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How StarCraft beat Chess

Blizzard looks back on the world's best strategy game.

Dan Griliopoulos avatar
Interview by Dan Griliopoulos Contributor
Updated on
EurogamerSo you're basically saying it looked great, had great gameplay, played great in multiplayer, a great story... were there any weaknesses?
Frank Pearce

There definitely were. The game really took off when we launched the expansion.

Bob Fitch

Brood War filled some holes.

Frank Pearce

Balancing the three races was not easy and when the game launched I wouldn't say it was ideally balanced. I don't know even how many patches we've released; one within the last six months. We have to make sure the game is viable for the e-sport community and we have to keep correcting bugs. We certainly were doing a lot of that in the first year, and the expansion addressed that too.

EurogamerWith Brood Wars why did you stop there? Why no more expansions after that?
Frank Pearce

Warcraft III! We also splintered off another group of people who started work on another product that got shelved. These guys were then moved onto their next big project, something you may have heard of called, erm... World of Warcraft? So the development team that started working on StarCraft seeded the team that ended up working on World of Warcraft and also the team that made Warcraft III.

EurogamerBattle.net was one of the only multiplayer/matchmaking arenas that was fair, moderated and easy to use; has anything superceded it?
Frank Pearce

Xbox Live? Gamespy, Steam.

EurogamerAre your older products ever going to be on Steam?
Frank Pearce

That's a good question. We've talked about it, but we've not made any decisions beyond our own. We already offer WOW for digi-download on our own site.

Apparently, this is corsairs casting a disruption web on Terran air defences. Looks like a bleeding Mondrian to me.
EurogamerYeah, and you don't need more people on that particular game, really. Going back to StarCraft, the spawn installation thing that allowed 8-player multiplayer from one copy of the game. It was an early version of viral marketing - one person selling to 7 friends. Why did that die after Total Annihilation? Why haven't more games made use of it?
Bob Fitch

I have a theory about that: people were afraid that they wouldn't make enough money. They would think they're selling one copy to eight people when they want to sell eight copies. That's just not the way we think about it. Anyway, now you can download demos right from the internet, so there's not much point to doing it right now.

EurogamerWhat was the riskiest thing you did with StarCraft?
Bob Fitch

Delay! [Laughs]

Frank Pearce

Is that a risk? We felt like the game wasn't ready so we had to hold it until we felt it was. That certainly paid off in spades.

Bob Fitch

Sure, but generally delaying can be risky for the company. It's just a risk we're willing to take every time. We can delay and the game's going to be great.

EurogamerTen years ago you were a mid-rank developer. Back then, you obviously didn't expect to be where you are now. But where did you see yourselves going in the next ten years?
Bob Fitch

[Laughs] Did we look that far ahead?

Ah, yes, the difference between vanilla Goliaths and Brood Wars Goliaths; highly-effective anti-air rockets.
Frank Pearce

A lot of the stuff we did then was seat of the pants, impulsive, short-sighted stuff. Ten years ago we were a lot younger than we are today.

Bob Fitch

Ten years ago it was "let's make a great game and see what happens" rather than really trying to plan it out.

Frank Pearce

We're gamers ourselves so our focus is always on making games we wanted to play. While we were wrapping StarCraft there were a handful of guys on the team playing Ultima Online. EverQuest came along afterwards, but I don't have to spell out where that took us.

EurogamerN64 StarCraft didn't do badly, but not well either. People have tried strategy games on the consoles. Why did you try it? Why have you never gone back to consoles?
Bob Fitch

It was on a console. It's hard to do RTSes on a console.

Frank Pearce

StarCraft was designed with the PC and its peripherals in mind, so it was a different experience. Because it was on the N64 we didn't have the benefits of PC communities, who are critical to our experience today.