Back in the ‘90s, Chris Metzen had an idea for a new game. For the still-blooming Blizzard Entertainment, these were formative years. There was Warcraft as of 1994, but there was no World of Warcraft. There was talk about doing more real-time strategy, as the company was arguably getting good at it, and a keen interest in heading into space.
Good Game Well Played: The Story of the Staying Power of ‘StarCraft’
Twenty years after Blizzard’s baby redefined a genre and spawned the esports movement, it remains a timeless proof of concept for what online competition can be
Ten Years of World of Warcraft
Ten years of World of Warcraft. Well. So many thoughts. WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one tha…
» Starcraft (A History in Two Acts) The Digital Antiquarian
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
Build, gather, brawl, repeat: The history of real-time strategy games
As we wait on a new Age of Empires this fall, let's revisit the RTS genre's highs and lows.
StarCraft: Cartooned – Available Now
» The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah The Digital Antiquarian
Amidst so much else, the 1990s saw the rise and fall of the narrative-driven space sim. The sub-genre was effectively invented in 1990, when Wing Commander dared to add a set-piece story line to the sturdy foundation of the more open-ended British classic Elite. It reached a peak of commercial and critical acceptance in 1994 with Wing Commander III and TIE Fighter, only to fall off the big publishers’ radar completely by shortly after the turn of the millennium. As you regular readers know, I’ve been writing the final installments to a lot of stories recently, a symptom of the period of churn and consolidation in which these histories currently find themselves. Now I’m on the verge of writing my last words on not just a company but a whole category of games as a mainstream commercial force — almost, I’m tempted to say, a whole subculture of gaming, one of the oddest of them all when you stop to think about it.
Now that Google's artificial brain is conquering Go, this classic computer game from 1998 could be next
Google DeepMind's next challenge could be 1998's "StarCraft."
Why League of Legends Is The World’s Greatest Game
In 2003, I was a very serious WarCraft III player. If I recall correctly, I have over 5,000 one-on-one ladder matches logged on my Battle.net account. I watched replays every day and even did some …
Shopify: A StarCraft Inspired Business Strategy
How CEO Tobi Lütke Applied StarCraft Gaming Strategies & Concepts To Build Shopify
» Master of Orion The Digital Antiquarian
Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position of influence is hardly misbegotten for other very good reasons, it was already the heir to a long tradition of such games at the time of its release in 1993. In fact, the tradition dates back to well before computer games as we know them today even existed.
Collections: The Great War: Western Front, A Gain of Inches
This week we’re looking at The Great War: Western Front, a hybrid turn-based/real-time strategy game about the First World War developed by Petroglyph Games, a renowned maker of real-time str…
ROBLOX is a MUD: The history of virtual worlds, MUDs & MMORPGs
A general timeline of virtual worlds, their influence, the key names and where you can get more info.
The Legacy of No Man’s Sky in Game Design
Two years ago, No Man’s Sky, a sci-fi space exploration game boasting powerful procedural generation, released to a flurry of negative…
20 years ago, Dead Rising showed a different path for open worlds, and more games should pinch its ideas
Dead Rising showed developers there were different ways of doing open worlds. 20 years since its release, we go back and explore what we could of had.
Wargames
anything related to wargame especially as a sand box for strategy
3 tactics for leading a team through uncertainty
Strategy Is a Loop, Not a Plan | Ragan McGill
Emergent Strategy