Why don't we do a game that is sort of like that where you have a bunch of Vikings that are going around and they can fight in a sort of RTS way?" That just evolved over time. We came up with the idea based on thinking, "Hey, we like this RTS genre, and we just did Vikings, and we like Lemmings. You would think that if anyone's going to have been involved in those conversations, it would've been me. I didn't even know about Games Workshop and their games until years after we had already shipped. I didn't even know that Games Workshop existed because I wasn't into their gameplay, their tabletop miniatures and stuff. Is that true?īF: That is completely not true. My understanding is that Warcraft's genesis was that Blizzard wanted a contract to do a Warhammer game with Games Workshop.
Even looking at the crowds when we have them all out in the courtyard and doing champagne toasts for the launch of a game or something, and seeing how many people there are, it's hard to imagine how it all started even today. Twenty-five years later, I'm in shock that it has gotten so big. Then they say, "Now that it's huge, what is it like for you to look back on how small it was?" I'm still in shock. "What was it like thinking about what it might be one day?" We weren't thinking about what it might be one day. No idea that it would ever turn into something this huge, of course. Eh, who cares? Let's just make a game that we love to play." It was a lot of fun back then. That was an adventure, a lot of comradery, and just doing whatever it took to get the games made kind of thing, thinking, "I wonder if this will be successful. All eleven of us would go to lunch at the same place every single day. We had a real young guys that don't entirely know what they're doing but they're having a lot of fun. I think we were doing conversions of other games and I was working on Rock n' Roll Racing. Orcs in Spaceīob Fitch: There was just eleven of us in a very small office making. Joining me are StarCraft's lead programmer Bob Fitch and former reviewer and current Blizzard PR rep Bob Colayco, the latter whom was heavily involved in the StarCraft community in its initial phaseses. This is a look at those early days, the period during StarCraft's development and subsequent launch when Blizzard was still building it into what it is now. It was trapped in the shadows of WarCraft II and derided by some as "orcs in space." When it finally came out in 1998 after an extended beta, more than a few reviewers dismissed it in favor of Total Annihilation, which boasted downloadable units and cutting edge 3D graphics. Its equisite balance has won it millions of fans around the world, many of whom recently returned to celebrate their favorite game with yesterday's release of StarCraft Remastered.īut before it took over South Korea and became the first true eSport, StarCraft was just another RTS. StarCraft has endured for nearly 20 years for a reason: It's one of the greatest examples of competitive gaming design ever.
It's the 20th anniversary of StarCraft! In honor of this classic game, we're republishing our look back on its earliest days with StarCraft lead programmer Bob Fitch. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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