Tough times on the road to Starcraft - Page 2

The entire team worked long hours, with Bob working stretches of 40 hours, 42 hours, even 48 hours programming. As I recall no one else attempted these sorts of masochistic endeavors, though everyone was putting in massive, ridiculous hours.
Working these long hours made people groggy, and that’s bad when trying to accomplish knowledge-based tasks requiring an excess of creativity, so there should have been no surprises about the number of mistakes, misfeatures and outright bugs.
Incidentally, these sorts of crazy hours weren’t mandated — it was just the kind of stuff we did because we wanted to make great games. In retrospect it was foolish — we could have done better work with more reasonable efforts.

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While I implemented some important features in StarCraft, including fog-of-war, line-of-sight, flying unit pathing-repulsion, voice-chat, AI reinforcement points, and others, my primary job gravitated to fixing bugs.

Wait: voice-chat! In 1998?!? Yeah: I had it all working in December 1997.

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When I say “argued vehemently”, I should mention that was more or less the only way we knew how to argue at Blizzard — with our youthful brashness and arrogant hubris, there was no argument that wasn’t vehement unless it was what was for lunch that day, which no one much wanted to decide.

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So you’ve heard me whine a bit about how difficult it was to make StarCraft, largely through poor choices made at every level of the company about the game’s direction, technology and design.

We were fortunate to be a foolhardy but valiant crew, and our perspicacity carried the day. In the end we buckled down and stopped adding features long enough to ship the game, and players never saw the horror show underneath.

Incidentally, these sorts of crazy hours weren’t mandated — it was just the kind of stuff we did because we wanted to make great games. In retrospect it was foolish — we could have done better work with more reasonable efforts.

On September 08 2012 23:45 Al Bundy wrote:


That's the Blizzard I know and love.

StarCraft became the game that defined Blizzard’s strategy of not releasing games until they were ready.

On September 08 2012 23:50 Shady Sands wrote:

That's the Blizzard I knew and loved.

On September 09 2012 00:01 Nimix wrote:

D3 anyone? :D
Great read otherwise, regression from low budget > great games to the contrary is sad, and really makes me want to see developers as motivated and creative as they were for those games, quitting commercial BS as anyway their games would probably sell better if they were just good...