Tough times on the road to Starcraft

September 7, 2012 By Patrick Wyatt

I’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code. I’ll be posting the latter parts over the next several days.

• This post: Why StarCraft crashed frequently during development
  
• Part 2: How we could have fixed the most common causes
  
• Part 3: Explaining the implementation details of the fix

The beginnings of StarCraft

During the development of StarCraft, a two and a half year slog with over a year of crunch time prior to launch, the game was as buggy as a termite nest. While its predecessors (Warcraft I and II) were far more reliable games than their industry peers, StarCraft crashed frequently enough that play-testing was difficult right up until release, and the game continued to require ongoing patching efforts post-launch.

Why? There were sooooo many reasons.

Orcs in space

StarCraft was originally envisioned as a game with modest goals that could fit into a one-year development cycle so that it could be released for Christmas, 1996.

The project leadership was comprised of the same folks who had started Shattered Nations (video), a turn-based strategy game along the lines of X-COM that Blizzard announced in May 1995 but canceled some months later.

The team members were regrouped to build something that could reach market quickly so Blizzard wouldn’t have a long gap between game launches.

Q4 1994 – Warcraft
Q4 1995 – Warcraft II
Q4 1996 – planned ship date for StarCraft
Q2 1998 – actual ship date for StarCraft

The decision to rush the game’s development seems ludicrous in retrospect, but Allen Adham, the company’s president, was under pressure to grow revenue. While Blizzard’s early games had been far more successful than expected, that just raised expectations for future growth.

Given a short timeframe and limited staff, the StarCraft team’s goal was to implement a modest game — something that could best be described as “Orcs in space”. A picture from around the time of the E3 game show in Q2 1996 shows the path the game team originally chose:



But a higher priority project overshadowed StarCraft and stole its developers one by one. Diablo, a role-playing game being developed by Condor Studios in Redwood City California, was in need of additional help. Condor, a company formed by Dave Brevik along with Max Schaefer and his brother Erich Schaefer, was given a budget of only $1.2 million — ridiculously small even in those days.

The Condor team had no hope of making the game they aspired to build, but they did such ground-breaking work in developing something fun that it made sense for Blizzard to acquire Condor, rename it Blizzard North, and start pouring in the money and staff the game really deserved.

Initially Collin Murray, a programmer on StarCraft, and I flew to Redwood City to help, while other developers at Blizzard “HQ” in Irvine California worked on network “providers” for battle.net, modem and LAN games as well as the user-interface screens (known as “glue screens” at Blizzard) that performed character creation, game joining, and other meta-game functions.

As Diablo grew in scope eventually everyone at Blizzard HQ — artists, programmers, designers, sound engineers, testers — worked on the game until StarCraft had no one left working on the project. Even the project lead was co-opted to finish the game installer that I had half-written but was too busy to complete.

After the launch of Diablo at the end of 1996, StarCraft development was restarted, and everyone got a chance to see where the game was headed, and it wasn’t pretty. The game was dated, and not even remotely impressive, particularly compared to projects like Dominion Storm, which looked great in demos at E3 six months before.

The massive success of Diablo reset expectations about what Blizzard should strive for: StarCraft became the game that defined Blizzard’s strategy of not releasing games until they were ready. But a lot of pain had to occur along the way to prove out this strategy.