StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

September 27, 2012 By Patrick Wyatt

In my previous article about StarCraft I talked about why we rebooted the project and changed it from a follow-on to Warcraft — derisively called “Orcs in space” in 1996 — into the award-winning game that we were finally able to deliver after two more years of hardship. But one noteworthy source of inspiration didn’t make it into my previous article, and that’s what I’m going to write about today.

Blizzard first brought StarCraft to the attention of the gaming public at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June of 1996. At that point the game had only been in development for a few months so it was no surprise to the development team and other staff members that it wasn’t markedly different from its immediate antecedent, Warcraft II.

With the success of previous Warcraft titles and of Command and Conquer from Westwood Studios, the RTS genre attracted competitors. The race to build the next great RTS was on, and consequently Blizzard was about to be publicly embarrassed by its choice to show so early in the development lifecycle. Just a short walk away from the Blizzard booth was that of another game which appeared to be better than StarCraft in every respect: Dominion: Storm over Gift 3, from Ion Storm.

It’s 1996 and you want to buy an RTS game. Would you pay money for this?



Or this?

Trade show espionage

During the early years of Blizzard — back before the company was even called that — the entire development team would attend trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and E3. We’d spread out over the show floor and “research” (that is, play) products at our competitors’ booths, getting an early look at what other game studios would be launching over the next year. It was an opportunity to analyze gaming trends, learn about technological advances, evaluate new user interface techniques, and review gameplay. Even better, our competitors would facilitate this learning by demoing the games and answering our questions, and of course we’d do the same for them back at our booth. This is one reason game publishers have a love/hate relationship with trade shows, along with high costs (tens of thousands of dollars for a few feet of floor space) and excessive distractions for the dev teams, is that other studios are like hungry wolves looking for prey to devour.

In the early years, when our games were programmed for 16-bit game consoles, our programming staff would review soon-to-be-launched Super Nintendo (SNES) titles, and would crowd around games trying to puzzle out how their developers had accomplished some feat of technical magic and derring-do. The SNES was an odd combination of a glacially slow 2.58 megahertz (not gigahertz) processor with a tiny 64 kilobytes (not megabytes or gigabytes) of memory coupled with exotic microchips designed to rapidly blast bits onto the screen — if you could figure out the right incantations to make it all work.

We’d stand staring at a game talking in phrases that only a few thousand folks in the whole world — most of them working for Nintendo — knew anything about. Someone would toss off an idea like “perhaps they’re using the hblank interrupt to set the scroll register to adjust the view distance in mode 7″, and we’d all do our best to wrap our heads around that idea, learning a great deal in the process. Our artists and designers would be similarly wowed by their own show-floor discoveries.

It was an exciting experience to see so many new ideas in just a few days, and we’d come back from the shows both energized by our findings and exhausted by the brilliance and audacity of our competitors.

Better yet, these trade shows were held in exotic venues like Las Vegas where we’d get to stay out late drinking and gambling before dragging our hung-over selves back to the trade-show floor. Staffing the booth during the early mornings was always challenging, and required a careful evaluation of who would be the best advocates for the game after nights of excess — would it be the hardy-partiers, with their higher alcohol tolerance, or the more abstemious members of the team — the lightweights? While it might seem that the lightweights (myself included) were a better bet, just a few drinks more than usual might cause us to miss a morning event due to a catastrophic hangover.

For the privilege of getting access to the insights to be found on the show floor our dev team staff would be stacked like cordwood in cheap motel rooms far from the convention centers to save the company money. We stayed in a hotel so far into the rotting core of Chicago that several on the team felt the necessity to carry steak-knives as protection against the perceived threat of muggers. And who could forget when one of the two elevators caught fire and was put out of service, necessitating fourteen-floor hikes morning and evening.

Back on the show floor after these escapades, Blizzard staff members would discover great games on the show floor and would — like honeybees returning to the nest — communicate their findings so other devs could seek them out to harvest insights.

As the Ion Storm booth was next but one over from our booth it was no surprise that we quickly discovered in Dominion Storm a stunningly better entrant into the real-time strategy (RTS) genre than our company’s paltry efforts, which was all the more humiliating given that StarCraft represented our third foray into the genre.