Recently, the rights to several classic game franchises, including Master of Orion, Total Annihilation, and Star Control, were auctioned off following Atari's filing for bankruptcy earlier this year. You can see a list of the franchises involved, and whom they ended up with, below.

StarCraft II's expansion pack, Heart of the Swarm, is already out in some parts of the world, and it's launching tomorrow in North America. To celebrate, let's take the opportunity to examine more than 20 years' worth of real-time strategy history in today's Show Us gallery, and see how much the genre has evolved…