It was November 30th 1998 the day it came out. We, or at least I, missed its b-day by a few days. Now StarCraft b-day was April 1st, 1998. How many year has it been since Brood War came out?
8 years!!
And StarCraft will be 9 years in a few month. For a few of us thats a little over 8 years of playing this game. I thought we might as well define today the exact meaning of old school for our community, at least so it means something to those few that can claim it.
Old school is someone that started playing this game from beta or the first year it came out.
Thats it. Final. Of course there are other definitions and we could sit all day and debate whether the next first "few" years qualifies you too as claiming the old school title or whether it is your game style etc.. but I personally will use it and will leave it for those that started playing at ground zero, i.e. beta and the first year.
If the community agrees then we can make it part of StarCraft folklore.
Poll: When did you start playing StarCraft? (Vote): Ground Zero, beta player. (Vote): First year, I am old School. (Vote): PreReplay but not old School. (Vote): Replay Generation (Vote): This year! 2006
I have made similar polls before but I decided to divide it in the different generations: ground zero or old School, Pre-Replay, Replay generations. I guess we could even further the Replay generation pre- and post- BWChart but it would get messy and I do not think it had as huge as an impact as replays did.
i had PLAYED it in the first year it came out but that probably shouldn't count because i didn't actually buy it until a little bit after it came out (around 2000 i think, pre-replay)
then again I never even got into the 1v1 melee aspect of starcraft until even later, 2003-04 maybe
hell did i even get broodwar until 2002-03 possibly not >_>
btw i like your definition of true old-school, it fits well
God bless that wonderful day. I bought the game ONLY because I saw the Ultralisk on the back of the box. Same reason I got into War Hammer 40,000 (Carnifex/Hive Tyrant).
Wonderful game that I can honestly say has been enjoyable despite devouring my life for 9 years.
Of note. I am not old school myself. I started in 1999 - pre-replay generation. I wish though I had been there at ground zero. Anyway Happy B-day Brood War!
I started playing online about when XellOs was in the WCG, so I guess I am from the replay generation. I remember when I didn't have a copy of SC so I downloaded the demo and battled it out on that preset map, with Terran being the only avaliable race. The strat that worked best for me was tank/turreting their cliff and mow down their base.
I played it the first time the same year it came out. First singleplayer at a friends place and thought it seem horrible. Then I played a lot of Brood War on a LAN cafe with friends. Didn't buy the game until a bit later tho, because I had no computer to play it on at home.
Started sometime in summer 1998, but only in the permanently installed LAN of my boarding school...
At first I hated how people were suddenly starting to play SC, because I was more into Age of Empires 1 at the time and wanted to play it instead. Standing behind the back of a friend watching him play SC I didn't understand shit, it looked very confusing to me. Since everyone else was playing it, I was kind of forced to play as well and so I did. Interesting to see how a game I didn't like at first became to be the main reason for my "online life" or whatever you may call it.
So, like I said, started maybe 2 months after the release, but at first only LAN. I think I played my first couple of online games in early 1999, but I'm not sure.
I also still remember playing with that leaked patch, which introduced replays
Such a nostalgic feelings, I have started with 1.0 Starcraft when I was like 11. I have been playing 8player FFa with computers all the time for many many times, I spent like 200 hours ffing with comps, it was such a joy -_-
Than two or so years later in 1.04 I have started to play LAN 3v3's at internet cafe, later at high school, it was even better joy. later I used to play UMS stuff on 99% hacker server Ender...
And than I returned to bw two years ago in the replay era when I started to play 1v1's, found online friends and fell down to adoring the progaming scene and watch replays like a crazy man
I was playing TA a lot at the time, and going from TA to anything was hard.
But my Quake buddies kept playing SC and finally I tried some good multi games and TA was mostly a goner. I remember a pentium pro was required for smooth SC 3v3 on lans, P133 lagged just a little
This was back at college, and we had an almost illegal amount of fun. I managed to study at the same time, many did not. TA/SC was a great way to relax after our way too serious quake matches (Carnage Clan for those old enough to remember)
I got it in December of '98 for Christmas. I literally only played vs comps, UMS, or just fastest maps for 2 years. I took a break for a couple years, then started playing on and off. Started to 1v1 probably only a year and a half to two years ago.
