8 ms·

StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

435 points by phenylene 14y ago

lectrick 14y ago
Pretty awesome story!
STRML 14y ago
Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready, not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been monumentally successful. It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.
- troebr 14y ago
  Unfortunately "when it's ready" did not apply to diablo 3 or starcraft 2 (battle.net for sc2 was months from being ready).
  - DrStalker 14y ago
    Has there been any information as to why those were so screwed up, compared to other blizzard titles? Blizzard used to be on my "buy everything they make you can trust it to be good" list but Starcraft II knocked them off that and Diablo 3 made me rather dislike them. I know the Diablo 3 performance issues weren't picked up in the open beta stresstest - because I played that and the performance was good enough to make be buy the game after being hesitent to buy an online-only ARPG when I live in Australia.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
      Do you really consider SC2 a screwup? Remember, SC1 was far from perfect as well when it came out. The only blizzard game that was perfect right from release IMO was warcraft 3. SC2 might not be their best, but it is still a really great game. So I can't really follow that SC2 bashing. Can't talk about Diablo3 though, that series never interested me.
      - mertd 14y ago
        WC2 was pretty good.
      - STRML 14y ago
        SC2 wasn't terrible. I think a lot of people were angry (and still are) about the state of custom games, which were a lot of fun for a lot of people. The implementation in pre-Arcade-patch SC2 was so bad that only ~15 maps were ever played. Post-Arcade is better but still misses the mark in several key areas. I think it shows that (a) the staff is being manipulated by upper management, who doesn't understand what made Blizzard games good in the past or (b) the turnover has been so high in this industry that the designers and developers themselves don't know what made these games great.
    - spdy 14y ago
      What really shocked me in Diablo3 were some really simple programming mistakes that never should have passed Q&A or even be implemented in the first place. Like one where you could change your local computer time and affect the auction house online to cancel your account at will and get the money bidden on these items. They either had to finish the product on a tight schedule and did not focus on core aspects of the game or they had no real talent on the project. But this has probably something to do with the day Vivendi took over and they had to deliver ROI at any cost. WoW is still a first class game but we will see if they are able to convert enough of their player base to Titan. But it looks like the brand name is starting to lose value.
- MMXII 14y ago
  It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what actually goes on internally. Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects? Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so. It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its magic, and it's not even quite sure why. The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before (C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through Blizzard's fingers. Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by tremendous successes with WoW. But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat the next time someone eats their lunch.
  - crazypyro 14y ago
    To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.
T-R 14y ago
For anyone who's wondering: Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7. H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank, between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used, but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle. I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.
- psykotic 14y ago
  > used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). Even the 3D plane effect in F-Zero and Mario Kart requires an hblank interrupt routine that changes the scale and scroll registers for the tile map. Without such trickery Mode 7 technically only does 2D rotozooming. That said, in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D plane effect.
  - philiac 14y ago
    > in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D plane effect. That is amusing.
    - T-R 14y ago
      I believe he's right, though - I've heard that Mode 7, and specifically the fact that it could simulate a 3D perspective with that effect, was a selling point of the SNES over the Genesis/Megadrive to developers (that, and its higher number of colors). I admittedly haven't played around with Mode 7 much myself. Apparently Wikipedia has a nice article on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
I've worked at two game studios over the years and came away with one takeaway: there won't be a third unless it's my own. There are few more dysfunctional engineering environments on the planet, leading to continual burnout. There is a long line of coders who grew up playing games that want to do that into adulthood, leading to a perverse supply/demand ratio that allows studios to treat their employees like crap under the auspices of "that's how the industry works". I wouldn't buy into it.
- motoford 14y ago
  This is not limited to game studios, or even software in general. Unfortunately it's everywhere.
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Not really. In most European countries, unions tend to be strong enough to prevent this type of situations in regular IT shops, if you complain about it. Just in the game industry, people tend to avoid to complain, because it is so hard to get into.
    - motoford 14y ago
      Definitely a case of where you live I suppose. I have never heard of a union IT shop here in the states.
      - marvin 14y ago
        Once again, it comes back to the meaning of the word "union" in the US versus Europe. Labor unions in Europe usually have less focus on enforcing a monopoly on labor and more focus on having good, safe conditions for sustainable work, arranging courses and sharing experiences, etc. For example, pretty much all Norwegian IT workers are organized either through Tekna (union for Masters degree holders in technical subjects) or NITO (union for engineers and technical personnel). Being organized in such a community is a huge bonus when it comes to bargaining power and decreasing the leverage employers have due to ignorance or lack of information on salaries, etc. This comes in addition to all the advantages you get for having easy access to like-minded professionals.
comlag 14y ago
The link to the story of ION Storm and the game Daikatana he mentions was a really interesting read as well. Talk about a complete mess of a company. http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather/ http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather...
