Starcraft had a long and exciting history of being developed. It has been delayed many times and could have came out in 1996. What took StarCraft so long to develop into a final product? Here's the Early Alpha story:

As Blizzard finished WarCraft II, it became a remarkable success. Afterwards Blizzard has dedicated itself to be a good company. They have rushed to make StarCraft their new game. It would be basically an improved WarCraft II. But it would have 3 races and it would be totally different, as opposing to WarCraft II with its mirror images. But as they almost finished their StarCraft game, they showed it on an E3 show. During that it was criticized so much, it appeared to look too much like WarCraft II. From then, they totally changed the game engine. We come to that section later. First there are some screenshots of the first version of StarCraft shown to the public: The Early Alpha version.

The Zerg which were playable in it were called the Nightmarish Invaders. Later the Nightmarish Invaders were renamed to Zurg and more later to the for us very familiar Zerg (to avoid legal action since Zurg sounds like a guy from Toy Story).

And below there are screenshots of the Zerg buildings in the Early Alpha phase. I dont have much information about the other two races in the Alpha phase, but Zerg was kinda popular back then. Anyway, now you know why people said WarCraft goes "purple" instead of calling it StarCraft.

Somewhere in the year 1997, Blizzard upgraded the engine again and made some more units. The buildings look a bit cartoony, but are on the other handvery beautiful again. Most of the units look very much to the ones nowadays. Only the buildings differ very much. In the future they will change even more and names are really changing from one building to another building. But more about that in the Beta section.

And this is finally the version which one looked the most to our current StarCraft version. It is in the end of 1997 and the very beginning of 1998. The engine was again a bit upgraded and again some more units were added. As I said before, some name-swopping occured, some balance fixes were made, but they couldn't alter it too much, because they had to finish it before a settled date. I am not gonna tell you what is very cool about each picture, find out for yourself! You will see many weird buildings and units. Try to find out what they look like nowadays.

Of course there was also a beta phase of Brood War. It was not as turbulent as the history of StarCraft, but Brood War had to be tested too. There are not many screenshots with interesting information, but these should give you a little idea what Brood War beta was. And I personally like the first screenshot. Look, 3 types of Archons! I think it's a merge between a Dark and a High Templar.

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