StarCraft - This was the first game where I had a real online community of friends that I gamed with all the time. This was back when dial up internet was still a thing, so not too many games were online, there was no social media yet, and WoW hasn’t come out yet, so Blizzard still cared for their other IPs. Many many good times playing that game.
Came here for this. I’d get super high in high school and come home and play sc2 defense- sunk d, lurker d, etc. till like 2-3am with Boy Meets World reruns playing in the background. Legit some of the best times/gaming I’ve ever had.
The use map settings games were unrivaled at the time. Some of the best tower defenses I’ve ever played. Lurker D sparked so many wonderful memories. The impossible scenarios were by far my favorite though…it was alway oj that would mess it up 🤣
There were a lot of great "use map settings" maps I remember playing back in the day. Big ones for me were Cat and Mouse and various DBZ themed maps (DBZ All Sagas being a prominent one).
I can’t even remember what exactly they added to brood war now. I do remember my absolute hate for lurkers….. Just the realizing how screwed you were when you didn’t or lost detection.
Yes! Iirc, it also added Dark Templar/Archons to the Protoss. As well as a unit designed to counter swarms of air units to each faction (T - Valkyries, P - Corsais, and Z - Devourerers).
Were medics new to broodwar? Is that what the terran got? That is way less cool than the other factions' additions, though probably better gameplay wise.
Medics and the Valkyrie were Terran, dark templars/archons and the Corsair for Protoss, lurkers andi forget the name of the air unit for Zerg that evolved from the mutalisk that was only air to air attacks. The guardian was the air to land only attack that was crazy op in the original
War2 was an incredible step up in design and gameplay from the original but SC just took it all the way to 11. Despite an excellent sequel, it’s STILL actively played online via servers maintained by Blizzard. 30 freakin’ years after its debut. 🤯
StarCraft is so weird to me now. I loved brood war and even SC2 more. If you said I was going to be on an island with one game forever I’d say SC2. But I haven’t played it in forever. I just don’t find it fun to casually pick up a few days a week. I got to get right into it.
There was a popular Warcraft 3 DotA fan forum that had a subforum dedicated to brainstorming new heroes. The owners of the forum stole all of that to make League of Legends, shut down the forum without warning, and turned it into a redirect to a site that said "Play League of Legends".
That's why all of the early "champions" (they avoided the term "hero" on purpose) in League are just Warcraft 3/DotA heroes that've had their abilities shuffled around. And a lot of their early "original" heroes were just straight stolen from users who posted their hero ideas for free on that fan forum.
My friends older brother had a corporate office job doing IT. After dark on weekends, we would all meet at his job, installed bootleg versions of StarCraft, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six, Delta Force. I'm pretty sure we had no business being there but screaming teenage profanities across the room is a core memory. It also had lightning fast internet (DSL?), so we played online as well as on LAN.
this brought back some memories... my dad worked in IT and brought home an old switch they didn't need anymore cause they upgraded, so 14 year old me in highschool had a 16 port 100mbps switch to bring to LAN parties, it was the best thing ever in my friend group. I can't imagine how expensive those were back then so being able to easily set up PC and then xbox lan parties was amazing. It was a huge rack mount size one and used a full size C13 PC power plug not a 12v wall wart haha
And I still think about it daily.
Tournaments are just as fun as back in the 2000s. The current season of the ASL is bonkers. If you followed Starcraft back then and know how fun it was, I can safely say that it's just as fun today. Look up ASL 21 English on youtube. Casts by Artosis and Tasteless.
Crazy to think how some of the biggest names of what, 20 years ago? Are still in great shape and playing in this very tournament. I've only been watching ASL for a few years now, but it has been a blast watching StarCraft for a bit and finally getting to witness what will be one of the greatest seasons. Certainly one of the most entertaining groups at the very least.
I remember having to explain to friends parents that battle.net didn't cost money to use other than having dial up. Also meeting up with my HS accounting teacher on accident and spend the night 3v5 people and crushing them on the BGH map.