I got it the first year it came out. I was still learning WCII when my bro brought home SC, and I stayed up all night watching him play the campaign. I recall him taking like 3 attempts at that "survive for 30 minutes" map. I took forever on the campaign myself, with trouble on Ep1 last mission. I spent so much time trying to beat that, but I never could. But I was like... 10 at the time, and it was the first PC game I really played.
I gave my friend Warcraft II so we could play modem games back in 97, and about 6 months later he gave me this wonderful game called Starcraft to try and said it was better than War 2.
Things like these make me cry and I regret that I never reached gosu level after some many years-hours playing this game. Hmmm I think I can say I am the best BW playet of my 20000ppl town though...
I think I bought it around 1998~1999 and started playing online in 2001 I remember buying it in a box that had warcraft2, diablo 1, sc and bw. At first I only played sc and bw offline because I didnt have internet yet, then played diablo on line for a month or two before getting down to the real work, hell yeah. Its been my main game ever since <3 (even though I only started getting into decent melee since 3 years ago)
bought the game a couple of months after it came out. the box looked so cool, and it had gotten good reviews in various game magazines. at the time i couldnt play online though, so it was only a couple of years later i really got into it (multiplayer). i dont really play anymore now though =/
I started out in 3rd grade, now i'm in 11th, so about 8 years ago...Holy shit, I'm 16, i've been playing starcraft for half of my life! that would be 1998. Old school generation. My friend had a full install M.O.D of it from gundam wars or something. I was obsessed with it. I would FFA it out on BGH for hours Then I eventually got it for christmas and i was extatic. I quickly rushed online to play these 3v3 games and I had no idea how to type or ally someone. My first game, everyone was saying "ally him now" but i had no idea how to talk. I would slam every key on my keyboard and nothing would allow me to type... so i quit the game and asked in the public channel and i joined my 2nd game. Took me days to memorize how to ally someone. lol...
It's been about 7 years since i bought it, and 8 years since i started playing. Been about 3.5 years since i've been playing competitievly.
On December 12 2006 01:47 Carnac wrote: I also still remember playing with that leaked patch, which introduced replays
that was awesome =) I remember that for some odd reason my starting channel was always deu-x, i didn't even know there's an aut-1 channel for more than a year.
Bought it the month it came out - stopped playing warcraft 1 and 2/monkey island games - Had to wait a few months for internet though, but the singleplayer was... is... godly. Hail Starcraft
ps.. have had long breaks from the game though, but no-other game comes near to giveing this much back to the player.
Recently took a look at some of the in-game cinematics from the game, they still look crisp
I got my hands on SC in late March of '98. Maybe it was early April. But I got it for my b-day present so it was one of them.
I've played the game at least once every 6 months after then but not competitively at all. I didn't even keep up with the progaming scene until 2 years ago.
Got SC Sophomore year in high school and played it very rarely (only LAN/modem games with friends and cheats in single player campaign), then BW came out and we had a pirate friend that owned a CD-burner who copied CDs for our whole group. We played on Bnet a few times, and I tried playing against some people at school and finding more people at school that had the game. I tried logging into Bnet a few times to play Ladder and check out the high level scene (which at the time was nohunters), even running my own tournament. It was all about BattleReports.com where all the best battle reports by Heartcutter, YourRoleModel, and DoomDragon resided, and strategy was discussed there in great detail with a knowledge base far superior to the B.net forums where I had been visiting in my off-time. Around this time I found out xeno117 played BW a fair amount but never on Bnet, so we started doing 2v2s on standard, non-money maps. I remember there was a leaked Beta patch called 1.08O that had a replay function, and everyone thought it was going to be the end of high-level play and introduce copycats (which it did to some extent). My very last game in 1.07 was a 2v2 against Terran_Turtle which was so close we wished replays existed at the time, and it was such a long game we got disconnected from Bnet, and when we logged back in the patch began autodownloading. xeno and I were LANning at the time and our eyes got big and we looked at each other and said "ONE OH EIGHT???!!!!" the patch that seemed like it would never arrive. We played very often after 1.08 came out and it's been off-and-on since about last year. Old school.
i started playing a little after it came out at my friends house. his description was warcraft in space, so i was like what the hell. the first thing he showed me was a carrier when he was in the middle of a game and i was just like WOW OMG. i still remember getting raped in my first game in one of those no-rush games, with about 4 reavers getting dropped 10 min in -_-. then i realized protoss is for gays and switched to zerg. i think i got myself a copy right when bw came out. i never played bw til like 01 for some reason tho =p.
