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StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

Forum Index > BW General
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Heyoka
Profile Blog Joined March 2008
Katowice25012 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-09-27 22:47:09
September 27 2012 22:45 GMT
#1
A few weeks ago Patrick Wyatt posted a really awesome blog about the making of the first StarCraft that we posted in the BW forums here. There is another part of it out today about how SC1 went from a game meant to fill an empty spot in Blizzard's release schedule to a more serious A-level title, and as with last time it's a fascinating read.

Here's an excerpt. Go read the whole thing!

Code of Honor

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?

[image loading]
Dominion Storm


Or this?

[image loading]
StarCraft at E3 in 1996


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.

***


Read the rest at Patrick's site
@RealHeyoka | ESL / DreamHack StarCraft Lead
HopLight
Profile Blog Joined January 2009
Sweden999 Posts
September 27 2012 22:48 GMT
#2
Yay! Thanks for keeping us updated when new awesomeness shows up.
Al Bundy
Profile Joined April 2010
7257 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-09-27 22:55:18
September 27 2012 22:53 GMT
#3
Thanks for sharing, a lot of people were looking forward to that
o choro é livre
sour_eraser
Profile Joined March 2011
Canada932 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-09-27 23:14:43
September 27 2012 23:00 GMT
#4
Yay. Forgot about this. Thanks for reminding me :D

Edit: Wow just read this. That fake demo sitautuon was just mind blowing. lol
Who would have known that the game was fake and because of that SC was rebooted.
"What's the f*cking point of censoring a letter if everyone and their mother knows what it stands for.... F*cking morons"
Heyoka
Profile Blog Joined March 2008
Katowice25012 Posts
September 27 2012 23:01 GMT
#5
The entire idea that StarCraft was re-birthed because of a fake demo Ion Storm gave is incredible, it's such an odd piece of history that really changed the course of how games are viewed.
@RealHeyoka | ESL / DreamHack StarCraft Lead
HawaiianPig
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
Canada5155 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-09-27 23:09:01
September 27 2012 23:08 GMT
#6
The more I read these blogs the more it's clear that game development in this era was dominated by extremely skilled individuals facing the growing pains of a burgeoning industry. It seems it's resulted in a lot of accidental hit games.

I mean... I especially love that Starcraft was rebooted on account of fear induced from a fake demo. Fantastic.

But more specifically, every time I read a story like this, about the development of older games, I always notice one key theme: that developers were in the business of making games and not in the business of making games.

Although guys like Allen Adham would push development cycles into strict timeframes or push for the development of more casual games, it seems that the sterile "maximize sales at all costs" approach would not bleed into the actual content of a game. There was no "What if soccer moms played this game?" focus group in order to make the game more accessible.

There was simply: "Make an RTS game set in space"

And that's what we got.
AdministratorNot actually Hawaiian.
Hesmyrr
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Canada5776 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-09-27 23:16:13
September 27 2012 23:15 GMT
#7
Story like this is another example of how much I appreciate what Brood War came to be. Stars seem to have aligned perfectly for the game to become and give birth to what had been such amazing memories.
"If watching the MSL finals makes you a progamer, then anyone in Korea can do it." - Ha Tae Ki
Demonhunter04
Profile Joined July 2011
1530 Posts
September 27 2012 23:34 GMT
#8
On September 28 2012 08:15 Hesmyrr wrote:
Story like this is another example of how much I appreciate what Brood War came to be. Stars seem to have aligned perfectly for the game to become and give birth to what had been such amazing memories.


Think of all those things that never came to pass because the stars didn't align for them.
"If you don't drop sweat today, you will drop tears tomorrow" - SlayerSMMA
shindigs
Profile Blog Joined May 2009
United States4795 Posts
September 27 2012 23:58 GMT
#9
On September 28 2012 08:08 HawaiianPig wrote:
The more I read these blogs the more it's clear that game development in this era was dominated by extremely skilled individuals facing the growing pains of a burgeoning industry. It seems it's resulted in a lot of accidental hit games.

I mean... I especially love that Starcraft was rebooted on account of fear induced from a fake demo. Fantastic.