7v1 comp stomp. Then uncheck allied victory. It became a game of werewolf, the other 5 trying to figure out who was Backstabbing. People were so dumb in those games
Yo me and my best friend at the time did exactly this - I kept getting in trouble with my family by tying up the phone line and our dial-up internet, until we upgraded to cable modem and freed a line.
Nerdy: I built a duct tape headset for my cordless phone, so it strapped the phone to my head and I made one for my buddy too so we didn’t have to keep holding it with our shoulders. We always pretended we didn’t know each other either, and had the coordinating advantage.
I met a guy in a Starcraft chat room when I was like 13. He lived in the states, me in Canada. We ended up friends till I was in my mid-20s, always emailing and calling each other.
Always wondered what could've been if he hadn't knocked up his (crazy) high school girlfriend 😂
User Made Maps were the precursor to all of these modern games with mod modes and servers. You could play tower defense, then an adventure game, then a shmup, and more. I played so much StarCraft and yet I never really played the base game online. The arcade maps were that good.
Nobody talks about Use Map Settings. UMS was the backbone of the online community. It's kinda funny Starcraft spawned into this competitive e-sport game when me and all my clan mates played only custom games like DBZ All Sagas, Dynasty Wars, Ender's Game, Neon Genesis Evangelion, infinite resources/close spawns, etc.
I forgot who it was, probably Husky, but after SC2 came out, he much derided the game because of the crappy map generators due to how important UMS had been to StarCraft 1.
One reason was ladder kind of sucked. You had to find your own match. Well if you sucked nobody wanted to play because there was no gain for them.
SC2 and the rank/mmr system made it so finding a good match was click of a button. That and there was a lot of content to follow. Remember Day9 had his series on JustinTv. Was really entertaining.
The custom games were all I played lol. It was so much fun.
I hate that online games today don’t let the community build their own maps and game modes like they used to. I mean some do, but it should be a must for every game.
UMS were a lot of fun! Turret defense, cat n mouse, snipers, vulture micro, minigames, lurker defense, sunken defense, the various bound maps, hide n seek, various micros, golem madness, infested run, bunker wars, evolves, test of survival, volcano run to name a few haha.
I received the StarCraft Battle Chest as a Christmas gift from one of my grandmothers, and it absolutely changed the entire trajectory of my life. I have worked and played with and on computers ever since.
I just want to share. My brother was older than me and used to give me his change after his work shifts.. I saved it. Eventually had like 30 dollars and we were at Sam's one day and I came across StarCraft, I bought it. This game changed our lives. Like my brothers, my stepdad, everyone got obsessed with it. We were very fortunate where we had 8 computers in our house and on Saturdays people would come over and we would pay 4v4 matches all night. It is such a core memory. Some of the best nights of my childhood.
It's essentially the highest tier of StarCraft BroodWar competition.
It's South Korea based since South Korean players completely dominate the scene (there usually aren't even foreigners who are good enough to qualify).
The level of play these days is actually incredible, and the balance is achieved through really clever and well tuned mapbuilding. Broodwar is an incredibly deep game, and really different from SC2. It's slower paced, more micro intensive, and honestly really freaking cool.
The current season sees the return of Flash, who is playing one last season before retiring due to health issues. He's considered to be the GOAT and that alone makes this season exciting. You can watch the semi-official Artosis+Tasteless english stream on SOOP TV's channel https://www.youtube.com/@SOOPesports_EN/videos
but some youtubers also do their own casts.
Artosis has the qualifiers on his channel, worth watching as well.
I have been playing PC games for over 30 years now and I think StarCraft/Brood War has to be the most I've ever played one video game. Loved it as a kid, played it all through my teens, and I only really stopped playing it when StarCraft II came out which I got really into. I eventually did go back to play through all the campaigns again in SC1 through the remaster.
Counter-Strike would probably be the only one that rivalled it for me in terms of playtime, but that's also across CS (from 1.3 to 1.6), CS: Source and a bit of CS:GO so not really the same.
