StarCraft

"The races of Starcraft are now renowned for their balance and distinctive features but all started as being influenced by other science fiction properties and tropes. The Terrans were conceived of as “outlaw cowboys,” who would have a clunky, heavy feel to them, Art Director Sam Didier explains. “We wanted our human race, the Terrans, to be a bit more of scoundrels, rather than the uptight and polished humans of most science fiction stories.” The Protoss, in contrast, were meant to embody the trope of the little “gray aliens” you see in science-fiction films. They were designed to be the “most intelligent, advanced race in the game, but also the highest evolved warriors,” Didier explains. These “little gray aliens” ended up being seven feet tall and resembling “space samurai” where everything— their buildings, units, and armor— all were “ aesthetically pleasing to the eye.” The Zerg, finally, were always meant to be these frighteningly adaptive aliens that were heavily influenced by Aliens and Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. “They devoured and consumed and then took what was special about you and made it a part of their race. Oh, and they had teeth…lots of teeth,” Didier says."

"StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners; they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q. “Imagine playing a concerto on a piano, and if you miss one note the entire orchestra stops playing and you’re kicked off and you lose your job,” Sean Plott, one of the official commentators on the Scarlett-Bomber match, told me recently. “That’s what this is like.” The piano reference was not arbitrary; top-level StarCraft requires as many as three hundred actions per minute, or A.P.M.; an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects."

"The rest of the team was like, ‘I dunno man, space vampires are pretty wack. We want to do something a little broader."

"I grew up reading a lot of Thor — which has a Shakespearean component to the language — back from those Stan Lee days, or the Walt Simonson days, my favorite. I gave the Zerg campaign a Shakespeare meets Old Testament kind of vibe. But I needed that that human-like character down the line, and it was toward the end of the Terran campaign like, whoa, what if she becomes — again, we stumbled on those connector points."

"At the time it was the big figure-skating to-do with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. So we’ll just name ours Kerrigan, after the girl who gets her knee beat in. We thought, aw, that’s so funny! It’s so stupid."

"At its peak, in Korea, where w:Esports grew and led the world, there were three cable channels broadcasting StarCraft 24/7. That was both awesome and something that we hadn’t necessarily predicted, forecast."