Real-time strategy games aren't awfully common these days, but back when Blizzard was working on the original StarCraft, the RTS market was booming. Creating a game that stood out among the many RTS titles released in a given year was a challenge, and to face it, Blizzard’s team of developers established a fiercely competitive internal culture. One developer dubbed it "the piranha effect."
Author David L Craddock is wrapping up his second book on Blizzard, titled Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, and he's given us a chance to read a pre-publication version of Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear, which delves into the intense development of StarCraft.
Blizzard wound up creating World of Warcraft, which is still one of the .
The piranha effect referred to a sink or swim mentality in Blizzard’s programming department, where senior engineers and programmers were intimidating presences for new hires.
"It basically was, if you did anything wrong you can expect the programming team to jump all over it," recounted Gage Galinger, a software engineer who worked on StarCraft.
Craddock's interviewees describe an atmosphere at Blizzard where there was no 'onboarding' process for new hires, they were simply expected to perform from day one. It was a deliberate pressure, since Blizzard was expected to deliver up another hit with StarCraft. Any mistakes were immediately pointed out by senior staff.
"You were so careful with the code. The code was sacred," said Galinger. "If you're going to check something into that code base, it better be fucking spotless."

StarCraft is arguably a game about being in as many places at once as possible, but as the game came together it wasn’t at all clear how that was going to happen. Two programmers had opposite ideas of how unit A.I. should behave when the player wasn’t giving orders, and they fought back and forth in the game’s code, according to David L Craddock’s upcoming history of Blizzard, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II.
Pat Wyatt, a programmer and Blizzard’s vice president of research and development, recalled his tug-of-war with an unnamed team member over A.I. While Wyatt wanted units to behave somewhat autonomously, his interlocutor thought units should only react to player commands.
The crunch was brutal, but it led to a classic. StarCraft II is on our list of the .
"I wanted units to be smarter like they were in WarCraft, and he wanted them to be dumber because he wanted the player to be making the decisions, which provided more tactical advantage to players who were better at manipulating units," Wyatt recalls in Chapter 7 of Craddock’s book.
The two programmers would independently implement their changes, each going in and rewriting the StarCraft code to undo their competitor’s work. Neither was willing to back down, and the constant writing and rewriting of StarCraft’s A.I. system meant more work for both parties.

Uniqlo is no stranger to licencing designs from notable video game companies. You may remember, just under a year ago, the company launched its - well, now it's Blizzard's turn for the Uniqlo treatment.
The official Blizzard x Uniqlo collection includes a range of T-shirts featuring designs based on World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo, Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm and are available in-store and online .
As this is Uniqlo we're talking about - a company that prides itself on offering quality clothing at abnormally cheap prices - each of these shirts will only cost you £12.90 (shipping is £3.95, for what it's worth). As with most official Uniqlo crossover collections, the stock is limited and only available for a certain time, so if you happen to be a particularly Blizzard-tinged fanatic, you may want to get one of these sooner rather than later.

There are plenty of cancelled titles in Blizzard’s history, but Project Nomad is one we don’t often hear about. The squad-based sci-fi game was canned and the team behind it moved on to World of Warcraft - but it turns out WoW wasn’t the only game to swallow up Nomad’s developers.
As StarCraft development reached its most intense points, with developers lengthening their days and working into the weekends, the team started picking people off from other projects to assist in development. Former programmer Rob Hueber, for example, was hired to work on ‘Team 2,’ the group behind Nomad - until he was pulled to the StarCraft team.
Don't focus on what might have been - enjoy what was with the .
“As tends to happen at Blizzard,” Hueber says, “whatever project gets ahead starts to pull people from the other team, and other teams die from attrition and things like that. That's not a bad way to do things. It definitely hurts the project that gets resources stolen away from it, but it's for a good cause, obviously.”
That comes via an excerpt from David L Craddock’s upcoming Blizzard history, , which is currently seeking funds on . Craddock helped bring Project Nomad to light years ago, telling about internal struggles as the Blizzard team attempted to figure out exactly where to go with the game.
Several members of the team wanted to do something else entirely, so Kevin Beardslee and Bill Petras pitched a more accessible version of EverQuest. Nomad was scrapped and development on World of Warcraft began in a matter of days.

Crunch in game dev has been a hot topic in the past year, but it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. In Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, author David L Craddock details the development of the original StarCraft, including the long hours and strained relationships it took to get there.
Jeff Strain, the person behind the free StarEdit tool players could use to create and share their own custom maps, was behind schedule on his project leading up to launch. That led him to carry his laptop and devote spare moments to coding - and as Craddock writes, that was “a decision that didn't go over well with his wife.”
Keep yourself sharp with the .
“I was writing code while she was in labour,” Strain says. “Here it is, twenty years later, and I'm still paying for that. That's her trump card, right? Maybe in another ten years I'll have made it up to her.”
Even so, StarCraft veterans suggest those long hours were self-imposed. “We wanted to perfect our cinematics,” artist Harley Huggins says. “That's why we ended up separating stuff into layers later on. You'd render the whole [cinematic] and go, ‘There's something that's flashing’ or ‘Maybe you could go in and change the frames.’ Instead of just saying it was good enough, we'd go in and redo the whole thing. Sometimes that meant not going home. Everybody just did it because they wanted to do it.”
Rob Huebner speaks similarly, comparing the experience to his time at LucasArts on Jedi Knight. “It was a self-demand more than an external demand. Maybe at a higher level it was from management and they stealthily made it seem like it came from grassroots, but if so, they succeeded at that. There were still long hours, but to me, a sweatshop is like a producer coming in and mandating these hours, or you hear horror stories about L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi. That definitely wasn't at all like what Blizzard was.”

David L Craddock has almost completed the second part of his trilogy documentaing the formation of Blizzard Entertainment and the studio's biggest games. Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II covers the creation of StarCraft and Diablo II, detailing the crunch and challenge of starting a new series in a saturated genre, and building a sequel worthy of the original game's fame.
Craddock has allowed us to publish a chapter of his book here on PCGamesN. Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear focusses on the 14 months of crunch the StarCraft team put themselves through in creating their classic RTS game. Members of the StarCraft team tell him how the work brought them closer together, while putting significant strain on their health and their relationships outside of work.
StarCraft isn't on our list of the , but its sequel certainly is.
Craddock has almost completed the book and is funding the final stages through a Kickstarter campaign. To read more about Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II and support the project head over .
This chapter was prepared for us to publish but may change between now and publication. Also, we've emphasised the next with pull quotes and added in imagery.

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