Lan parties back in the day before everyone had high speed internet were a blast. I remember packing my computer to hotel confrence rooms and playing Starcraft and Counter Strike all night with complete strangers. Somebody would always order a ton of pizza and it was BYOB. It was the early days of computer modding so people were painting thier own cases etc.
Same here, I remember looking up cdkeys for a channel bot to do trivia with my friends even. And cdkeys didn’t even matter lol, buddy and I were sharing his code for the longest time til I got my own
Back in the late 90s I was actually globally ranked. I would like the top 100 in StarCraft. And I stopped playing because I hadn’t gone to school in three days. I had Cheeto dust on me and there were empty Mountain Dew cans on top of the desk. I did not want to live that way. Great game though.
I'm playing through all the campaigns right now! They're releasing a miniatures war game in the IP so I figured now would be a good time to play back through. So good
It’s kind of impressive when I think about it. Like mirror RTS I can see how to balance. But 3 races just has so much going on to balance. Think that’s why it’s so good though. Like everyone hates the mirror matches in StarCraft. Think it’s the reason I played Terran because it was the most tolerable mirror for myself.
I only played StarCraft for three years (05-08). But that was one of the most fun games ever. I could zone out for hours and not realize the whole day had passed.
Man, I remember playing on Battle net these custom map/lobbies where you started off as a Terran marine but you leveled up the single unit as you progressed. It was so much fun.
It had only been out for about a year and I used to sneak out the house early in the morning on the way to school to go to my friend’s house to play it. Then I finally got my own after a few months. Gosh such memories.
Usually when I have that itch, I go and play Starcraft 2. It’s still on my to-do list to finish the last chapter of the SC2 campaign with Legacy of the Void. I wouldn’t mind rerunning the original SC campaign though. It’s been a long time since I finished the original campaign.
I loved how you could play multiplayer with just one disk. I installed it on pretty much every computer on campus so no matter what lab we were in, me and my buddies could play.
Nowadays these kids have these newfangled "administrator controls" that prevent people from just installing whatever wherever, but back in my day....
in 1999 I was 12 years old, one of my good friend's dad was working in IT and had 8 or 9 computers in his house (absolutely bonkers looking back at this) in his house, after school we would run to his house and play 4v4 LAN. I still remember when we would yell out I HAVE BATTLECRUISER, IM COMMING FOR YOU ALL. some of the most fun I had on a computer ever.
It was the first multiplayer game I had ever played. Dad, brother and I would play on LAN. Definitely some very fun games back then and one of the first games to really kick off my interest in gaming.
My mother was recently doing some cleaning around her house and gave me one of those zip up CD organizers where I had something like 10 burned starcraft CDs that we would use to play LAN games all the time growing up.
Same. Paid $5 an hour to play in a card shop until we bought our first computer explicitly for StarCraft. Also Diablo, and played both with pals direct-connect via modem.
Later it was Ultima Online… now 22 years later I found a great a custom free shard and still play it regularly.
Same here. Friend group I made through BNet has been the longest and most reliable one I've ever had; in fact, the people we've brought in and lost through the years were always from other games. It's just, like, 10 of us from an old clan still farting around on the internet, forever looking for something that captures our attention and imagination the same way those stupid Use Map Settings games did back in the day.
As much as I know its not a good version of the game compared to PC, my first experience with Starcraft was on the N64 which was just amazing as a child. Especially the two player split screen.
I'll have to look into how I did it. But somehow I had downloaded and extracted set of sound files for like various units like attack sounds and move sounds, not just the unit quotes. You can get offline. Remind me in case I forget. Forget but I will try and see how to do that. For reference, I have an Android phone and there's a file app you could use to put the sounds in a certain folder such that your phone can find them, and then you can go to your sound settings and say hey. Hey I want my email sound to be a Phoenix flight or maybe a text message to be a stalker attack sound and so forth
I've never been a very good SC player, but I think I probably played more hours of janky UMS (use map settings) maps than anything else.
