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.
Congrats Monk, that sounds awesome - I'm sure you are excited to work at a new place, as we are all excited to finally get a hopefully fast paced RTS game.
I know whatever Frost Giant will do, will be great and I'll be a day 1 customer regardless!
I really hope you guys will look at the things that made BW Amazing, wheras starcraft 2 even from the beginning was a little bit of a let down with some of it's mechanics and death balls (this has been discussed to death).
awesome news man. best of luck with the new rts! would be awesome if bits and parts could be shared bit by bit in the future so we could help you guys if you need help or feedback
remember you from the forums very early on, then seen you in hearthstone, it's awesome to see your development!
Please continue with co-op mode at Frost Giant, it has potential to become absolutely massive. The fanbase around co-op has shown how successful it can be!
Also can you fix the Zagara mastery bug and Alarak P3 hotkey bug haha
Had the pleasure of working with Monk on SC for almost 3 years and one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that he is a very cool guy that helped me recover my TL password for the explicit purpose of making this congratulatory post
Best of luck and thank you for everything so far. It looks like Blizzard is now officially out of the RTS genre, and Frost Giant will be picking it up. I'm seriously happy to see the amount of good RTS talent being picked up there.
Having played every blizzard RTS consistently since WC1, it's sad to see them go. But I'm now excited for the first time in a while about the possibility of actually good new RTS games.
I like what you did with Co-Op, and I'm looking forward to seeing your future work!
<3 working with you was amazing and one of the most educational experiences I had. I still almost can't believe we wrote 100 pages worth of Starcraft PvZ guide when we first started TL Strategy!
I'm sure that whatever you do at Frost Giant will be amazing, I'm looking forward to seeing it!
Coop has been a great stress reliever when you don't want to work at SC. Definitely curious about how you'll build on very solid work with the coop in SC2.
The amount of careers TL has helped jump start in the Esports/Gaming scene is phenomenal. Glad that you were a part of SCII history, and hopeful to see you crush it at Frost Giant.
I’m quite pumped to try co-op sometime, isn’t the sort of thing I tend towards but have heard a lot of good things!
Good luck with the next step in your adventure, still fondly remember your efforts in the strategy section, they were certainly a lifesaver for my gameplay.
I was always impressed by your analytical skills and attention to detail back in the TL Strategy days. I hope you will have the liberty of using those skills freely at Frost Giants and make a truly great RTS. Best of luck Monk
EPT
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