“The first rule of StarCraft is don't break StarCraft.”

Robert Bridenbecker , vice president of technology strategy and planning at Blizzard, is blunt about the challenges of remaking a classic game, especially at a studio as beloved as Blizzard are. And especially when that game is StarCraft. The StarCraft.

In the eSports world, nothing compares to the longevity that Blizzard’s StarCraft has had. The sci-fi real-time strategy game has been around for nearly 20 years, and during its long shelf life it’s been instrumental in carving and fleshing out competitive gaming as more than just a closed door affair at LAN parties.

StarCraft, and its expansion Brood War, is still played today if not so much in the west then certainly in South Korea, where it’s still a stalwart in both huge tournaments and regular casual play at PC bangs (Korean PC gaming centres), competing for attention alongside Overwatch and League of Legends. It’s seen as a standard, something akin to chess, Go or tennis – but in some ways, it’s laughably outdated.

Busan’s beach was lit up at night © Blizzard

Enter StarCraft Remastered: almost two decades on from its 1998 launch, Blizzard are giving StarCraft a brand new lick of paint, dressing it up to modern standards in 4K (widescreen!) glory, and even giving it an online matchmaking system. But the core needs to stay the same. StarCraft may be old enough to vote, but its fans will still melt down on the forums if the formula is messed with. That’s how die-hard the StarCraft community is.

To see that dedication first hand, we travelled to StarCraft’s adopted home country to witness Remastered’s South Korean launch, dubbed ‘GG Together’, a celebration of all things StarCraft, and talked with the developers and pros, culminating with the legendary gamers competing against each other on a huge stage on the sandy beach of Busan at night.

But before the huge stage, before the even larger crowd watching game after game like MOBAs had never been born, we sat down with the developers to ask just what exactly is going into StarCraft Remastered. How do you fix what ain’t broke?

“The most obvious [thing] was updating the graphics to a 4K resolution, but matchmaking is one of the biggest additions from a community perspective, so that it's easier to find a match, and there's an associated ranking, so you're finding better opponents,” senior producer Pete Stilwell tells us. “It's essentially a lot of bringing StarCraft to the modern era; we have a great game, we didn't mess with the gameplay, but the desire was to make it a first class citizen of sorts.”

I want to make sure that players can still play for generations to come Robert Bridenbecker StarCraft has largely stayed the same, but over 19 years the computers and systems running it most definitely have changed; there have been seven major Windows releases since the game first launched, and CPUs and GPUs have become exponentially more powerful. Simply trying to play StarCraft on modern systems is a difficult endeavour. StarCraft Remastered runs as smooth as butter on Windows 10, however – and there are even more modern features aside from 4K graphics: cloud saves let you pick up the game from where you left off, on any system, as long as you’re logged into your Blizzard account. “One of the goals we set out with was to reduce that barrier – and again, make that same frictionless experience that you had when you first started playing StarCraft,” Bridenbecker explains.

Fans braved the heat, waiting for the big event © Blizzard

“I want to make sure that players can still play for generations to come. I grew up with this title myself, it's part of Blizzard's history, it's part of Blizzard's community's history, and I think our measure of success is that if we can still continue to preserve that, and even make that available to succeeding generations, so they can continue to play, enjoy and experience StarCraft.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though: there’s also Battle.net, Blizzard’s online service that has continuously evolved since it was first created back in 1996, to think about. The Battle.net of today looks a lot different to the Battle.net of ‘96, and that proved to be a challenge for the StarCraft Remastered team. “Merging [StarCraft Remastered] with the old Battle.net system that was created in '96 was incredibly challenging, so that was one of the biggest challenges – we had others issues like dynamic lighting, and getting that to work on 2D sprites opened up a few challenges,” senior software engineer Grant Davies tells us.

Forget Terran vs Zerg, the real battle is bug versus feature

The trouble, though, has been worth it: you can play StarCraft Remastered against people online who are still playing the original version, those who are either too stubborn or cheap to upgrade to the remaster, but there are plenty of reasons to make the switch. And even if you don’t like the new widescreen graphics, at the press of a button you can bring back the old school 4:3 aspect ratio, original sprites and ancient user interface, throwing you back to 1998 like Hanson are back in the charts.

While there were challenges involved with bringing the game up to 2017’s standards, the team wrestled with ideas about what actually constituted a bug, and whether it needed fixing or not – and whether they were tempted to actually change anything from the original game.

Davies tells us, “One of the things with StarCraft is that you have to be very careful about what you know as a bug – as it could become a feature. We certainly looked at a lot of things, and in a lot of cases, some things required a bit more utility.

“Some of the hotkeys we added, we got feedback on both directions, and we came out with a much more improved version of hotkeys. It requires a lot of thought and iteration for us to decide on what to change.”

