Blizzard Entertainment today made wildly popular real-time strategy game StarCraft a free download for Mac and PC, nearly two decades after its original release.
The RTS hit was universally acclaimed when it launched in 1998, and went on to become an e-sport phenomenon in South Korea, where big-prize tournaments and TV channels drew legions of fans to the game.
The free download is the game's first in eight years and includes the Brood War expansion pack. The patch 1.18 download also sports a handful of new features, including windowed mode, a better online game search engine, and improved response times during multiplayer battles.
Blizzard's decision to make the title freely available comes ahead of this summer's Remastered edition of StarCraft, which promises enhanced 4K graphics, better audio, high-quality cinematics, and a redesigned matchmaking system.
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They did a phenomenal job - completely blew me away. ~60 people worked on it for almost 10 years (the project started in the WarCraft 3 engine - they shifted it over to StarCraft 2 when that was released). I wrote the Mac installer for it... although I haven't maintained it at all. They have some more involved steps you can manually follow for the Mac, or I can link to the installer I wrote if you want.