- achompas 14y ago
  Ion Storm rivals Looking Glass Entertainment as one of the bigger disappointments of the 1990s PC gaming scene. Both companies produced an incredible roster of games -- Thief, Deus Ex, and the amazing System Shock series (which managed to frighten so much with so little) -- then vanished after figuratively lighting money on fire. Can anyone point to companies producing games like this today? Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'd really like to find a few before I give up and buy Halo 4.
  - evan_ 14y ago
    > Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'm sure you're familiar with them but all of Valve's first person shooters fit this mold (maybe not minimal...). The Left 4 Dead series especially has the atmosphere down.
    - achompas 14y ago
      I'll have to give the L4D games a shot--I hear they're excellent. Does Xbox v. PC matter at all?
      - shawabawa3 14y ago
        At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I don't think there's an FPS in existence where console vs PC doesn't matter. You need a mouse.
      - Tomis02 14y ago
        I would take the PC on general principle. I can vouch the L4D games on PC are fantastic, especially when playing with some friends.
wtallis 14y ago
"As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the Dominion Storm demo was a fake." How many times in the history of computing has a team seen a faked demo, believed it, and cloned it, unwittingly becoming the first ones to do it for real? The fact that there are several such stories is really quite amazing.
- 3minus1 14y ago
  What are some other examples?
  - bartonfink 14y ago
    I've read something similar by Michael Abrash. Based on a press-release for the capabilities of a new graphics card that would have blown his project out of the water, an engineer spent a long time thinking about what they must be doing to get that sort of performance. He figured they were using a FIFO somewhere in the circuitry, and had enough space to implement a 1-deep FIFO for a certain operation, figuring that it wasn't enough. Turns out, his improved chip beat the benchmarks that were in the original press release because they had implemented a FIFO for a different operation that had less impact on performance.
    - anabis 14y ago
      Luckily, its on the web: http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html
  - mlinsey 14y ago
    One famous example is the Apple team getting a demo of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC. The Apple engineers mistakenly believed that the Xerox interface had a bunch of things it did not, in particular being able to drag overlapping windows on top of each other. The Xerox engineers were supposedly amazed when they saw the results. This isn't quite the same thing - Xerox wasn't staging a fake demo, the Apple guys just mis-remembered or mis-understood what they were looking at. But they still put an insane amount of effort into getting this working, much to everybody's surprise, because they thought that someone else had already done it, so it must have been possible. Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. You can probably find this story somewhere on the folklore website.
danso 14y ago
Ah, the press event, the time-suck that had to be tolerated in every realm of human undertaking: video games, sports, business, politics, etc > As every game developer knows, release dates are slippery, but the dates of trade shows are set in stone. If a game studio has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare booth space, purchase long-lead print advertising and arrange press appointments, the development team is going to have to demo something or heads will roll. It's crazy to think about how much money and resources were wasted, not to mention destructive pressure created, by these contrived schedules of publicity dates. Getting publicity today is not as simple as making a webpage and twitter account, but at least it's not how it was in the OP's day
xentronium 14y ago
Speaking of change of plans. Does anybody remember blizzard warcraft 3 pre-release version? See screenshots [1][2] That was entirely different gameplay, with more RPG and less strategy. I remember how I read about it in some magazine and was greatly excited. When it came out, I liked it even more than I expected, that was one kick-ass game. And then I found World Editor. Needless to say, I was stunned, I spent all my free time playing with JASS (wc3 scripting language), and that was very probably a deciding factor in me becoming a programmer. Hell, even now, I think I could make a decent map if paired with a good landscape designer/storymaker. I haven't finished many maps and projects in my time but the process of creation/programming was so incredibly enjoyable, that end result didn't even matter. I wonder if there are any other world editors on HN. [1] http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=39&pos=0 http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=... [2] http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/003.jpg http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/... also click arrows on the page, there is more.
- dgant 14y ago
  Blizzard definitely struggled with what they were trying to accomplish in attempting to create genre-busting character-centric RTS. WC3's a great game, but the released product seems to be a backtracking from what they were trying to accomplish. DotA strikes me as having gameplay closer to what Blizzard was striving to create.
- zacharycohn 14y ago
  ex-Jedi Knight modder/level editor here. There was a game with even more moddability and level editability than Warcraft 3.
- doppel 14y ago
  I am just sad that they scrapped the RPG / adventure game they were making with Thrall as the main characer. It seems a lot of his storyline took place behind the scenes somewhere between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. But again, an adventure might have failed spectacularly with no prior experience and the genre in general losing popularity.
error54 14y ago
IGN review of the game that made Starcraft what is today. http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-gift-3 http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-g...
fts89 14y ago
Starcraft :P http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000DMAI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&tag=asdfdsa-20&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00000DMAI&linkCode=as2 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000DMAI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
melicerte 14y ago
Patrick Wyatt's CV at the end of the post is impressive and its story well worth the read !

