StarCraft as it appeared in June 1996 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. A picture from around the time of the E3 game show in Q2 1996 shows the path the game team originally chose: Given a short timeframe and limited staff, the StarCraft team’s goal was to implement a modest game - something that could best be described as “Orcs in space”. While Blizzard’s early games had been far more successful than expected, that just raised expectations for future growth.
The decision to rush the game’s development seems ludicrous in retrospect, but Allen Adham, the company’s president, was under pressure to grow revenue. Q2 1998 – actual ship date for StarCraft.Q4 1996 – planned ship date for StarCraft.The team members were regrouped to build something that could reach market quickly so Blizzard wouldn’t have a long gap between game launches. The project leadership was comprised of the same folks who had started Shattered Nations (video), a turn-based strategy game along the lines of X-COM that Blizzard announced in May 1995 but canceled some months later. StarCraft was originally envisioned as a game with modest goals that could fit into a one-year development cycle so that it could be released for Christmas, 1996.
While its predecessors (Warcraft I and II) were far more reliable games than their industry peers, StarCraft crashed frequently enough that play-testing was difficult right up until release, and the game continued to require ongoing patching efforts post-launch. Part 3: Explaining the implementation details of the fixĭuring the development of StarCraft, a two and a half year slog with over a year of crunch time prior to launch, the game was as buggy as a termite nest.Part 2: How we could have fixed the most common causes.This post: Why StarCraft crashed frequently during development.I’ll be posting the latter parts over the next several days. I’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code.
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