Everyone knows the Protoss are the best. They're like psychic ninja cricket things! How can you go wrong with that?

Man, I miss This Day in Gaming. Even if you're just reposting material, it's still a cool little feature that I really enjoyed.

UMS + Money maps + regular maps = Always something to do. Nothing like sweating out an epic tvp LT match, then turning around and reaver dropping someone's pile of workers on a fastest map possible. Gee gee!

And I *still* play this game fairly constantly. Moreso than any 10+ year-old game, anyhow. I can't wait for the second - IT MAKES ME HOT!

Happy Birthday, Kerrigan!

Oh, jolly memories plague my mind on this special day of strategy and zerg-rush. Let future generations rid it from noobs and cheaters, so lag may finally be vanquished!

Why don't we do This Day In Gaming anymore? I loved that feature. Anyway, happy birthday to Starcraft.

PROTOSS FTW

i suck ass at starcraft...so i go no good stories that doesnt involve me looking like a scrub

still i love the game and always enjoy a good match

cant wait to be beaten in SC2

I have been running Starcraft off my Flash Drive for the last two years so that I will always have it with me.

I just remember when starcraft, diablo and war2 players shared the same small room in battlenet, and when we called people from inside our game to join us, we had to wade thru uncountable diablo nerds :|

PS. I went for protoss too. It was the coolest, hands down. And I remember the pamphlet inside the box - with the ad of that graphic adventure orc-based with cartoon graphics. A ferocious botch by Blizzard :D

@greygecko: *got
damn invisible edit button

Co-op, half my stories are either co-op online or some crazy map someone's rigged up so I can play and RPG or something similar.

> Got any good StarCraft stories to share? Hit the comments.

And tell you the number of Koreans that kicked my ass? I'll pass. :P

I too had the Protoss box. I was 13 when SC came out. My best friend and I spent a whole summer playing SC on LAN. I think I played SC & BW for another 5 years at least.

"Use map Settings" maps were my favorite. I'd spend hours playing user made RPGs and stuff like Sunken Defense. SC also had the best cinematics ever seen, they blew my little mind.

Best game of all time IMO.

Literally started playing again from scratch a few days ago. I wanted to be completely refreshed on the story line come Starcraft 2 release. It's hard to believe this game is still rocking my world.

My life for aiur... assuredly.

What, no comments yet decrying Starcraft and its sequel for their "obvious' inferiority to [Name your favorite RTS that isn't SC here]? I'm sure it won't be long.

What an amazing game though, and Battle.net for all its flaws at the time sure beat hooking up WarcraftII netgames through #warcraft and #macwarcraft on IRC ;)

Happy birthday starcraft!

I think this was the first game that brought me into online gaming. It's also the game where I adopted the nickname I'm using now. I wasn't great at starcraft but it was still a lot of fun especially with the custom maps developed. Also nothing beats playing with friends and hearing Nuclear Launch Detected followed by a bunch of swearing.

I love playing against 5 Protoss AI.

I didn't get to pick which race I wanted on the box. I bought the super duper ultimate $20 edition. Came with loads of Blizzard stuff and Brood War.

OMG...happy Zerg Day

I remember hanging out with a guild called The Confederation (still friends with one of those guys) and meeting with some dude named Tome who had this insane record of like 5000 wins and 3000 losses. I made fun of him for having no life so he challenged me to a match (I still have no idea how that proves he has a life).

I suck at StarCraft the regular game but give me a Use Map Settings game and I'll probably consistently be "the winner" after 2 or 3 playthroughs, so this Tome guy should have had no problem killing me. However, since I knew I would die playing a regular game, I decided to 4-pool and started running my zerglings to the opposite side of the map, completely guessing his position.

Welp, I guessed right and he was Marines, so my first lings made him use his SCVs to attack me, which killed his supply line. My second wave of lings came to kill off his first marine and help destroy some more SCVs. By the time the third wave came, he told me to take screenshots because he was going to give up and insisted that I send him the screens cuz he thought I was using a map hack. He insisted on a rematch too and I just laughed at him for losing to a newbie like me due to the 4-pool technique combined with dumb luck.
Ahh that was the most hilarious StarCraft experience ever.

My second best experience? Playing the map "Long Race". It's you, with a corsair, on a long map, racing other corsairs. That's it. Ahh man I grieved so many people making them download that and play it for 10 seconds.

To ten years of serious, dangerous addiction.

Zerg were my guys. Nothing beat a cloud of cracklings, defilers, and scourges owning the sky, the ground, and eating anything in between.

Back in the day, we used to go to my friend's house with our 10BaseT coaxial line network. We had cables all through his house to have enough room to play. We only had one game with 7 people in it. 3v2v2.

Long story short: We told one guy that he wasn't allowed to rush (we sucked like that), so he massed a huge Zerg fleet waiting for the word. The team of three parasited my SCV, so I ran him across the map to die. He ran into the Zerg fleet just as the other team nuked all of them. Without the parasite, we would have never known that it happened. All three teams (in different rooms in the house) yelled out at once. Two teams cheered, and one jeered. Needless to say, they lost, but a good time was had by all.

LAN parties... I miss them.

Man I loved this game. I think I played through it in a couple days. The story was so good for an RTS. Then came the online play and I was hooked. Still my favorite RTS to this day and probably in my top 10 games of all time.

Instead of saying "My life for Aiur", my friends and I would say, "My wife for hire!".

@DaveKap: A record in starcraft is almost meaningless because you most often just play with your friends. Ladder helped and it turned into the War 3 ranking system where the score actually meant something. If I only played with my friends my SC record would be like 1000-50-0 with all 49 loses to my insane micro toss friend who I have yet to beat but the 1000 would be against most of my other friends so have yet to beat me 2:1 and who narrowly squeaked a victory 4:1. My friends are noobs.

i still play it competitively, never get enough of it... best RTS every made

ilu infected kerrigan!