435 points by phenylene 14y ago

Pretty awesome story!

STRML 14y ago

Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready, not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been monumentally successful. It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.

troebr 14y ago
Unfortunately "when it's ready" did not apply to diablo 3 or starcraft 2 (battle.net for sc2 was months from being ready).
- DrStalker 14y ago
  Has there been any information as to why those were so screwed up, compared to other blizzard titles? Blizzard used to be on my "buy everything they make you can trust it to be good" list but Starcraft II knocked them off that and Diablo 3 made me rather dislike them. I know the Diablo 3 performance issues weren't picked up in the open beta stresstest - because I played that and the performance was good enough to make be buy the game after being hesitent to buy an online-only ARPG when I live in Australia.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    Do you really consider SC2 a screwup? Remember, SC1 was far from perfect as well when it came out. The only blizzard game that was perfect right from release IMO was warcraft 3. SC2 might not be their best, but it is still a really great game. So I can't really follow that SC2 bashing. Can't talk about Diablo3 though, that series never interested me.
    - mertd 14y ago
      WC2 was pretty good.
    - STRML 14y ago
      SC2 wasn't terrible. I think a lot of people were angry (and still are) about the state of custom games, which were a lot of fun for a lot of people. The implementation in pre-Arcade-patch SC2 was so bad that only ~15 maps were ever played. Post-Arcade is better but still misses the mark in several key areas. I think it shows that (a) the staff is being manipulated by upper management, who doesn't understand what made Blizzard games good in the past or (b) the turnover has been so high in this industry that the designers and developers themselves don't know what made these games great.
  - spdy 14y ago
    What really shocked me in Diablo3 were some really simple programming mistakes that never should have passed Q&A or even be implemented in the first place. Like one where you could change your local computer time and affect the auction house online to cancel your account at will and get the money bidden on these items. They either had to finish the product on a tight schedule and did not focus on core aspects of the game or they had no real talent on the project. But this has probably something to do with the day Vivendi took over and they had to deliver ROI at any cost. WoW is still a first class game but we will see if they are able to convert enough of their player base to Titan. But it looks like the brand name is starting to lose value.
MMXII 14y ago
It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what actually goes on internally. Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects? Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so. It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its magic, and it's not even quite sure why. The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before (C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through Blizzard's fingers. Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by tremendous successes with WoW. But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat the next time someone eats their lunch.
- crazypyro 14y ago
  To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.

T-R 14y ago

For anyone who's wondering: Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7. H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank, between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used, but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle. I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.

psykotic 14y ago
> used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). Even the 3D plane effect in F-Zero and Mario Kart requires an hblank interrupt routine that changes the scale and scroll registers for the tile map. Without such trickery Mode 7 technically only does 2D rotozooming. That said, in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D plane effect.
- philiac 14y ago
  > in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D plane effect. That is amusing.
  - T-R 14y ago
    I believe he's right, though - I've heard that Mode 7, and specifically the fact that it could simulate a 3D perspective with that effect, was a selling point of the SNES over the Genesis/Megadrive to developers (that, and its higher number of colors). I admittedly haven't played around with Mode 7 much myself. Apparently Wikipedia has a nice article on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

I've worked at two game studios over the years and came away with one takeaway: there won't be a third unless it's my own. There are few more dysfunctional engineering environments on the planet, leading to continual burnout. There is a long line of coders who grew up playing games that want to do that into adulthood, leading to a perverse supply/demand ratio that allows studios to treat their employees like crap under the auspices of "that's how the industry works". I wouldn't buy into it.

motoford 14y ago
This is not limited to game studios, or even software in general. Unfortunately it's everywhere.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Not really. In most European countries, unions tend to be strong enough to prevent this type of situations in regular IT shops, if you complain about it. Just in the game industry, people tend to avoid to complain, because it is so hard to get into.
  - motoford 14y ago
    Definitely a case of where you live I suppose. I have never heard of a union IT shop here in the states.
    - marvin 14y ago
      Once again, it comes back to the meaning of the word "union" in the US versus Europe. Labor unions in Europe usually have less focus on enforcing a monopoly on labor and more focus on having good, safe conditions for sustainable work, arranging courses and sharing experiences, etc. For example, pretty much all Norwegian IT workers are organized either through Tekna (union for Masters degree holders in technical subjects) or NITO (union for engineers and technical personnel). Being organized in such a community is a huge bonus when it comes to bargaining power and decreasing the leverage employers have due to ignorance or lack of information on salaries, etc. This comes in addition to all the advantages you get for having easy access to like-minded professionals.

comlag 14y ago

The link to the story of ION Storm and the game Daikatana he mentions was a really interesting read as well. Talk about a complete mess of a company. http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather/ http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather...

