My own BroodWar retrospective

I saw it first in a fancy magazine.

They had that pre-premiere review of it, and I accidently stumbled upon like three-page article lauding it's depth and fun to explore. What was awesome about that article, was that it contained plenty of cool, razor-sharp screenshots. And what was even more awesome, was that the journalist spent more than a half of the space he got from his boss to just give away a large battle report from 3v3 team melee game on some basic map. Actually, despite twelve year distance, I can still recall couple of expressions from it:

"I picked Terran. Race comfortable to use, and those Tanks..."

...and later...

Terrans' wet dream.

"I sneaked my spy behind his lines and soon, I could watch the delightful little dot upon his main building. Few seconds later: KABOOM! and his base suddenly started looking like a refugee camp. There were corpses of Hydralisks and smaller piece of crap - Zerglings lying everywhere and my soldier comfortably moved away from that scattered area."

I was excited. A game where you can devastate some hostile aliens with a nuclear bombs? Totally awesome. But that wasn't the end:

"The guy couldn't afford to waste any more time and to not help his ally, so he sent all his Carriers to rescue his buddy we were both attacking. But then, I brought my invisible fighters and his Carriers earned M.I.A. status."

Superb! So, supposedly, even the most badass unit has a counter to it!

"All of the sudden, a hoard of 40 (!) Hydralisks came out of nowhere and ran over my base. My Tanks were doing their best, but the Bunkers stood only for like a second. Sadly, it turned out that the guy was sending one or two Hydras at a time and burrowed them at the side of my base, and I had no idea, thus no reason to scan that place with my Comsat."

Oh, so those aliens also have cool tricks at their disposal. I like it!

There was the report, but where were I? Well, I was just having my 2nd computer ever after like two-year break from having such a device at home. Long story short, my parents were both mean and poor, meaning that if I wanted a computer, had to inherit it from my older brother, who started living on his own and bought himself something better. So, during my childhood, I used splendid Amiga 500. Ah, the sound of buzzsaw coming out of it's floppy disk drive... The need to switch disks 5629 times during basic Mortal Kombat 2 ladder against computer opponents... The feeling of supremacy after inventing the way to place curled shots in a 1v1 soccer called Kick Off 2... The smell of melting rubber as you worked another joystick to death by trying to beat legendary platform game Flashback...

A Beautiful Machine.

Amiga 500 was pretty much perfect, but it finally broke down and, after a long interlude, I got iMac - a bigass, plastic-covered green box with everything vital in it. In-between, I had very little interest to the development of games and gaming, so to me, in 1999, the time sorta stopped on Dune 2 or the very first edition of Civilization, if you recall those two. As a result, I had no idea that Starcraft's graphics were a little outtated at the time, but more importantly, I couldn't care less about that. Simply speaking, I was raised on fully symbolic, visually bleak games, I only wanted the graphics to not disturb the fun, and realism was virtually unimportant.

I just had to fall in love with Starcraft.

Now, back to the reality; I had a computer, but no Internet. No Internet at all all the way to my 18th birthday; can you imagine that? To me, multiplayer was when I put my iMac into the box and carried it to my friend's house. Or when I visited another buddy who had two comps linked together and we were unbelivably lucky to find both of them unoccupied. That sucked. That also helped my to get some decent grades, because I hardly had any way to waste time I was supposed to use up for studying. But still, t h a t s u c k e d.

What I had left to do was to beat all single-player campaigns, so I proceeded to do so with utmost caution. To me, if my attack was to be successful, it had to be conducted with 100% chance of winning the game, and of course, with 0% of own casualities. In SC, that pretty much narrowed the choice to turtling into 12-Battlecruiser tactics - or to it's alterations like 12-Carrier or 12-Guardian + 12-Devourer play. No need to guess, that the mission I liked the most was called Desperate Alliance. Well, it was just turtling, wasn't that beautiful? Apparently, not to everyone. One of my friends tried to beat it, but didn't know how Bunkers work, so he just tried to amass Marines in the entrances to his base. In the end, his last building collapsed about 5 seconds before the time ran out, causing him to rage so hard that he threw his mice against the wall and broke it. I laughed like a retard.

After beating the campaigns and figuring out that 12-Guardian 12-Devourer strategy gets you screwed on very last Zerg mission Omega (but mass Hydras don't, lol), I was still hopelessly into Starcraft, so I pursued the only direction I could try while being hopelessly offline - StarEdit. My quest was to design a complete campaign that would push forward the plot known from BroodWar, while being significantly harder to beat. My custom maps were basically large slugfests with objectives like "kill 500 Zerg units in 60 minutes", but I wrote background and briefings, not to mention hours spent on perfecting in-game triggers. Apart from that, I even had a single UMS map where you had to assault WTC on 9/11 by crashing bunch of Scourge into a floating Command Centers - all that, of course, after paralyzing Terran's guards one way or another. Oh, well, you can only imagine what I felt when I found out that the legend of PL scene, Blackman, also used StarEdit to give himself a challenge.

Jumping fast-forward, I saw myself sitting in a large room in a large city, with my brother and my cousin, staring at the screens of our laptops and setting up like our first real multiplayer Broodwar game after getting some SC:BW wisdom off the internet. It was 1v1v1 on Octopus - a monstorus 256x256 Blizzard map with eight respawns. I had Terran at 1 o'clock, bro had Zerg at 5 o'clock and cousin had Toss at 10 o'clock.

