StarCraft’s Visual Evolution – From Awful To Awesome

March 25th, 2009

The original StarCraft is still a relatively pretty game, but it wasn’t always that way…

Back in 1996, Blizzard was riding the high tide of success after WarCraft II became their very first game to break the magical million units sold mark. Games now break that mark regularly, but gaming then was still a niche entertainment medium. Breaking the million mark was a big deal.

Diablo’s development was nearing completion at the newly-acquired Blizzard North, so anticipation surrounding this small studio was reaching fever pitch. Finally, E3 (the huge gaming expo) rolled around in May 1996 and Blizzard proudly showcased Diablo and StarCraft. Everyone loved Diablo but StarCraft was described as “WarCraft in space”, “Orcs in Space”, and “WarCraft Goes Purple.”

It looked like this:

The purple/blue terrain is physically hurting my eyes… And those Overlords look like awful boats.

Thankfully, Blizzard went back to the drawing board and overhauled the WarCraft 2 engine. In its original form, it couldn’t support some of the new unit abilities like cloaking and burrowing. After three months of recoding, the engine was rebuilt from the ground up and was looking excellent. Confident in their product, Blizzard presented it again at E3 in 1997. This time, they got a much better response. You know why? Because it looked like this:

and this:

The difference one year made was astonishing. Look carefully at the Protoss Dragoon, Protoss Scout and the Terran Dropship models: they look very similar to those found in the final version. Blizzard was under a ridiculous amount of pressure at that year’s E3 because Diablo launched in early 1997 and it immediately sold one million copies. Blizzard had two million sellers in a row, and StarCraft was slowly shaping up to complete the hat-trick.

StarCraft shipped on March 31st, 1998 and was an immediate commercial success. More importantly, it wasn’t purple.

The final version still looks good 11 years later.

Blizzard went to ludicrous lengths to make StarCraft as brilliant as it was. Our favorite anecdote of the games development comes from December 1997, when campaign editor Jeff Strain took a notebook into the hospital where his wife was giving birth to his daughter. He coded prior to the contractions, and while his wife slept. When she woke up, he was still coding just before the birth of his daughter.

His wife shouted, “Are you working on that damn game during the birth of our daughter?”
“It’s not ‘that damn game’ Annie. It’s Starcraft!” he retorted.

Now that is dedication.

StarCraft aged better than the two Blizzard games that preceded it, and sets the graphical precedent for its gorgeous successor – the engine must age well and run on anything.

Sources – Blizzard circa 1997 and GameSpot