EPTBefore I start, let me talk about myself. I’m a Masters Protoss, played at ~3500 points last season, was diamond since the first day of SC2. Played BW but not seriously, top was D+ in iccup even though I only played maybe 20 games. I played in the CSL this year for my school, nothing special. Now I’m just your average Toss player trying to make himself better. This isn’t a brag blog or anything important; I’m making this blog for me. I feel like I’ve only told my Starcraft story in chunks, which doesn’t do it justice. Starcraft means a lot to me, and it’s something I love no matter how much my buddies joke about it. If you want to hear about pros or strategies or something magnificent, go somewhere else. This is my story.
Growing up, I always loved strategy games. It all started when I was 7 or 8, when my dad and I started playing Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness together. He had it all set out – in the office of our house sat two computers nearly side-by-side, one was a Windows 95 and the other was a Windows 98. He wasn’t a gamer, and to be honest I’m not sure why he did it, but he set it up so we could LAN together. So sometimes on the weekends or when he got home from work during the week, he’d grab me and we’d play 2v2s against the computer on Warcraft 2. Goddamnit, those were good times.
![[image loading]](http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/images/d/d0/Warcraft2_Screenshot.jpg)
Micro those Paladins, bro
There’s hardly better father-son bonding time than cooperatively killing hordes of villainous Orcs. My favorite map was Spiral, so you could get ships and submarines. Looking back, it was actually hilarious; some of you may not know this, but there’s a bug in Warcraft 2 that for some strange reason has the computer AI in 2v2s always attack Player 1 first and the hardest. My dad would always choose to be Player 1 and let me be Player 2, who was hardly touched at all. So we’d spawn at our locations, and within 8 minutes my dad would have enemies at the front of his base. He’d scramble to get some Ogres out, maybe throw down some panic towers. All the while I’m sitting in my base (playing Humans, of course) teching to Griffin Riders. I remember our conversations:
“Dad, you okay? You got guys in your base,”
“Yeah I’ll hold, how are you doing down there?”
“Fine, I’m almost at Griffo… OH MY GOD DAD THEY’RE ATTACKING ME OH MY GOD HELP”
“Okay, I’m coming”
Yeah, you heard it right, I’d freak out over a small attacking force and he’d send help while his base was under attack. You know, regardless of him paying for my food, housing, and education, and providing me with a safe family to grow up in, I think I only now noticed how good of a dad he really is. Huh. I mean, if I’m getting 6 pooled, like I’m gonna help my dumbass ally, fuck that. I’m throwing down cannons in my own base, not his.
We’d play for hours on end. I still have the Warcraft 2 music stuck in my ears, and I can almost recite the dialogue of the opening sequence. After you’d play the game would rate your performance, and I’d always get a Squire. My dad was always a Paladin, basically because it was a 2v1 until I got Griffon Riders out. End game scenario right there. In today’s Starcraft terms that’d be like playing 2v2 and having your ally tech straight to mass Carriers. He was a trooper. And to think I thought Squire and Paladin were basically equivalent, oh the ignorance!
We stopped playing after a couple years, he stopped playing video games altogether as work got harder and more time consuming. But even then, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have a father like him.
![[image loading]](http://i463.photobucket.com/albums/qq358/mccuefamily/connor2-2006.jpg)
On top of Mt. St. Helens with my dad, I think this was the summer before high school
From there, I was hooked on the entire RTS genre. I got super into Age of Empires 2 (who didn’t) and still LAN that shit with my dorm buddies. Red Alert 2 was another good one, cept it was just a completely over-the-top and silly game. I would play as the South Koreans and just do bombing runs all game against the computer. Age of Mythology was another one I got into, but I think that was more for the historical aspect. There were some other random RTS games I played, but none worth mentioning.
In 2001 I got my hands on Starcraft and its expansion. Now, I actually owned it from when it first came out, but that was when my dad was getting out of video games. So I bought my second copy. Dunno if some of you know this, but Starcraft was orginigally given a Mature rating. I think they scaled it down after, because my second copy is only rated Teen. One game, two ratings, too funny. I loved it, but I thought it was too hard and wanted to focus on other things. I was 10 and I liked girls for the first time. I would basically make only tanks and goliaths because they were fucking awesome. I only played the campaign for maybe 2 weeks and then stopped. Shame.
Then in 2003 two of my best friends were playing outside. I went out there to go play with them, and when I got to them they were pretending to be these creatures I had never heard of. I remember my buddy Nigel saying, “No, Robert, I’m the Lurker. You can be a Dark Templar.” And Robert responding, “No I want to be the Lurker.” [Remember those names, they’ll come back eventually] I was confused and they told me they were talking about Starcraft, which confused me even more – I hadn’t played through the game enough to know what they were talking about, or at least to remember those units. So after they were both pretending to be Lurkers and I was a Zealot, I went to look for my Starcraft game. Couldn’t find it, so I asked my mom to get it – she did.
Copy number three. And I was hooked…
some stuff likes this makes me care a little more about having no father >_>
