INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
forever.This year, StarCraft turned 20 years old, and to commemorate Blizzard released a remastered version of the game this past April that
we chatted with Blizzard Entertainment Vice President of Technology Strategy Robert Bridenbecker all about the original StarCraft
In particular, we reminisced about the early days of Battle.net and discussed the massive impact it had on online gaming writ large.Because
Battle.netRobert Bridenbecker: Back actually when we did Diablo, not a lot of folks remember this, but the very first public beta of a
Blizzard game that we did was actually a Battle.net beta
The whole reason we did that wasn't because we were necessarily looking to get a ton of feedback against Diablo as a game, but we were
actually looking to get feedback on whether or not Battle.net as a service was even a viable thing.I don't know how much you remember of the
in, click that and, boom, you're on the service
You've just put in your display name, and that's it
Except, well, it led to this sort of Thunderdome environment of chat channels
what-have-you, and we would kick him out of the channel
That was one of these things where we're just sort of learning it by trying.StarCraft just popped so big over in Korea, we actually ended up
having issues around keeping the databases around the world in sync, where you'd have a bunch of Korean data that would be there
We'd actually have to push it across the internet cables over into Asia, and it would create tremendous amounts of lag
Servers would just connect to one another, so you'd have chat channels that would actually like fork through one another.So, you'd be in
general chat, and you could actually be in two different copies of general chat
how we we ended up in a situation where that classic service had left us with East Asia, Europe [US East and US West]
That was all done because the connectivity between those those areas wasn't super great but our populations in those areas was super
ups, so the call waiting, mom picking up the phone
Just the fact that you're pushing bits over basically the average speed, [which] was like 28.8 kilobytes a second.When people think about
internet-connected activities, like, you couldn't stream the worst quality YouTube clip on your best day at 28.8Kbps without just wanting to
And, so here we've got up to eight people all connecting in a game of StarCraft, and we're pushing bits back and forth in a peer-to-peer or
round-robin format and trying to keep all that going across basically copper wires
That in and of itself, I think, was one of the biggest challenges.TR: Can you recall or tell any stories of critical moments in launching
seeing people come in and really own their online persona and doing it while they're gaming along
where they were a dial-up service and had a little bit in online chat rooms and so forth But, there wasn't a whole lot going on in the in
people nearby working on it
To basically have all that knowledge trapped up in a couple of people's heads, and then to see it go live and have people connecting up
chatting on getting the games.I'll tell you what, when Korea really lit up, we didn't we didn't plan for that
where people would walk in and you'd have machines, fifty to a room, where you'd pay five bucks to be able to play StarCraft
[We were] just humbled by that love and passion for the game, so you know that that to me is has always been the defining moment of what,
concurrent players during the early days of StarCraft Battle.net versus those same numbers today in, say, SC2RB: I want to say we were north
of hundreds of thousands of people playing from any given region at any given time
Compared to today, we measure it in the millions and millions of dailies
top of those numbers just was unbelievable.You know, what was true then I think we've we figured out now, but it took us some time, is that
when there would be a hiccup in the internet
back on quickly, is a hard thing to solve for
In today's world, that's just sort of expected
We have to deal with millions upon millions of players that, at any point can pop online
screens.RB: I mean, it was a peer-to-peer-peer-to-peer game, and so with that what we ended up with was that basically all the packets from
one machine would actually have to be reflected out to everybody else and so
From a gameplay standpoint, what we'd have to deal with is just the raw latency at the lowest common denominator, and we would adjust the
Where that worked really well was in the highly developed internet countries, where latency is super low
What doesn't work at all even today is when you're trying to go out over a couple hundred milliseconds, because you're just constantly
waiting for other players
We found out that, real early on, players are known for their patience index to tend to drop off real real quick, and so people get booted
from games super fast if they're the one that's causing waiting for players, even the way that we did data passing technology back
then.Basically, you're using my internet connection to do file transfers
In effect, we had one of the earliest sort of peer-to-peer file exchange programs that was out there,but it was all highly optimized around
our data as opposed to random data.TR: What were the most popular types of matches in the early days of StarCraft versus those of the sequel
today or contemporary SC I remember comp stomps being my favorite as a less than amazing player.RB: Players creating their own sort of
custom maps and then about making those things was just a novel way for us to engage with the community
We didn't know how big that would get, but it turned out to be something that we explored even further with Warcraft 3 and with StarCraft
For the the people that were particularly great at it and gotten down into the muscle memory of hotkeys and unit groupings, they were able
to really just turn it into something we've never seen before, which was nice.TR: Honestly, at this point it really is almost like an entire
language unto itself.RB: When we launched StarCraft remastered, it was so key to us to serve the existing gameplay, because first rule of
making it was that we couldn't break StarCraft
That put some parameters around just how far we could go in terms of remastering it.An example of that was that raw APM [Actions Per Minute]
was so key, and the way in which players had learned to sort of circumvent some of the the way the engine worked back in the day was bizarre
The pro players would actually shake the mouse to increase the refresh rate, and the reason that they do that is early on they wanted to
the entire screen, because that's just how you made the game back in the day, and when we changed over that and put in hardware cursor, the
game started to feel a little different
here because we don't have a ton of folks that are hitting above 200 to 250 APM
The pro players reach either 300 or 400.All this stuff over 20 years has just been awesome to see developing, to your point of it being its
own language, like it it has become this game, this sport that is something that we're very delicate with
We want to make sure that we continue to preserve it and have it available for generations to come
But, at the same time, we need to make sure that the generations that had the game like this today continue to recognize it as the same game
to this today.TR: What is something you or the team misses about those old days of Battle.net, and what is something that you definitely
That just was exciting: what we were plugging in, the whole notion of actually bridging external social communication channels from back in
the day, like IRC or AOL, and integrating it directly with the game, so that players have the ability to just very easily find one another
and chat, and then hop into a game and enjoy their day
No one wanted to talk of anybody else, because that was there their thing
Today, it's a different problem set, and so you have a lot of the the same sort of start-up mentality and just cool problems to solve, but
they are very different problems, I think
know, I was still in my early twenties, and so these sleepless nights were cathartic and awesome
just sort of works right, and I think it's just cool to be a part of it.TheIndianSubcontinent's fourth annual PC Gaming Week is officially
here, celebrating our passion with in-depth and exclusive coverage of PC gaming from every angle
Visit our PC Gaming Week 2018 page to see all of the coverage in one place.
