#6: Starcraft (1998)

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 This is one of the big boys. The chess, if you will, of video games. Pretty much everyone has some fond memories of this. Some people still play it. Until October 2012, this was still TELEVISED in South Korea. Almost half (around 5 million) of the copies sold for this game were sold in South Korea. They even had their own match-fixing scandal!

If you've never watched the Pro-League in Starcraft, you really should check the highlights. Nothing can quite compare to the madness of the crowd's crazy reaction when SlayerS_'BoxeR' audaciously SCV-rushed [NC]Yellow in the tournament finals of an MBC televised match. Seriously, if you understand even the vaguest amount of this game, do yourself a favour and watch it. It's only 05:00 and sooooo beautiful! It nicely explains at least some of the Korean hype and love for Starcraft.


And why was it so popular as a professional pursuit? In a word...balance. Three factions, and there have been champions of each. SlayerS_'BoxeR' kicked it off for Terran, followed by Flash; Jaedong and JulyZerg for Zerg; Bisu and Reach for Protoss. These are just some of the legends I remember from my fascination with tuning in to watch the matches.


The LANs we had, the trash-talk, the boundless love for the game was seen in all our activities. It was all-consuming. Who can ever forget a certain someone's famed "carrier-rush" which wasn't actually speedy at all, or the early days of playing the game on Blizzard's Battle.Net servers where we had a blast with "backstab" games? furnace69 (silly, I know. I was young!) still remembers them. :-)


For me, very few games, if any, will come close to the sheer perfection of the balance in this game. I'm not joking when I say that reducing a single unit's (such as the Hydralisk's, or the Zealot's) cost by 25 minerals (a minute difference) could have swung things entirely. My singular issue with an otherwise brilliant game, was that the single-player campaign could have been better done. Oh, no doubt, the multiplayer was "OMG! RoXXor" brilliant, but the campaigns of the early Command & Conquer games were presented more slickly.  


Having said that, no other RTS, not even the otherwise brilliant sequel, will quite match this in terms of the skill involved. I don't care who you are, you simply have to appreciate it for that. GG!


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