, per year since StarCraft's release.
That means that there is an average of between 1 to 12 full fledged campaigns created by players per year, even more so when you consider the amount of mods that exist for it. The real highlight though has to be the modding community itself, which has expanded to the point where modders are creating more games than just from their work for a franchise like StarCraft.
StarCraft Fan Campaign Masterlist
This is hugely impressive for a relic to still be relevant, let alone receive a constant stream of fan-made content this good since 1998.
South Korea's Infatuation
As mentioned before, half of StarCraft's grand sales were South Koreans. Of note at this point is that StarCraft was extremely influential to the genre it premiered in simply for the fact that it has achieved a great power balance amongst the three races the player can choose from. This is of significance because all the other RTS games at the time seem to buckle, even bottleneck the entirety of any given game's fair competitive ability, suffer from unfair advantages given to a particular race over the other. StarCraft not only remedied this, but also sat the standard way up high for the genre at large. It did this with its amazing unit variety (including the use of marine and mutalisks in competitive games, not to mention its incredible micro controls) and great diversity of play (its map design) that made for a game that felt like it would take place in every imaginable scenario, from an apocalyptic wasteland, to a cold, lifeless shipyard. Its AI is also one of the finest AI's I've ever seen in any game of that era. It is, I would dare even say, ahead of its time.
Blizzard then proceeded to take advantage of this, and not only continued to push StarCraft forward in terms of its design, but expanded on it. As mentioned before, there are two very different kinds of Starcraft - there's the original Starcraft, which was all about the balance of power and the balance of skill, and there's the expansion that introduced several new units into the mix, as well as expanded the single-player campaign, called Brood War. Starcraft 2, for the record, is of course all about the balance of power and the balance of skill. However, while Starcraft 2 doesn't have the same depth as its predecessor (there's not much to it, really), the multiplayer itself has come to be recognized as one of the most balanced RTS games that has been released second to the original. This is not to say that it isn't still competitive, but when playing with people, you don't feel like you're fighting your way back from a deficit, but rather that you're battling against the player in front of you to find out who will beat who. Starcraft 2 has many of the greatest features of the genre: the diversity of units, the balance of units, the balance of abilities, the balance of strategies, the diversity of scenarios, and the balance of the race and the players and of all the things that make up the grandeur of the game.
Conclusion
Few video games out there were as impactful as StarCraft. Even moreso when taking into account the fact that it is still being played in the national eSports in South Korea for this long, in addition to its loyally devoted playerbase churning out original content. You'd be hard-pressed to find any other matching game such as this. I definitely recommend you check it out!