All credits to Blizzard mapmakers - for this and many more.

Both my opponents were still relatively low on game's knowledge (just like me) so we all developed our own ways of playing. For instance, my younger brother played Zerg because of Queens. He demolished me with them couple of times by both parasiting the critters in my base to get the information, and then, spawning Broodlings from my Medics as I attempted to break his Sunkens with infantry (OFC my timing of that was laughable). He just liked epic tactics, I guess. My cousin, however, was quite the opposite. 100% of times, he would expand like a madman and mass Carriers to the limit. And I mean, his ability of expanding and collecting money was really good. But he believed in Carriers unconditionally, and not without a reason, as in view of our poor skill, he often A-moved them into victory.

So knowing what's coming and seeing with Comsat that my bro makes many Mutas, I focused on making Goliaths and Valkyries. But then, boom! Four Dark Templars landed in my base in Shuttle. What was comical about it, was that I complained before the game that my cousin only makes Carriers and that he should develop some more strategies than that, or he'll soon start to get rolled every game. He asked me then "like what?" and I, loosely adviced "You may drop DTs to someone's base, it's quite effective". Point was, I never expected that he'll do anything to alternate from his beloved Carriers, so I just threw random tactical reccomendation and forgot about it - and he went straight for it, catching me with my pants down!

Yup.

Five minutes and half of my base later, I was staring into the face of death. My panic Turrets stopped Templar rampage, but I was supply blocked and had a bigass fleet of Mutas coming. Fortunately, what my enemies were oblivious to - I had an expo at top-right corner, with 10 Starports pumping Wraiths non-stop. So sorry, brother, when you brought your Mutas, they all perished to the Cloaking Field. Meanwhile, the poor Zerg was being erased by cousins' Carriers, so he left the game, stating that 1v1v1 sucks. In the retrospect, he was totally right, but we had fun, noone got upset or angry, and that what really mattered.

So then, it was me vs 20 Carriers. Now, for two newbs thrown against each other, 20 Carriers ain't that much of a trouble. The real trouble is: how to find them on a goddamn 256x256 arena? This could take forever, and if not for my massive luck, I could see that game taking the whole night. But I had a spider mine dug at some random location and it spotted the enemy fleet passing over. Moreover, the mine survived that meeting, so either Carriers got an order to move or they had no Observer with them - an ideal chance for someone who has like 40 invisible planes under his command. So I sent my Wraiths to the proper location and before he saw what's going on, I took down all his Carriers. And then, he surrendered.

Those days, there were many more good games with my good mates. Like, there was a game, when my cunning cousin altered his ways little further and went for 5-Gate Zealot all-in on 2-player desert of Binary Burghs. I never scouted. I got 30 Zealots in my main. Lost all units except the flying buildings and bunch of SCVs that run around from Zealots like those guys in Benny Hill. Proceeded to evacuate what's left to the sealed high ground in the middle. Started from zero and hung on with Spider Mines and Turrets as he nonchalantly took the whole map and made Carriers. Won in an epic comeback struggle involving Shuttle sniping, dropping and turtling to the death...

Us, newbs, after reading about proper SC strategy.

That was at times when I knew nothing. Back then, South Korea was just some far-east country, proxy was only a type of an online server and Boxer was only a kind of engine for sport cars. Though I occasionally got on the Internet at school, it never occured to me that I could google stuff about Starcraft - mostly because I had no idea that this is so much of a big deal. But despite my ignorance, I had great time playing SC, and when I was tired of it, designing maps in StarEdit - maps difficult enough, so I could myself struggle to beat them, because I was bored with easy campaigns and because I liked to set myself challenges.

Only many months later, I discovered Proleague, Jon747, TL, walling, pimpest plays, livestreams, theorycrafting, reverse ramps, build orders, ICCup, Day[9], WCG, FPVODs, strong alcohols, chicks, life in general... I tried my best online only to find out that I was incapable of breaking 120 APM and that feeling when brain works much faster than my hands. I fought many better gamers and lost to many, sometimes in an epic fashion. There was one game I remember, on Fighting Spirit, when a Zerg made proxy Hatchery up my ramp, semi-allined with Lings, then I survived with 2 Bunkers, we destroyed each other's mains with doom drops in the midgame and I narrowly lost because, in a nick of time, he blocked choke to his last expo with two Lurkers and I had no detection or Dropship left to climp that ramp. So many blurry memories coming to back to me as I write it...

One thing is for sure - losing never felt bad as long as I gave everything I got.

And today, more than ten years later, I'm sitting here, thinking of Violet - the first from the line of SC gods who suddenly turned out to be mortal. At the same time, I'm thinking about BroodWar, that followed quite the same path, although, ironically, even as an essentially dead game, it looks less fragile that it's most unfortunate, deicated KT Rolster and Protoss lover. I never happened to be anyone more that D+ player, never even had enough motivation to get much better, but I'm still saddened with the course of history over few last months. Even though I'm not playing anymore, people and things seem to disappear behind my back way too quickly.

Shit like that shouldn't happen. And I mean both leukemia and BW agony...

...
...
...
...but I guess what really mattered was the fun.

And the fun will be remembered.

My own BroodWar retrospective

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