
StarCraft is now free, nearly 20 years after its release - doener
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/starcraft-is-now-free-nearly-20-years-after-its-release/
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taspeotis
Previous discussion [1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14144193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14144193)

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delegate
This game is and always will be an integral part of me.

The number of hours I've spent fighting the Zerg, the screams and shouts of my
friends from the other room and the subsequent conversations after the game
ended...

"If I'd brought some lurkers over there... " or "There was no way your hydras
could break through my siege tanks".

I still play it today from time to time - against the brilliant AI - which is
still very very good and can kick your ass. Unless you have Battlecruisers.
Nothing gives you as much confidence as 24 Level 3 Battlecruisers going out
for a walk on the map :).

Somehow this game reminds me of those years - when I was younger and free..
Friends, girlfriends, LAN parties... Starcraft was part of our subculture back
then.

Starcraft is a masterpiece and will remain so for many years to come.

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hd4
It would have been nice if they had done a 'id software' and released the
source, and thereby possibly encourage more people to take an interest in game
development.

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rplnt
It would be nice if everyone did this, with any independent software that is
no longer sold/supported. Independent as in major parts of it are not used in
newer products.

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whatok
I remember originally attempting to pirate Starcraft from an FTP I had access
to from some IRC channel I used to frequent. Even with all the music stripped
from the game, my 28.8kbps modem was unable to download it overnight and for
whatever reason that FTP did not allow resumption of transfers. I had to get
my friend with a 56kbps modem to download it and then transfer it zipped to a
zip disk. My friends who were in college at the time had access to the
computer lab so we would pass the zip disk around to install it one at a time
and at the end of the night we would uninstall it to cover our tracks. Good
times.

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atesti
The download is only 3Mb. Is there an offline installer?

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bichiliad
Yes - I believe the download is just a loader.

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lawless123
Will online play be possible between people using this and their remastered
version i wonder?

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bsharitt
I think it will be and that's one of the reasons behind the patch. If I'm not
mistaken, I think the remastered version is mostly new art work on top of this
patch.

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H4CK3RM4N
It's also on macOS now.

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twblalock
It ran on Mac OS in the late 1990s, shortly after it was released for Windows.

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soneil
What's changed here (for osx atleast) is that there's an Intel build. There
was starcraft for MacOS (or 'classic'), and then a carbonized starcraft for
OSX-ppc. But ppc support ended in 10.6, and this is the first time there's
been a mac-intel build.

