EPTBy the time I got my own copy of Brood War it was already a rather old game. It was as I entered my freshman year of high school, four years ago, that I installed it on my computer. I played it with friends and we were all very bad -- the premier strategy was to play Lost Temple, rush an island base and turtle until you had a huge fleet of Battlecruisers or Carriers.
Later I discovered the professional scene - proleague, OSL, MSL. In those days the forum I browsed for nuggets of BW knowledge was GameFAQs and it was there in a topic asking who the best player was I saw the first response: "search youtube for boxer". Of course, it's easy to see that this set me on the road to becoming a terran player.
It was in this way that I got to become the best of my friends at the game, which was still pretty bad. I was C- high on iCCup though mostly I averaged a D+ rating. As it turns out, D+ was enough -- I could win against my friends playing any matchup. One of my friends who came the closest to beating me was a college student at Rice University, and he joined their CSL team. He didn't do fantastically but I was proud of him for being able to make the lineup, to play in matches to represent his school. Though I was always the kind of guy to play a macro game I was never happier than when he managed to take down a C+ protoss on Moon Glaive with a BBS I helped him practice over and over.
Fast forward. Starcraft II comes out. i got my own copy and played it a bit, though nowhere near as much as I played Brood War. Don't get me wrong - it was fun, it was competitive, it was still StarCraft -- Blizzard truly created another wonderful game. But it just didn't have the same kind of hold over me. And as more time passed and less of my friends played Brood War I ceased to play as well.
Nowadays I play League of Legends. It's fun. Lots of my friends play it. I'm a fan of CLG, though -- IPL4 Spoilers Ahead -- + Show Spoiler +
TSM definitely outplayed CLG in the last set of the finals
In fact, it's been a long time since I've booted up Brood War.
But the Proleague finals -- now that's something special. SKT vs KT was and always will be a timeless rivalry. I even remember one of my favorite TL polls that almost seemed like SKT vs KT: "Best autovote option?" And two of those options, of course, were "Boxer" and "When Yellow wins an OSL". It's nothing to do with good and evil though one might romanticize it as such (with personal bias of course), just the two most elite battling it out, a neverending duel with a million parts.
And that's why I immediately felt very guilty when I saw that I had missed the date of the Proleague finals. Hurriedly I went to youtube and found the VODs. I'm watching them now. And in the very first set the camera swept out amongst the audience, and I saw KT flags waving and SKT thundersticks, and I heard the roar of the crowd and the exuberant exclamations of the Korean commentators I have come to admire so much.
And a wave of nostalgia swept over me, because it's really something quite special. Perhaps I'm just wearing glasses tinted with rose, and I'm almost certainly prejudiced, but Brood War seems to have given me something so distinguished that Wings of Liberty never gave me, that League of Legends hasn't given me.
Brood War always did, and always will, give me the sense of a strange kind of magic.
