StarCraft II

• 1. Introduction

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  StarCraft II arrived on the 27th of July 2010 as one of the most anticipated sequels in gaming history. Blizzard Entertainment had spent years quietly building under the codename Medusa, and when the announcement finally came at the Worldwide Invitational in Seoul on the 19th of May 2007, the audience watched a cinematic trailer and a live gameplay demonstration unfold in front of them. What followed was a record-shattering release, a global esports phenomenon, and an unexpected proving ground for machine intelligence. How does a video game become the benchmark that artificial intelligence uses to measure its own progress? And how did three alien races battling for galactic dominance shape the way the world thinks about competitive gaming?

• 2. Three Races, Three Stories

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  Wings of Liberty opens four years after the conclusion of StarCraft: Brood War, placing the player inside Jim Raynor's rebel faction as it fights the Terran Dominion regime ruled by Emperor Arcturus Mengsk. The Zerg haunt the conflict throughout, until Raynor recovers their incapacitated queen, Sarah Kerrigan, from the Zerg home world.

  Heart of the Swarm, released on the 12th of March 2013, shifts the lens entirely to Kerrigan. The Dominion attacks both Raynor and Kerrigan, and her campaign against Mengsk becomes the spine of the expansion. The story also introduces a new threat: Protoss-Zerg hybrids, creatures that will loom over the entire final chapter.

  Legacy of the Void, released on the 10th of November 2015, hands the narrative to the Protoss. Zeratul and Artanis lead their people in an effort to reclaim their homeworld while confronting Amon, the architect behind the hybrids and the greatest threat the universe has faced. The game is structured as a 3-mission prologue, 19 main campaign missions, and a 3-mission epilogue in which all three factions finally unite inside a place called the Void. A final story chapter, Nova Covert Ops, arrived in 2016. It follows the ghost operative Nova as she uncovers a conspiracy against the reformed Terran Dominion after Amon's defeat.

• 3. Sound of a Galaxy at War

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  Russell Brower, Blizzard's Director of Audio, drew a deliberate line between two kinds of music in StarCraft II. The tracks heard during live gameplay are quiet and unobtrusive, designed to keep the player focused. Only the cinematic interludes are allowed to become more emotionally distinctive.

  Brower's team recorded the orchestral score for Wings of Liberty with 78 musicians from the San Francisco Symphony and Opera. The sessions took place at the Skywalker stage at Lucasfilm Ranch in Marin County, California, under the name Skywalker Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eímear Noone. A 32-voice choir was recorded separately in Seattle, Washington. Both sets of recordings were mixed by John Kurlander, who had previously worked on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Beatles' Abbey Road.

  The Terran sections of Wings of Liberty called for a different mood. Country and blues pieces were recorded at Dreamland studio in Woodstock, New York, performed by members of Peter Gabriel's band, including bassist Tony Levin and drummer Jerry Marotta. Other pieces featured Laurence Juber, formerly of Wings, and Tommy Morgan. The soundtrack also incorporates Eternal Father, Strong to Save, a hymn composed by John Bacchus Dykes and William Whiting in 1860.

  The full original material for Wings of Liberty spans approximately four hours of music. Brower borrowed the technique of associating musical themes with specific characters from composers such as John Williams and Richard Wagner. Heart of the Swarm continued the approach, again recorded in Marin County with 80 performers from the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra, again mixed by Kurlander and conducted by Noone.

• 4. Records and Reception

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  Wings of Liberty sold 1.8 million copies within its first 48 hours on sale, breaking the record for the best-selling strategy game in the history of the industry at that point. Aggregate review scores placed it at 93% on GameRankings, and GameSpot nominated it as the Best PC Game of 2010. By the end of 2012, sales had passed 6 million copies.

  Heart of the Swarm moved 1.1 million copies within two days of its release on the 12th of March 2013, making it the best-selling PC game of that quarter. Its GameRankings aggregate settled at 86%. Legacy of the Void crossed 1 million copies worldwide on its first day, earning an 88% aggregate score.

  Across the full StarCraft and StarCraft II series, combined sales exceeded 17.6 million copies by the end of 2015. By the end of 2017, Blizzard counted the StarCraft franchise among the handful of its brands with lifetime revenue exceeding one billion dollars. In 2017, Blizzard made multiplayer, co-op, and the first single-player campaign free to play, a shift that preceded a resurgence of competitive interest after the game's esports scene had experienced a period of decline.

• 5. The Esports Arena

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  South Korea was the center of gravity for StarCraft II competition from the beginning, carrying over the culture that had built around the original StarCraft: Brood War. The game earned a reputation during its early years as the largest esport in the world, and it was widely credited with introducing organized competitive gaming to audiences outside Korea.

  Blizzard launched the StarCraft II World Championship Series in 2012 as the primary sanctioned tournament circuit. From 2013 onward, Korean leagues such as the Global StarCraft II League and non-Korean events including Intel Extreme Masters and DreamHack fed into the WCS system, awarding points and qualification spots for the Global Finals held annually at BlizzCon. In 2020, Blizzard entered a three-year partnership with ESL and DreamHack to restructure the WCS format.

  The multiplayer ladder that feeds this competition is organized by geographic region and sorted into seven tiers: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master, and grandmaster. The 1v1 format is the most recognized mode and the direct foundation of professional play. The game also supports 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 team formats, as well as a variant called Archon mode, where two human players share control of a single side in a nominally 1v1 match.

• 6. Machine Against Master

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  In November 2016, Alphabet's DeepMind branch announced a collaboration with Blizzard to turn StarCraft II into a testing platform for the wider artificial intelligence research community. The game's complexity made it a demanding environment: players must manage economies, coordinate units, predict opponent behavior, and react at speed across a partially hidden map.

  DeepMind built a bot called AlphaStar and, in December 2018, AlphaStar defeated professional StarCraft II players for the first time. Its first recorded victory came against a player named MaNA, with a final score of 5-0. The circumstances of that match were disputed by some observers, who argued the conditions gave AlphaStar unfair advantages. A revised version with stricter constraints earned Grandmaster status, the highest tier of the competitive ladder, in August 2019. The research community described that achievement as a landmark for the field of reinforcement learning. StarCraft II served two distinct purposes in this work: as a proof of concept that modern algorithms could reach the level of human professionals, and as a benchmark for measuring improvements in reinforcement learning methods intended for environments beyond the game itself.