The Story of Starcraft Part 2: Gaining the Plot

Before we go into the plot of Starcraft and RTS games, there’s an important question to answer first:

Who cares?

Not every game needs a story or named characters. As I alluded to last time, the RTS genre doesn’t lend itself as naturally to plots as roleplaying games and first-person shooters do.

Why try to force an arc and character development where they don’t belong?

I have a few reasons for wanting to do this.

First, I think it’s an interesting artistic challenge. It’s easy to tell a story with a novel, it’s harder with puppets and it’s harder still with crudely drawn stick figures. It’s not impossible, though. It makes for a good test of your storytelling abilities.

Can you move people to tears with stop-motion Lego? If so, congratulations, you’re a story teller.

Second, stories elevate the art of games. When people say they’re brain-rotting wastes of time, money and effort, you can’t point to Tetris and say they’re wrong*. Show them a story that can only be told by interacting with it in a virtual world - now you have a chance.

* If you somehow get them to play Tetris, that might persuade them. But watching someone line up bricks is hardly a solid counter to their claim.

Third, an RTS can tell its story on so many different levels. When I sat down to map out this series, I blew my own mind with what I was seeing.

Fourth… I like the worlds of Warcraft and Starcraft. They’re great backdrops to fun games that tell a cool story. Call it personal taste but I wanted to explore this further.

Fifth, great stories told well, paired with a fun game, make not only classic games but financially successful ones. Yeah, there are exceptions. Tetris has outsold most studios and it doesn’t have a plot. It’s not an absolute rule.

If you’ve read Shamus Young’s writing, you know he has already made this point. His series on Rage 2 argued that the terrible story probably hamstrung sales. Meanwhile, his analysis of Mass Effect… well, if you haven’t read that already, do yourself a favour.

The point is that a great plot can make a good game better. It can elevate something from an activity to an experience.

I barely remember playing Command & Conquer, despite playing it a lot. Even so, I remember some of those story beats so vividly. Had it been a game where futuristic tanks blow up other futuristic tanks for the lols, I wouldn’t remember it at all.

As for a game like Starcraft? That’ll be with me for life.

When games had manuals, which had novellas

When I bought Starcraft, it was in the days when Steam didn’t exist, and games came on CDs in boxes. These boxes often had pretty pictures on them to (often successfully) convince me to part with my money.

The boxes also contained manuals.

These manuals were glorious. There were like the game wikis of today, only without the banner ads, hyperlinking, interactivity or detailed statistical analyses.

Some companies, like Blizzard, shipped with thick manuals.

Starcraft’s - and Warcraft 3’s, a few years later - came with a lot of lore. A lot of lore. Reading it was entirely optional. It told the backstory to the world, something that would emerge through gameplay.

I couldn’t have put it down if I tried.

It told the history of the Starcraft universe as a textbook would. It was a factual account - few anecdotes or emotions, just a description of what happened and when. I found it utterly addictive.

I mean, it didn’t hurt that the future history was fascinating, but the almost journalistic style of it sucked me along.

The manual told more than just the history. It talked about the units and buildings, both from a mechanical angle (stats, costs, effects) and a narrative one (the history, the purpose, the role in society).

This was a full, living world, where everything had emerged for a reason.

It was Domino worldbuilding - maybe simpler than Mass Effect would eventually do, but still far above what a mere RTS should aspire to.

The bare minimum you need to know about Starcraft’s lore

If you read the manual cover-to-cover, it starts before the birth of our universe.

Starcraft* focuses on three factions, each represented by a race. You’ll learn all about the Zerg and the Protoss in the manual, but all you need to know before you begin is about the Terrans - humanity’s spacefaring descendants.

* All the games in the series

The story, briefly, goes like this:

Future generations of Earth suffer from the obvious problems*. At the same time, people begin experimenting with cybernetic implants and genetic manipulation. Amidst all the chaos, a single world government emerges - the tyrannical United Powers League (UPL).

* War, overpopulation, environmental collapse, technology run amok…

The UPL decides overpopulation and all this tinkering with what-it-means-to-be-human are two problems with a common solution: get rid of genetically/technologically augmented people.

Rather than killing all of them, they bundle a few tens of thousands of them into experimental arkships and blast them into the void. The ships glitch, arrive at somewhere unintended, then the survivors have to keep on surviving in a distant corner of the galaxy.

These Terrans* make for a delightfully eclectic bunch. Some have implanted microchips or even entire artificial body parts. Others are so genetically altered that they’ve developed psionic powers.

* I mean, they’re humans. The game calls them Terrans, though. Except when it calls them humans. It doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.

They have advanced technology by our standards, yet they have to rebuild civilisation in remote, hostile solar systems. The best technology is whatever they can salvage off their arkships as they struggled to bootstrap their industry.

Their technology is also primitive - or at least familiar - by our standards. They use guns with bullets (what, no lasers?) and juke boxes and big generators with no surge protectors.

It’s not an original idea, even in 1998, but it’s a fun one. It’s the Wild West in Space, with a dash of survival management thrown in. Terran technology is advanced - it’s also dirty, noisy and cobbled together.

People figure out how to get by, then to thrive. Life is hard and dangerous. Government emerges. Things seem to be going well, when they remember their ancestors were frozen and then fired into space with no real plan.

Society becomes stable enough to fight wars without everyone dying, so they do. Power centralises across these far-flung solar systems.

Then things get bad.

The Terrans make contact with aliens called the Zerg. The Zerg don’t seem to have technology, not even spaceships - they cross space in large blimp-like animals. They might not even be intelligent, but they are savage and cunning. A variety of monstrous creatures swarm over some outlying Terran worlds, ripping people apart.

Then Terrans make contact with another race - the Protoss. Or, rather, a Protoss fleet shows up, incinerates a few Terran planets from orbit, then leaves.

It’s looking like a rough time to be Terran.

All that happens before you begin the first tutorial. That’s the background behind the first campaign of Starcraft - the Terran campaign.

If you’ve read the manual, you know a lot about the Zerg and the Protoss. You know where they come from and why they’re here. If not, they’re simply a pair of mysterious and dangerous threats.

But these are all words, right? What if you’re not a nerd who reads the manual? What if you don’t even watch the cut scenes? How will you know any of this if you just, you know, play the game?

We’ll talk about that next week.