Bridenbecker adds: “Certainly, early on there was a desire for everyone to at least explore the potential for changes – and the more we looked at the tapestry that makes up StarCraft, just every little string you'd pull on, it'd have the potential to completely unravel it entirely. So even stuff like pathing, which is one of the big ones you hear from people, and they'd say, 'The dragoons are all over the place,' and we've been asked if they're going to be fixed, but the more we listened to the community, the more we realised if we 'fixed it', we'd be breaking some of the random element of what makes StarCraft, StarCraft.

"So early on we decided, 'Let's not mess with the gameplay, let's keep that a closed box.'"

Practically everything has been remastered © Blizzard

Every rule has an exception, of course. “We did fix a wireframe bug that was there for 20 years though, and we wanted to make sure we could fix it, but it’s the same,” he admits, sheepishly.

Part of bringing StarCraft up to date for modern gamers meant adding some quality of life changes to the game – nothing that would shake up the game at its core, but add more accessibility to the classic title. New languages have been added to the game, and the original localisations have been improved too, with plenty of translation mistakes fixed, which, as the team tells us, should allow a new generation to access the game better.

“We have a dedicated team for StarCraft Remastered and we will be [looking after the game] well after release; we're going to open up our ears, and if we missed anything, we're going to make sure it's exactly how it should be. This team is dedicated to making sure it's in the best shape it can be,” Stillwell tells us.

But how does it play? We ask the experts

But back to the customisable hotkeys, arguably the biggest non-aesthetic change the remaster brings. It’s a quick change that sounds simple and superficial on the outset, but could dramatically change how players play the game – especially for players returning to the game after StarCraft 2.

Legendary pro player Lim ‘BoxeR’ Yo Hwan tells us, “After ending my career as a professional Brood War player, I moved onto a similar yet very different game: StarCraft 2. When I tried to return to the first game, I had a very hard time readapting. So the ability to customise the hotkeys will most likely be big news for returning players.”

Fellow pro Lee ‘Flash’ Young Ho agrees, telling us, “It's definitely a great feature for players returning from SC2.”

With almost 20 years of history behind it – and a sequel that’s also played competitively across the globe – is there room for StarCraft Remastered to rejoin the busy eSports table and be a viable global eSport again?

“We're really excited just in terms of the longevity of StarCraft – it's been almost 20 years, and there's still a vibrant and active competitive scene,” Bridenbecker says. “We've really engaged with the community and watched and listened [with regards to making StarCraft Remastered]. We're looking to take a similar approach with eSports for [the game]. While we don't have anything to announce today, know that we're watching.”

The event was streamed around the globe online © Blizzard

“Bringing in the new matchmaking feature lets a new generation of players experience StarCraft in a way more accessible way, in a way that's more expected of today's era,” Davies explains. “Hopefully that will attract new players and new generations to StarCraft.”

“When you think about it, StarCraft's been around for nearly 20 years, and there's been a very vibrant and active ecosystem that has naturally grown up around the game, so for us, with the remaster, we've been ensuring that we don't break anything, and that includes what that eSports scene looks like,” Bridenbecker adds. “Our matchmaking for StarCraft Remastered is global: it's a worldwide matchmaker, and will let the top players of various regions play against each other.”

While StarCraft and StarCraft 2 have managed to coexist in a competitive capacity in South Korea, the rest of the world has focused more on StarCraft 2, deciding to move with the times and focus on the ‘latest and greatest’. Is there still room for both? “They're both great games – they're different games though, right? Strategy games in general, whether it’s Company of Heroes or Homeworld or any other strategy game out there, have their own uniqueness,” Stilwell says, “and that's part of the game experience, right?”

Kibong ‘TheBOy’ Koong , a former pro StarCraft player and current Blizzard employee agrees, and sees that there’s room for both at the top. “Even though it's named as the StarCraft franchise, they're different games. I think they can co-exist for the future. And actually the user group and viewer group for both games are different… I feel they can both exist.”

Legendary pros line up during the press conference © Jon Partridge

When quizzed about the Remastered version of the game, and if it feels the same as the original, Lee ‘Jaedong’ Jae Dong tells us: “It felt like a brand new game due to the difference in graphics, but when actually playing it for myself, it felt no different from the original game. It felt familiar yet new. They didn't take away any fun from the original game, but they added features to make it a more up-to-date eSports game. The new features added to the observer system will also get more diverse and better over time.”

Returning to the spotlight

Whether or not Remastered can reignite the StarCraft flame around the globe remains to be seen, but there will certainly be enthusiasm for it in South Korea. As we discover, it’s still a huge part of the country’s culture (one pro player, NaDa, even married his wife at the launch event for StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void). As fans descend onto the beach in Busan to check out the huge event for the Remastered game, no one's batting an eyelid at the presence of a video game tournament on a beach – Busan’s mayor was even there to give a speech about StarCraft and how he hopes the city can become an eSports mecca.