EPT
Last summer I was watching SGDQ (a very popular speedrunning marathon for charity) and decided I wanted to dive into a game myself in my free time. After pondering for a while, I figured what better game than the game I spent a lot of my youth playing? I picked up the Brood War Terran campaign and learned each level and was able to get the world record for each individual level as well as the overall campaign after a lot of practice. I ended up submitting the run to ESA, which is Europe's version of GDQ, and traveled to Sweden to do a run of the campaign this past February with a couple of friends doing commentary for me. As a high schooler I always dreamed of playing StarCraft in front of a crowd. This isn't quite what I envisioned but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless
Since then I decided to go for some of the vanilla campaigns, which are a lot more competitive. It took a lot of practice but I was able to snag both the Terran and Zerg campaign WR's. The Zerg campaign is very likely to get taken soon as some optimizations have been made by others, but the Terran one is one that I'm really proud of as missions 5-10 are all surprisingly tricky and both 8 and 9 require a lot of multitask to get consistently good times on:
Since I got into it, a lot of things have changed. Traditionally there's only been one category for StarCraft - any%. This is the basic category that any game has and just means you beat the game as fast as you can. The problem with StarCraft is that, as a lot of us remember, the old patches have glitches that can't be used in the latest patches. For example, sliding a CC right next to the minerals or floating a Drone can let you complete missions really quickly. This means that the only way to get really fast times is to downpatch your SC and use these glitches.
However, recently, the community agreed to add a new category - "Any% All Glitches & Patches" (also now being referred to as AGaP"). Any% now only counts runs that are utilizing a patch that does not have broken glitches or balance changes (150 mineral Spawning Pools tend to make for faster runs). AGaP still allows all patches to compete against each other.
This change has sparked a lot of interest in optimizing levels on the newer patches and finding new tricks to beat them fast, which has found some awesome strategies. Honestly because there was no reason to try to compete with the old patches before, a lot of new strats are being discovered now. Some of the current active runners include Thadortin, Kesanka, and 7thAce, all of whom are quite creative. For example, Kesanka found that Z08 (Eye for an Eye), the level where you have to kill two Protoss Nexii, can be cleared really fast by using the timer to determine when Observers will spawn and storming them right away and using a cloaked Kerrigan to clear the first base:
Thadortin found that a glitch can be used in Z05 (The Amerigo) that clips Kerrigan through a cliff to skip most of the level:
Thadortin also found on BWZ08 (To Slay the Beast) that by abusing a timed attack that the AI does, you can slip in some DT's, block the ramp with a few of them, and hit the Overmind while there's no detection nearby. This is currently the WR but was mostly done as a test and will be optimized at some point but really goes to show how much is going on in the community right now
On top of all of this, what's really exciting is that 7thAce, who currently holds the WR for the Brood War Zerg campaign, got his run accepted into AGDQ 2023! Brood War was last in this event in 2019 as a bonus run, so to see it get in is great news, especially during this time where so much is happening in the community. The Brood War Zerg campaign is very macro heavy as most levels revolve around killing all the opponents' buildings on the map, but there's a fair amount of tricks involved too. The event averages tens of thousands of viewers and spikes at over 100,000 so this will get a lot of eyes on the game which is going to be awesome.
If you're like me and don't really feel like playing ladder anymore but still love the feeling of playing fast and moving all around the keyboard, now is a great time to get into it. It's nearly impossible to match the feeling of playing clan wars and tournaments in StarCraft, and I'm not going to lie and say that speedrunning can match that vibe, but getting deep into a run on a good time is quite the thrill in itself. speedrun.com is the main resource for speedrunning for nearly all games and you can find each games' page here:
StarCraft: https://www.speedrun.com/sc1
Brood War: https://www.speedrun.com/scbw
You can also join the RTS speedrunning Discord which is where most discussions take place for SC speedrunning: https://discord.com/invite/dy3GRjw
