It’s been twelve years since the release of StarCraft, which is something you’ve probably read a dozen times by now if you’ve been following the coverage of the game around the intertubes. It sounds significant, which is probably why people keep writing it—for many, the realization comes with a wave of nostalgia, recalling the days of dial-up modems, shuddering lag, zergling rushes and a million players who really didn’t know how they should set the latency option.
Then you start to realize it’s hard to get nostalgic about a game you were playing as recently as six months ago.
Yes, StarCraft had legs. Players warred with one another for years before the game began to show its age, and even then many couldn’t pry themselves away. Blizzard diligently rolled out patches, carefully adjusting the game for those faithful who still saw fit to log onto what had become an entirely archaic online gaming platform. It was a level of meticulous perfection in the gameplay mechanic that allowed StarCraft to endure far longer than anyone could have imagined, surviving the shift to 3D and certainly other challenges along the way. It had become ancient by the videogame standard when Blizzard finally dropped the StarCraft II bomb in 2007—but people were still playing.