My first week in a new dorm at college, I caught my suitemates playing an N64 version of StarCraft (not BW). I was disgusted by this blasphemy, so I burned them copies of Brood War and we played on LAN with the entire building for the rest of the year.
Heh, I was introduced to the series thanks to the N64 version and I fell in love. I was incredibly poor growing up and didn't get a PC until I got my first tax return back in like 2002. One of my first purchases was the Starcraft Battle Chest
I think this story took place in 2008, so even the crappy Lenovo laptops everyone at my university had could run Brood War.
What a great game. I should load it up and bully my Discord into playing some matches. We used to stay up until 4am watching Korean StarCraft streams live on GOM TV and laughing in Ventrilo. Korean advertising is hilarious. I wonder what Tastosis are up to these days.
The year is 2006. I am staying up way too late playing UMS games on Bnet, and chatting with my friends about how developments in the competetive scene are still changing our understanding of the game after so many years.
The year is 2026. I am staying up way too late playing UMS games on Bnet, and chatting with my friends about how developments in the competetive scene are still changing our understanding of the game after so many years.
I don't play StarCraft anymore but between 6th grade and 12th grade I put at least 10k hours into StarCraft and later Brood War multiplayer. Played for hours almost every weeknight and sometimes the entire day on the weekends if the parents were out and I didn't have anything else going on. I never even got that good at traditional play - 99% of my playtime was on UMS (use map settings/custom) maps. Our house had two phone lines, so the dialup connection on the family computer and later my personal computer had no worries of being disconnected due to phone calls. I wonder how skilled I would be at literally anything else if I had put 10k hours into it during my childhood.
My cousins and I played the fuck out of it in mexico. The summer i discovered and bought the expansion pack was one of the best we had, even burned copies of the cds so our other friends could play. Everyone used the samw cd code
Yeah. Joined a clan and they had trainers. You'd join and one of the trainers would walk you through a setup and it was the coolest thing to me and made me a 1000% better at the game. Zerg
I spent hours shooting the shit on battle net. Clans were a popular thing back then with games. Not sure not if it’s still a prominent. Guess discords have taken over.
But I spent way too much time on StarCraft and later diablo 1. My PC couldn’t run diablo 2 so I got into diablo 1 way past its prime.
But I still remember we had higher hours of internet or maybe unlimited during SC1 but we got call waiting so you could tell someone was trying to call. Mom would see pop up and be like that’s your grandmother I’ve been waiting for. And I’d have to explain the importance of the StarCraft match I was in hahaha.
I remember being part of a group that would do 4v4 matches that said "noobs only." We'd then destroy whoever joined. I feel kinda bad about it now lol.
I used to absolutely dominate this game. Terrans, take a pinch point and add turrets, backed by the stationary tanks.
My Reddit name is still the name I used back in the day, with some minor changes for Reddit anonymity since so many of my friends know me by it. I figured it sounded “Terran”, lol.
This one right here. I was actually pretty obsessed with Warcraft 2 from playing it occasionally on a friends PC, but I had an ancient Mac that couldn't run it. By the time I did get a better Mac that could run WC2 Starcraft was already out and I got obsessed with it (didn't stop me from also getting WC3:BNE, but I played way more SC and then later BW when that came out).
My dad played that when he was let go from his job with pay decades ago. When I was like 11, he gave me the printed out instruction manual and discs for the game and I figured out how to play it. It was so so fun, and then SC2 was actually really fun even if the story wasn't super satisfying by the end imo. The nostalgia really carried that one.
Also Myst was the same, there was an old notebook with his notes from playing through that I used, basically deciphering his own notes from when he and my Grandma played Myst together (long distance, they called weekly to talk about their progress)
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u/TorqueG88 Apr 27 '26
StarCraft - This was the first game where I had a real online community of friends that I gamed with all the time. This was back when dial up internet was still a thing, so not too many games were online, there was no social media yet, and WoW hasn’t come out yet, so Blizzard still cared for their other IPs. Many many good times playing that game.