Still have my Starcraft 1.0 disc, and it's actually got next to zero scratches on it. I bought it the week it came out in 5th grade and I've never looked back :p
I can remember going to school, swappin diablo/war2 stories with my buddies and having a good time...
...and then one day a friend came to school with talk of warcraft in space with aliens bugs and humans. He tried to share stories but I distictly remember saying to myself "man, that game sounds like trash. There is no way you can have interesting stories about it, be quiet".
Little did I know that I was about to encounter the game that would stick with me for (almost) 9 years.
Hurray for being oldschool.
(man, I must have started when I was like 10 years old... its crazy to think of it like that)
Pre-Replay, actually was playing since the first year, but not online. Much later had two PvZ games versus my classmate (my first 1v1s lol) where I maelstormed and statised his 12/12 guards/devourers and won the game. Then I thought I was torribly good and went to Bnet, where got muta-raped in my first game. That's how it started... Then there came that brilliant leaked patch with replays and 200/200 lurkers =)))
2002 , wonderful year a friend introduced the game to me and afterwards i bought it, but i started playing in Bnet in 2003 when i got an original copy xD (first one was ilegal)
I started playing 1998 and I hated it...I was pissed they didnt make a wc3 instead. but it grew on me :D.
Some memories: Zealots would rape my marines (1>3, what is micro?) Using Stim scared me (10 hp loss wtf?) Mass bunkers ftw Offensive sunkens ftl Being too timid to play on bnet, and having the fears confirmed after being stomped by some Kali bm asswipes (anyone remember them? I think they ended up making a channel called "clan x17") Vultures/zerglings(except for rushing, convenient in "5 min no rush" games)/defilers/sciencevessels/goliaths/ultras sucking hard. Surprisingly, queens didn't. Reavers = iddqd Archon vs Ultra debates BC vs Carrier debates Dropships being RIDICULOUSLY slow -_-;; 4 pools being a very powerful opening (150 mins) Walling in with supply depots...only to have to break it to move out
I've been playing from 1.00 Although multiplayer at the local lans only after Brood War came out(At that time Warcraft 2 was the shit... there were even tons of arguing which of the two is better, just as Half-Life vs Quake 2... the good old times).
Replay Generation in the summer of 2000 I started playing Fastest. If I would of started playing Limited $$ I would of turned out to be sooo much better!!
I regret starting with fastest so much, I switched to limited once I learned that there was $$ in it and more strategy in limited than in fastest.
Looking back I relieze playing 6 years of BW has not lost its fun. Which is why it still one of the best games ever!!
a friend showed me SC because I was always talking about my "C&C Lan" playing, It was to fast for me as I tried to play it vs comps ...... and I forgot all about it all because the only computers I had was an Amiga, Atari ST and a C64 .
A few years later a different friend bought a new PC+ modem BW V.1.6 and started playing Online, that was the 1st time I ever saw someone playing Online and i liked the Idea so I went to the same store the next day and bought the same package deal PC, Provider Modem & games and was online on B.net within 3 day loosing to dt's rush in 3on3 hunters as a Terran because I didn't know what dt's were or knew what a scan or turrets were good for.
I didn't start playing the missions or vs Comps till I swapped Providers and was offline V.1.9
Right on, I first tried SC when Crono~Lizard, a personal friend of mine introduced me to it back in fall '98. then Brood War I believe between early '99 and late '00. Been playing on and off since then.. nothing very hardcore though.
On December 12 2006 11:13 Xeris wrote: I've been playing since I was 10 years old ... 19 now. Been playing bnet since I was 11. Started low money , temple and shit when I was 11 and a half.
On December 12 2006 11:13 Xeris wrote: I've been playing since I was 10 years old ... 19 now. Been playing bnet since I was 11. Started low money , temple and shit when I was 11 and a half.
$playaz$ fighting!
hahahah i remember being like 13 and wanting to join $playaz$ so bad =x. @ss@ssins were my favorite back in the day tho ;p
2001 A guy joined to my class and showed me and 2 other friends sc on lan, then we got into internet cafe and started playing on bnet, NetCraft mostly(best polish server ever!). 1.07 was then, shortly after it 1.08 leaked and replays era started ;-) personally, i think i played my best at 1.08b
so long ago, but i still like this game and enjoy playing it, i got to know many people and i dont think it was a wasted time
starting playing ZC in 2000 once or twice a year lolz... then I got hooked on diablo 2 for a while then war3... then in 2003 my friend introduced me to low money style BW, and I've been hooked ever since :O took like a 4 month break though
Got the game, started on BNet, and started on non-money maps all in the first few months of 2002, just before the CompUSA patch (1.09). I owe it to my friends in high school who steered me onto non-money maps within a couple of months.
