Real Time

Neck-and-neck with Total Annihilation as the best of the best, Blizzard's StarCraft breaks new ground not in technology or even playability, but in versatility, refinement and creativity. Sporting what is easily one of, if not *the* most involving and original single-player campaigns ever seen, StarCraft may not be cutting edge, but it's incredibly fun and well-designed. And, after seeing the amount of polish that went into the game, there's little doubt about what all the long delays in StarCraft's development were for.

When Blizzard Entertainment, a small game development company out of Irvine, California, released Warcraft, they helped create the new genre of real-time strategy games. When they released Warcraft 2 a short time later, they revolutionized that new genre. Warcraft 2 was a gorgeous and engrossing game of mythical combat between Orcs and Humans. Many still hail it as the greatest real time strategy game of all time. Almost as soon as Warcraft 2 was out the door, Blizzard announced that their next RTS game was already in the works, called StarCraft. After 3 years of development, numerous delays and possibly the most hype ever surrounding a computer game, StarCraft was finally released to stores on April 1st 1998. The wait was over. The question is, was it worth it?