But more specifically, every time I read a story like this, about the development of older games, I always notice one key theme: that developers were in the business of making games and not in the business of making games.

Although guys like Allen Adham would push development cycles into strict timeframes or push for the development of more casual games, it seems that the sterile "maximize sales at all costs" approach would not bleed into the actual content of a game. There was no "What if soccer moms played this game?" focus group in order to make the game more accessible.

There was simply: "Make an RTS game set in space"

And that's what we got.


Well the focus on sales and making games more casual friendly is a product of these earlier game developers being so successful I'd imagine. When the industry is growing I feel like the focus on the business aspect is important, but not the driving force of game development. Seems like larger companies have important long term goals to deliver on so other things become the focus.
Photographer@shindags || twitch.tv/shindigs
meegrean
Profile Joined May 2008
Thailand7699 Posts
September 28 2012 00:11 GMT
#10
Wow, this is mind-blowing. If it weren't for Ion Storm's fake demo, would Starcraft still have been that good?
Brood War loyalist
Netsky
Profile Joined October 2010
Australia1155 Posts
September 28 2012 00:41 GMT
#11
Love these blogs so much
TheEmulator
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
28087 Posts
September 28 2012 00:44 GMT
#12
wow this is really incredible to know. Thanks for posting this
Administrator
Entaro[AoV]
Profile Joined July 2009
United States184 Posts
September 28 2012 01:06 GMT
#13
On September 28 2012 08:08 HawaiianPig wrote:
The more I read these blogs the more it's clear that game development in this era was dominated by extremely skilled individuals facing the growing pains of a burgeoning industry. It seems it's resulted in a lot of accidental hit games.

I mean... I especially love that Starcraft was rebooted on account of fear induced from a fake demo. Fantastic.

But more specifically, every time I read a story like this, about the development of older games, I always notice one key theme: that developers were in the business of making games and not in the business of making games.

Although guys like Allen Adham would push development cycles into strict timeframes or push for the development of more casual games, it seems that the sterile "maximize sales at all costs" approach would not bleed into the actual content of a game. There was no "What if soccer moms played this game?" focus group in order to make the game more accessible.

There was simply: "Make an RTS game set in space"

And that's what we got.


Well I think your tldr may be idealizing things a bit. It's certain a romantic thing to believe, that the developers are most left alone, but these days depending on the company, who knows?
TL+ Member
Draconicfire
Profile Joined May 2010
Canada2562 Posts
September 28 2012 01:10 GMT
#14
The fake demo thing was amazing. Can't believe that triggered the re-development of StarCraft.

Love this guy's blogs.
@Drayxs | Drayxs.221 | Drayxs#1802
Shady Sands
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4021 Posts
September 28 2012 01:11 GMT
#15
Holy shit this is amazing. Like. This needs to be required reading for every single developer out there
Что?
chaosTheory_14cc
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
Canada1270 Posts
September 28 2012 01:42 GMT
#16
Wow, that whole thing about the Ion Storm demo is really amazing. These blogs are fantastic.
vOdToasT
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
Sweden2870 Posts
September 28 2012 01:44 GMT
#17
So many things had to fall in place for us to get StarCraft. Wow. I'm really glad it all happened the way it did.
If it's stupid but it works, then it's not stupid* (*Or: You are stupid for losing to it, and gotta git gud)
Pucca
Profile Blog Joined January 2012
Taiwan1280 Posts
September 28 2012 01:53 GMT
#18
Is it possible for people to get their hands on this old games?
Master Chief
Boundz(DarKo)
Profile Joined March 2009
5311 Posts
September 28 2012 01:58 GMT
#19
The (Starcraft) universe works in mysterious ways.
Marou
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Germany1371 Posts
September 28 2012 04:47 GMT
#20
He did dumbed down his blog a little bit and made it more accessible which is a good thing.
Also it was supposed to be a 2 part thingy but i think it's not quite over yet, i really want to read about the story behind the pathing of the units in StarCraft.

Amazing read again, so much insights !
twitter@RickyMarou
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