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Comment by itsdrewmiller | Hacker News Reader

I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.

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Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.

Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.

Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.

But it certainly was the game that made it popular across the world.

StarCraft 2 tournaments broadcasts being watched in public venues pushed esports into the zeitgeist.

It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.

the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and was going strong for a good decade or so, before being ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and, primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).

There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that existed in america with quake and friends, and the constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea. Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the culture works.

Flash was an absolute legend.

I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.

It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.

PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.

Brood War has aged like fine-wine. As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the key to Brood War's longevity comes from the map maker. Every detail is carefully considered so that none of the races can get away with a crazy advantage. It's really a special game, and every new season of ASL still feels magical.

I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.

You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.

Brood War's longevity is thanks to the map maker, which has allowed the game to be balanced around maps. The size of your spawn location, the ease with which you can expand, and the paths to different bases drastically impact what kinds of strategies are viable. If there's a high ground location, it becomes much harder to break that position as the attacker. The amount of resources per base (mineral patch count, mineral patch size, 1 gas spawn, 2 gas spawn, mineral only) all impact which strategies are viable.

In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.

The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.

[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/ASL

[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Roaring_Currents

> There were gaming competitions in the 80s

... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...

True, but there will always be cheating. See the Savior scandal.

In the RTS niche, it is definitely the game that started e-sports that had any sort of weight and global audience.

I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the same traction or hype until AOE 2.

Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.

The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.

I agree. I think people underestimate the size of the Korean Brood War scene, even relatively early on. In my country, I had seen some huge LAN parties with associated competitions, but then I got introduced to Korean Brood War competitions; they were filling stadiums with audiences and had pyrotechnics and professional TV productions and everything. It was insane.

I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.

And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.

I quite like the StarCraft remaster. It plays just like the old one (to me, at least; I am not a competitive player), and it looks much better.

The cinematics were the best part of Starcraft!

I still get a kick out of the fact that the units look completely different in the cinematics as they do in the game and even the instruction manual

At the time those cinematics were top tier. Blizzard continued to have some of the best cinematics until Warcraft 3, after that I believe they and many other game developers switched to in-engine cutscenes because the engine visuals were good enough. That said, Blizzard does still make prerendered cutscenes for Diablo 4 and WoW, but they're just... not as impressive anymore as they used to be back then. And a big part of that is that they're not that much different from in-engine. There's some games (FFVII Remake/Rebirth) that have pre-rendered cutscenes that are visually indistinguishable from in-engine cutscenes, but they pre-rendered them because of e.g. wider / zoomed out camera angles or lots of effects.

> Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play.

Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.

Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic completely abandoned the formula and made the next game something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly it stood up to its predecessor.

Dawn of War 3 made DoW 2 look like Game of the Decade by comparison. I hear they're making a DoW 4, and they're not even mentioning 3 when talking about the history.

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