What a game, put more Aiurs into it than any other game I've ever played. It was the 2nd game I ever played online I believe, only superseeded but Quake 3. My best memories are creating UMS maps that others played and enjoyed. I look forward to SCII more than any other game I have in maybe 10 years!

Jeez, 10 years. I remeber having weekend LAN parties with this game and just 4-5 hours of sleep each night some pizza, booze, and Starcraft. Good times.

I loved playing this game, even though i was quite terrible at it. I still am actually.

I was always too busy playing Team Fortress, and later Counter-Strike, to care. I finally played it for the first time about 5 years ago with a friend who had lived in Korea for awhile. We both sucked, though, so it was kinda fun, I guess.

I still have fond memories of the "Town Square" chat on Bnet and playing until I noticed that the sun was coming up.

We need a Starcraft DS. NOW!

The two titles I have spent more time playing than any others are Starcraft and BF1942. I would have to estimate somewhere in the 400 to 500 hours range combined.

Gave up 1942 a while back but Starcraft still gets playtime.

This commemorates a moment in gaming history when the 'RTS' as a genre could have gone one of two ways--toward a more strategic approach based on economy akin to the turn based strategy games which were the genre's heritage, *or* toward an arcade tactical experience more similar to fighting games.

Dark Reign and Total annihilation were out, offering options for controlling AI, and setting up production-based approaches, rather than unit-based ones. Then blizzard released SC and forever determined the direction of the genre. Even the spiritual sequels to these titles, like SupCom have altered their gameplay to focus on a unit-based approach, allowing the true real time strategy game to languish in the ether, waiting for the time when someone will find a way to reintroduce it and offer a new term for it.

As it stands, it looks like the eventual title for the new genre will be 'tower defense'... ah well.

Cheers to you Blizzard. You determine the direction of gaming. For good or ill...

*pounds ethanol*

Oh God, I wonder what the total man-hours played of Starcraft is.

@deathbunny: You post the best comments. I do love Starcraft UMS maps, though.

I got into SC fairly late but I'm fairly decent at it. No money maps of course :P

Loved it when I nuked an army of like 12 or so Carriers because I told him his base would be demolished soon. So he most likely spent the time looking for a red dot in his base instead of moving his army away. Then he got pissed and left the game when he couldn't fight back.

Another voice: why dont we get our TDIG anymore???

@deathbunny: Wow, there you are with the SC hate, took long enough. Way to stealth it, I appreciate the effort involved.

@argh: People played maps on "Use map settings?"

I tried making custom rules where any unit that attacked a non-turret building or worker in the first 20 minutes would be destroyed. Unfortunately, I gave up half way, since I had to do it for every unit and for any unit they attacked. I just hope SC2 has a better map editor with better script support, or has a built in ro-rush game type.

I don't have any outstanding moments, but I know that watching an army of hydralisks with dark swarm annihilate a carrier armada is the coolest thing ever.

Fondest memory, making custom setting maps were all races built insanely fast, and then having a lan in which you and your friend throw mass amounts of troops at each other with no end in site.

Only thing was, Ryan forgot nuclear missiles ALSO got the speed and price cut...

I was like 17 when Starcraft came out. I used to work on a Cybercafé on that time (when internet was growing). I had around 4 co-workes by my age and i remember closing "early" to play some good LAN games while drinking some beer (yeah, i was a minor). Good times. :)

StarCraft may have shipped on March 31st but most stores didn't have it for purchase until April 1st. There was some hilarious irony in going out to the store that day. Somehow I knew it was going to happen too.

Ah Starcraft the devourer of lives. How we loath thy even as we bow before your amazing powers. Since I first witnessed a zergling rush I knew I was lost to whatever fate Blizzard had in store for me. Years were lost in a haze of human limbs as my zerg swarmed over any who dared venture near.

Lords knows I will lose many a year more when your offspring hits our computers. Oh how I loath you....

Where the hell are the SC2 pre-orders Arrrrrgggghhh!

Learning how to BS was the most satisfying experience ever.

Maps that were like, fastest, 7 players versus 1 computer... making it difficult for allies to defeat computer until finally you're ready to unally and defeat them all or lose trying.

So satisfying to unally someone and then phase in a bunch of units to their base with an arbiter... having a ton of defenses set up for everyone's stupid all-out offensive against me in retaliation. Their forces would get wasted on it, and they'd have little resources to rebuild.

Hell yeah, go starcraft!!! And while we're at it, go protoss!

My best Starcraft story was back when the game first came out. Me and a couple mates had a lan setup in his house and we would have many matches over the weekends.

On this particular day, we started early in the morning, well, early in the sense that it was 10a.m. on a Sunday, at any rate, there were 4 of us playing and me and my partner formed an alliance and took them out around the 45 minute mark.

Then what proceeded was probably the longest god damn game of Starcraft i've ever played. Since we were both relatively new at the game and thus had no idea what the fuck we were doing, and since resources were sparse on the map we were playing, we ended up having a back and forth match that lasted probably around 8 hours before I took out all of his main base and he had to admit defeat.

I don't think I've ever been stuck in a deadlock like that since then.

goddamnit I'm old (19)

Happy B-Day Starcraft! You life sucking, time sucking, girl friend destroying black hole of gaming! And I love you for all of it - yes its the Hesinki syndrome.

I love the no-cd patch and I'm still trying to figure out how to best use you with my new Logitech G15 keyboard macros..... any suggestions people?