StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

For anyone who's wondering:<p>Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7.<p>H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank, between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used, but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle. I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.

I've worked at two game studios over the years and came away with one takeaway: there won't be a third unless it's my own. There are few more dysfunctional engineering environments on the planet, leading to continual burnout.<p>There is a long line of coders who grew up playing games that want to do that into adulthood, leading to a perverse supply/demand ratio that allows studios to treat their employees like crap under the auspices of "that's how the industry works". I wouldn't buy into it.

<i>"As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the Dominion Storm demo was a fake."</i><p>How many times in the history of computing has a team seen a faked demo, believed it, and cloned it, unwittingly becoming the first ones to do it for real? The fact that there are several such stories is really quite amazing.

Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready, not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been monumentally successful.<p>It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.

The link to the story of ION Storm and the game Daikatana he mentions was a really interesting read as well. Talk about a complete mess of a company. <a href="http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather...</a>

Ah, the press event, the time-suck that had to be tolerated in every realm of human undertaking: video games, sports, business, politics, etc<p>&#62; <i>As every game developer knows, release dates are slippery, but the dates of trade shows are set in stone. If a game studio has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare booth space, purchase long-lead print advertising and arrange press appointments, the development team is going to have to demo something or heads will roll.</i><p>It's crazy to think about how much money and resources were wasted, not to mention destructive pressure created, by these contrived schedules of publicity dates. Getting publicity today is not as simple as making a webpage and twitter account, but at least it's not how it was in the OP's day

Speaking of change of plans. Does anybody remember blizzard warcraft 3 pre-release version? See screenshots [1][2]<p>That was entirely different gameplay, with more RPG and less strategy. I remember how I read about it in some magazine and was greatly excited. When it came out, I liked it even more than I expected, that was one kick-ass game.<p>And then I found World Editor. Needless to say, I was stunned, I spent all my free time playing with JASS (wc3 scripting language), and that was very probably a deciding factor in me becoming a programmer. Hell, even now, I think I could make a decent map if paired with a good landscape designer/storymaker. I haven't finished many maps and projects in my time but the process of creation/programming was so incredibly enjoyable, that end result didn't even matter.<p>I wonder if there are any other world editors on HN.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=39&#38;pos=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/003.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/...</a> also click arrows on the page, there is more.

IGN review of the game that made Starcraft what is today.<p><a href="http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-gift-3" rel="nofollow">http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-g...</a>

Patrick Wyatt's CV at the end of the post is impressive and its story well worth the read !

Pretty awesome story!