achompas 14y ago
Ion Storm rivals Looking Glass Entertainment as one of the bigger disappointments of the 1990s PC gaming scene. Both companies produced an incredible roster of games -- Thief, Deus Ex, and the amazing System Shock series (which managed to frighten so much with so little) -- then vanished after figuratively lighting money on fire. Can anyone point to companies producing games like this today? Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'd really like to find a few before I give up and buy Halo 4.
- evan_ 14y ago
  > Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'm sure you're familiar with them but all of Valve's first person shooters fit this mold (maybe not minimal...). The Left 4 Dead series especially has the atmosphere down.
  - achompas 14y ago
    I'll have to give the L4D games a shot--I hear they're excellent. Does Xbox v. PC matter at all?
    - shawabawa3 14y ago
      At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I don't think there's an FPS in existence where console vs PC doesn't matter. You need a mouse.
    - Tomis02 14y ago
      I would take the PC on general principle. I can vouch the L4D games on PC are fantastic, especially when playing with some friends.

wtallis 14y ago

"As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the Dominion Storm demo was a fake." How many times in the history of computing has a team seen a faked demo, believed it, and cloned it, unwittingly becoming the first ones to do it for real? The fact that there are several such stories is really quite amazing.

3minus1 14y ago
What are some other examples?
- bartonfink 14y ago
  I've read something similar by Michael Abrash. Based on a press-release for the capabilities of a new graphics card that would have blown his project out of the water, an engineer spent a long time thinking about what they must be doing to get that sort of performance. He figured they were using a FIFO somewhere in the circuitry, and had enough space to implement a 1-deep FIFO for a certain operation, figuring that it wasn't enough. Turns out, his improved chip beat the benchmarks that were in the original press release because they had implemented a FIFO for a different operation that had less impact on performance.
  - anabis 14y ago
    Luckily, its on the web: http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html
- mlinsey 14y ago
  One famous example is the Apple team getting a demo of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC. The Apple engineers mistakenly believed that the Xerox interface had a bunch of things it did not, in particular being able to drag overlapping windows on top of each other. The Xerox engineers were supposedly amazed when they saw the results. This isn't quite the same thing - Xerox wasn't staging a fake demo, the Apple guys just mis-remembered or mis-understood what they were looking at. But they still put an insane amount of effort into getting this working, much to everybody's surprise, because they thought that someone else had already done it, so it must have been possible. Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. You can probably find this story somewhere on the folklore website.

danso 14y ago

Ah, the press event, the time-suck that had to be tolerated in every realm of human undertaking: video games, sports, business, politics, etc > As every game developer knows, release dates are slippery, but the dates of trade shows are set in stone. If a game studio has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare booth space, purchase long-lead print advertising and arrange press appointments, the development team is going to have to demo something or heads will roll. It's crazy to think about how much money and resources were wasted, not to mention destructive pressure created, by these contrived schedules of publicity dates. Getting publicity today is not as simple as making a webpage and twitter account, but at least it's not how it was in the OP's day

xentronium 14y ago

Speaking of change of plans. Does anybody remember blizzard warcraft 3 pre-release version? See screenshots [1][2] That was entirely different gameplay, with more RPG and less strategy. I remember how I read about it in some magazine and was greatly excited. When it came out, I liked it even more than I expected, that was one kick-ass game. And then I found World Editor. Needless to say, I was stunned, I spent all my free time playing with JASS (wc3 scripting language), and that was very probably a deciding factor in me becoming a programmer. Hell, even now, I think I could make a decent map if paired with a good landscape designer/storymaker. I haven't finished many maps and projects in my time but the process of creation/programming was so incredibly enjoyable, that end result didn't even matter. I wonder if there are any other world editors on HN. [1] http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=39&pos=0 http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=... [2] http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/003.jpg http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/... also click arrows on the page, there is more.

dgant 14y ago
Blizzard definitely struggled with what they were trying to accomplish in attempting to create genre-busting character-centric RTS. WC3's a great game, but the released product seems to be a backtracking from what they were trying to accomplish. DotA strikes me as having gameplay closer to what Blizzard was striving to create.
zacharycohn 14y ago
ex-Jedi Knight modder/level editor here. There was a game with even more moddability and level editability than Warcraft 3.
doppel 14y ago
I am just sad that they scrapped the RPG / adventure game they were making with Thrall as the main characer. It seems a lot of his storyline took place behind the scenes somewhere between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. But again, an adventure might have failed spectacularly with no prior experience and the genre in general losing popularity.

error54 14y ago

IGN review of the game that made Starcraft what is today. http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-gift-3 http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-g...

fts89 14y ago

Starcraft :P http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000DMAI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&tag=asdfdsa-20&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00000DMAI&linkCode=as2 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000DMAI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

melicerte 14y ago

Patrick Wyatt's CV at the end of the post is impressive and its story well worth the read !