Seventeen years ago, I discovered teamliquid.net through my Googling of 4v4 BGH strategies—throughout high school and college, I followed Brood War through VLC streams and Warcraft III through PPLive. And when StarCraft II came out in 2010, I started contributing as a volunteer, authoring strategy guides, crafting tournament recaps, and ranking players on the basis of "power". At a certain point in my life, I was faced with the decision to either persist toward a more traditional career path or pursue my love and passion for gaming, esports, and StarCraft by officially joining the Teamliquid organization.
I chose StarCraft.
With this decision, I travelled the world for esports: Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Finland, Sweden, and China (though, regrettably, never Korea). I got to live briefly in the TL house with Liquid'Hero and Liquid'TaeJa, where Hero asked me to teach him Hearthstone, and TaeJa learned my name I suspect for the sole reason of asking me to help him get rid of spiders. And yes, TaeJa never practiced, even in front of the boss. (It was pretty great.)
Through good fortune, I was then hired by Blizzard as Lead Co-op Designer of StarCraft II, where I truly felt I was able to apply my skills and talents to a passion. It was a dream come true. My team fully empowered me to make meaningful contributions to the game, a game held sacred, one that had so much influenced the direction of my life. It was a pure joy and an honor to see players tinker with and theorycraft around Commanders and balance tweaks I had a hand in, much as I had once done myself over the past 25 years with Blizzard RTS games.
All in all, StarCraft was my community, my tribe, and—as cliché as it may be—I'm eternally grateful it allowed me to make so many lifelong friends along the way.
Recently, I made the difficult decision to leave Blizzard. Though this is the end of my time on the StarCraft II development team, it is in no way the end of my involvement with its community. I'll do my best to continue engaging online and will probably attend even more offline events than before, COVID willing. I hope to see many of you at these events, and if I do, please don't be a stranger.
Going forward, I'll be putting my skills, passion, and heart into Frost Giant—a new game studio announced today with many of my old colleagues I worked with on the StarCraft II team. On this new adventure, we will build a new RTS that we hope will be worthy of the legacy of the great RTS games that have come before it.
And with that, I have but one thing left to say: Please cheer for me. I hope to show good games.
En Taro, StarCraft. Kevin "monk" Dong | @Solid_monk
On October 21 2020 01:01 monk wrote: Through good fortune, I was then hired by Blizzard as Lead Co-op Designer of StarCraft II, where I truly felt I was able to apply my skills and talents to a passion. It was a dream come true. My team fully empowered me to make meaningful contributions to the game, a game held sacred, one that had so much influenced the direction of my life. It was a pure joy and an honor to see players tinker with and theorycraft around Commanders and balance tweaks I had a hand in, much as I had once done myself over the past 25 years with Blizzard RTS games.
i'm no expert. but in my average, diamond-leaguer opinion, Co-Op is off-the-charts fucking amazing. I speculate that part of the inspiration for Blizzard creating a "co op" sandbox was the Co-Op Campaign of Red Alert 3.
Overall, Red Alert 3's campaign had its positives and negatives. I always thought the co-op aspect of RA3's campaign was great. I always thought RTS, PvE Co-op had a place in the RTS genre.
As great as I thought Co-op PvE content could be ... as big of a proponent of it as I was.. I never imagined it would be done as brilliantly as Blizzard did it.
I had high hopes for SC2 co-op because I thought co-op PvE had a tonne of potential. You and your team exceeded those expectations.
It was a pleasure working with you and thank you for contributing so much into Starcraft. I hope you will find joy in the new project and I wish you all the best there!
As someone who loved co-op before Monk was on-board, I can say without a doubt he's easily one of the best things that ever happened to it. Put a lot of effort into finding pain points and making the game more dynamic and fun without ruining what people originally liked.
I will always have respect for devs that ask community figures (as someone who makes tons of co-op content still) how to improve things and then actually implement those. Monk you might have left blizz but your impact on the game is gonna be felt forever. Cheers!
It's great seeing you're still able to follow your dream and passions. I'm also really looking forward to seeing what you guys at Frost Giant's will make for us.
EPT
.
