Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

time-strategy title set in outer space - receiving
so much outright worship, that’s weird.
What’s weirder is that Starcraft is not
anything like the best-selling computer game of
all time. The Sims, say, has sold many, many
millions more. Still, it would not be unfair to
suggest that The Sims is primarily played by
people that are out of touch with the pulse of
gaming. (Damn, maybe we should just call them
“non-gamers,” sneer derisively, and move on.)
It’s the people who say they Play Games
that like Starcraft. Many of them like it a lot.
Most of them have bought the game, bought it
with such force and passion,and so repeatedly,
that Starcraft still ran for forty dollars new four
years after its release.
This in itself is almost unheard of in the
world of PC games. Ever-changing computer
hardware means that a game that runs on
an average system at a certain date is not at
all guaranteed to run on an average system
six months in the future without patches and
tweaks and kludges. This limits the shelf life of a
PC game severely; game pricing begins at about
$49.99, and then within three to six months
reaches $29.99. Then it goes down to $19.99.
Then a budget company like Majesco picks it up
and sells it for $9.99, “jewel-case only” at Wal-
Mart. This is only for the successful games, of
course. The unsuccessful ones begin at $49.99
and disappear altogether before the marketplace
registers their existence.
Hell, let’s go back to The Sims: it really
only sold as well as it did because of expan-
sion packs. More and more of them came out,
released at regular six-month intervals, and
every once in a while Electronic Arts pumped out
a new deluxe pack, bundling the core game with
specific expansions. The Sims Deluxe Edition
included the first one. The Sims Double Deluxe
Edition included the first two. The Sims Mega
Deluxe Edition included the first three.
I mean, I like Thriller - I actually like it a
lot, no kidding - but the reason every person
in America owns at least two copies of that
record has less to do with Michael Jackson’s raw
talent as a pop musician than it does with Epic
Records’s releasing seven of the album’s nine
tracks as singles.
The point is, Starcraft did well because it
was doing something, all on its own, which com-
pelled people to buy it and compelled developers
to emulate it. It was special.
* * *
My introduction to Starcraft came in 1998,
when I was in fifth grade and talking to a friend
of mine over the lunch table. His name was
Daniel, and he was a heavy-set guy who listened
to Metallica. I had once lent him my copy of
Riven, and he’d returned it the very next day,
telling me it had put him to sleep. He told me I
needed to get into “some better games,” so he
lent me Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. I can’t tell
you what that was like because the disc was so
heavily scratched that the installation process
always hung at ninety-three percent completion.
All of this kind of led me to question Daniel’s
taste, and actually Daniel in general, a little bit
On this day, he was messily drinking choco-
late milk and telling me about this new game he
had gotten.
“It’s called Starcraft,” he told me. “And
there are these units in there, called ‘Vultures.’
And when you click on them a lot, they say, ‘I
don’t have time to fuck around.’” At this point, a
bunch of kids gasped and turned around.
“Is that not sweet?” he asked me. “They
say the word ‘fuck!’”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said.
A Calculated Assault on Starcraft and All it Stands For: Why I am Not a Gamer 35