StarCraft: Legacy of the Real-Time Strategy by Simon Dor

This is the latest book in the University of Michigan’s Landmark Video Game series. In this case, they have made a selection with significant academic value. While not the first Real-Time Strategy game (RTS), it has sparked scholarly interest and is a must-read for anyone studying the genre.

The books in this series are written for an academic audience. I wouldn’t say I like reading these books that often. They can be hard to read at times and are frequently like textbooks.

This book, unlike what I was expecting, offers a unique perspective. Each book in this series is a little different, and they tend to focus on things the author thinks are important. This isn’t an issue because plenty of histories do this.

This book focuses on StarCraft’s Esports legacy in South Korea. It is a fascinating story, but I don’t care about it. After the first section, I struggled to care about what was going on. I’m not interested in Esports, so I struggled to connect with what was being said.

Author’s Note: I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon in Esports history. People seem to forget that video game competition existed before whatever game the author focuses on existed. The potential “start date” for Esports would have to be in the late 1970s or early 1980s. This is another example of how strange tracking video game history has become.

Brief History of RTS

The book doesn’t start with this. It begins with an event in the Esports community. I don’t know anything about the StarCraft Esports scene, so this story didn’t mean anything to me. I probably should’ve known something was going on when I read this.

From there, he gives us a rundown of the RTS genre and some of its basics. He points out the games that inspired StarCraft. The majority of them made perfect sense to me. Then he brought up Populous, and I wasn’t expecting that. After reading what he said about the game, I realized it made perfect sense.

 Note: Simon uses a few words that I don’t remember him establishing. He uses phrases like Decoding, Decoding Paradigm, and Foreseeing Games, which I assume he explained and I missed. I can’t fault him for my confusion on this.

I liked this history quite a bit. While it does read like a textbook or a research paper, I like this part of the book. He does mention RTS games on home consoles.

He starts with Hertzog Zwei but moves on to a few others. Then he brings up StarCraft 64. I keep forgetting that this game exists. It reminds me of the Command & Conquer games on the PlayStation One.

Esports

He mentions multi-player and Esports, which take up a good chunk of the book. I understand why he does this. Every researcher and writer likes to focus on parts of the history of games that they deem to be important or matter to them.

The most interesting part of this concerns the unwritten edict in video games. There are rules that players adhere to in an unspoken way. For StarCraft, it is the “No Rush” rule. The players give each other time to build up before starting the game.

This reminds me of the “Don’t Look at My Controller” edict of Tecmo Bowl, “Don’t Pick Oddjob” in Golden Eye, and the “Quarter on the Cabinet” rule in arcade fighting games. There are others, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. I never thought about these rules, and it would be interesting to see what other unwritten rules exist in multi-player and online games.

This is extremely interesting if you want to know more about StarCraft and its impact on South Korea. There is a lot here about why things were different in South Korea and how the stigma of gaming wasn’t there. While I did find this part interesting, I’m not really into Esports.

It is very cool to learn about the history of video game competitions. This was a bigger deal in South Korea than in other countries. While more countries, leagues, and competitions have caught up to the scale of South Korea, these competitions have been around for decades before StarCraft.

This book made me want to research the history of Esports and video game competitions. I don’t disagree with Simon’s comments about Esports in South Korea; I just thought about other things. This just wasn’t the book for me.

Final Thoughts

This book was okay. If I were more interested in Esports or StarCraft, then I would’ve enjoyed this game more than I did. There are some great things here, and I’m sure the stories are interesting, but I didn’t care.

Simon has a personal connection to this game. He includes that in his book, and I think it adds a lot to what he is talking about. This isn’t something that often shows up in this series of books, but when it does, I appreciate it.

He also wades into some of the sticky issues that come up when you examine Sci-Fi media. There are a lot of tropes, a tendency to fall back on strong men doing things, and female characters are largely non-existent or background characters. You can find stuff like this in every genre of media. It is interesting to look at this stuff critically and draw your own conclusions.

Reading this brought back some great memories of playing RTS Games in the 1990s. Simon mentions a ton of games that I remember fondly, like Dune II, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer. However, one game he mentions got me thinking, and I believe Simon makes a wonderful point about it.

He compares StarCraft to Total Annihilation. I hadn’t thought of this before, and the game is one that I keep forgetting about. It is a great comparison, and I understand why it was brought up. I like that he brought up all the different games; I wish that were the book’s focus.