2/20/2024 0 Comments Starcraft remastered ui skin“If we were a little earlier, it would’ve been better for the game. “I think with StarCraft II we were a little bit late, coming 12 years after the original,” he said. Looking back on the long and rich history of the franchise, Morhaime shares his unique perspective as a fan-albeit one with some influence-on StarCraft’s place in the esports pantheon. When we played the StarCraft II cinematic and made the announcement, that was huge.” We had some Korean K-pop bands come and play, like Super Junior, Ivy, and Psy was our headliner. “In 2007, we rented out the Olympic Park and had a Worldwide Invitational event, which was mostly themed around StarCraft. After being developed under the codename Medusa, Blizzard announced the highly anticipated sequel to a gargantuan crowd in Seoul. With such a huge scene of ravenous fans, big expectations fell on a second installment to the popular franchise and the development team was committed to making a game worthy of the name StarCraft. StarCraft II, which launched in July 2010, had a lot to live up to. So we just waited, and the games were awesome and epic, the crowd was awesome, and it was this really great moment because StarCraft II was still pretty young.” They had to fill time, so they showed a documentary about Tasteless living in Korea. And it was just awesome because everyone stayed. They had some technical difficulties with soundproofing the player booths or something, so it went very late into the evening on Friday night. There were people sitting on the floor because we ran out of seats. “There was a year we had the GSL Finals at BlizzCon," he recalled. yet, so I think this was really exposing people to esports more than anything. Esports wasn’t really a mainstream thing in the U.S. “At the time StarCraft and Warcraft III esports were both pretty big, so we did invitational tournaments for each of those games. “Although BlizzCon grew out of the desire to have a World of Warcraft fan meetup, we decided to make it into a festival celebrating all of our games,” Morhaime said. If only there were an event that Western audiences could get behind to experience the thrill of esports. But without the engaged and popular esports scene that Korea boasted, few in the West knew about the high-level play that professionals were exhibiting there. StarCraft was a phenomenon and in Korea it had become a household name. I don’t eat pepperoni either, so I always made sure to get a vegetarian pizza for myself Artosis.” I remember Artosis would complain because there were no vegetarian pizzas, and he’s a vegetarian. After the opening, every time I came to GSL I would go and watch the games in their studio and just get a bunch of pizzas for everyone. “They’d have little mini-stadiums and stages where people could compete. “Every time I visited Korea I got to see something live,” Morhaime said. For Blizzard as a whole, exploring new ways to support StarCraft esports fans, players, and casters begat more support for StarCraft as a franchise. Korea’s interest in StarCraft had exploded, and Morhaime had a front-row seat to the burgeoning esports scene in Seoul. At the event, I gave a short little speech, and I introduced Bob Fitch as the lead programmer of StarCraft. You could talk to people at the hotel or even people on the street, and StarCraft was a household thing. “The other thing that was surprising was that everyone there knew StarCraft. It was so much fun and there were so many people there. The crowd was really into it and they were cheering every time something happened. We had three months to put something together, and nobody was raving about our game yet.”īack in 1996, the first alpha version of StarCraft was skewered by critics as “Warcraft in space.” Seeing the unenthusiastic response lit a fire under the nascent crew of Blizzard developers. We used the Warcraft II engine and reskinned it, and we showed up at E3. “The first pass was converting all of our tilesets. “The artists were tired of drawing fantasy, so we thought we’d set this one in space,” said Morhaime. Warcraft and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness were two of the genre's top titles, so when it came time to make a new game, another RTS was the obvious choice. When StarCraft was released in 1998, Blizzard was already known for real-time strategy (RTS) games. On the 20 th anniversary of StarCraft, Morhaime took time to share some of his favorite memories on the growth of the game’s esports scene. Beyond his involvement in creating the original game, Morhaime has been a fan of StarCraft esports since before esports was even a word. Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, goes back to the beginning with StarCraft, and has had a hand in every expression of the sci-fi title since then.
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