So I've been playing SC for 5 years now, and boy do I feel old . I can't even imagine what it must be like for real old school players.
I remember one day that year in June I had such a strong desire to improve that I started playing on WGTour and refused to stop playing until I won a game. I lost 11 straight before I finally ran into a poor Terran who was worse than me and beat him in under 5 minutes.
Then later that year Bilperli had been playing a lot and then one day he beat me 2-0 or 3-0 or something and I was all like "OMG WTF how can I lose to him I'm better than him damnit!!"
I remember when that replay was released with Yellow and 3 other pros on LT, and they started sending their drones all over the map. At first I thought it was just a bugged replay, then a few days later I found out it was actually a new flying drone bug.
Then Blizzard released 1.10 on April 1st and everyone hated it, hoping it was an April Fools joke and demanding a 1.10b. Most notably, it was the first patch to break replay compatibility. IIRC it didn't fix some other bugs like the flying HT/DT bug, and it caused some other problem for Zerg players too that I don't really remember because I never played Zerg back then .
I bought both starcraft and broodwar the month they came out... but I was only playing campaign / some 2v2 bloodbath with my friend, and was deathly afraid of going near that "ladder" button TT_TT
I stopped playing after a few months... then picked it up again in december 2005 (lol 7 years?) since I started playing 1v1's with my korean friend.
started playing 2002 at a camp, i bought the game late 2002 and played offline until probbaly march of 2003. then i got 56K "yay" and i started playing ums/fastest till spring 2004 when i started playing 1v1
I started playing sc since 1.00... using a top-of-the-line pentium-I 100mhz+8mb ram+1 mb video! SC even prompted me that i needed to have at least 16mb ram for it to be playable... but still.. i cant help it!
probably around 2000 ~~ One of my mates got me into it ^^ Was before we had a good internet connection at home so we went to a local pc cafe :-D Which is closed down down because evryone have computers at home :-( Miss it ~~ Anyway HAPPY BIRTHDAY BW
I started playing in the best moment of PGT... So wonderful times T_T... Now I had to be happy with WcgZone...wich is awesome but doesnt compare to PGT...
ah the good old days of playin bw, i think i started in 1999, 2000 since then been playin on and off alot. i remember the good old days of playing bw instead of studying for school exams.. ah the joys! lots of ums, and then slowly moved into melee... i beleive the first map i practised on was BGH haha.. but that can still be fun sometimes, more 3:3
I begin to play sc with its original version(1.0?)prior to the coming out of BW in 1998.At that time I am just a primary school student.When I played it at first time I was thoroughly attracted by its brand new style of playing which is completely different and fresh from Red Alert.And then i introduced it to all of my classmates and friends,they also have crush on SC like me.We are very addicted to this game during our spare time.HUNTER is our favourite map at that period.I am really appreciated to Blizzard due to their great and wonderful work.
I started playing in 2000 (patch 1.07 I think), so I'm pre-replay. However, from 2001 to 2002 I only played vs my friends on a LAN one of them had set up at his place. We only used regular blizzard maps. 2001 to 2003 I quit the game, but when I came back I started playing on bnet. Since 2003 I've been playing regularly, except two roughly 3 month breaks.
started playing the year it came thx to some elementary school friends. 1hr++ games until everyone gets bored and just f10-E hahaha!!!! and i never won vs "150-spawnpool-patch" zerg comp until broodwar came out. I can still remember those awesome bugs where u can turn anything to a mutalisk!!!! hahahaha!!! 1212shift+H+L!!!! haha!!
Started playing this wonderful game as soon as it came out - and I was in the third grade O_O
I had a decent combo as well ... double Barracks opening, and make Factories and Starports and pump out Marines, Siege Tanks, and BCs ... worked wonders on Battle.net (somehow)
I think the reason why I'm not such an accomplished player is because of FPM. I got sucked into it years back, and I stopped playing it only a year ago. This probably makes me as good as somebody who played a year.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/tlnet/bwbday1.jpg)
. I can't even imagine what it must be like for real old school players.
