The apex of RTS games -- what a great gaming era RIP. Since then graphics are way better but business models have just deteriorated and mass appeal has driven games.
I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.
Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
Brood War's longevity is thanks to the map maker, which has allowed the game to be balanced around maps. The size of your spawn location, the ease with which you can expand, and the paths to different bases drastically impact what kinds of strategies are viable. If there's a high ground location, it becomes much harder to break that position as the attacker. The amount of resources per base (mineral patch count, mineral patch size, 1 gas spawn, 2 gas spawn, mineral only) all impact which strategies are viable.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.
It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one, five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games because everything is so different. BW really is lightning in a bottle.
Brood War has aged like fine-wine. As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the key to Brood War's longevity comes from the map maker. Every detail is carefully considered so that none of the races can get away with a crazy advantage. It's really a special game, and every new season of ASL still feels magical.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and was going strong for a good decade or so, before being ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and, primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).
There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that existed in america with quake and friends, and the constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea. Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the culture works.
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I agree. I think people underestimate the size of the Korean Brood War scene, even relatively early on. In my country, I had seen some huge LAN parties with associated competitions, but then I got introduced to Korean Brood War competitions; they were filling stadiums with audiences and had pyrotechnics and professional TV productions and everything. It was insane.
I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.
And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
At the time those cinematics were top tier. Blizzard continued to have some of the best cinematics until Warcraft 3, after that I believe they and many other game developers switched to in-engine cutscenes because the engine visuals were good enough. That said, Blizzard does still make prerendered cutscenes for Diablo 4 and WoW, but they're just... not as impressive anymore as they used to be back then. And a big part of that is that they're not that much different from in-engine. There's some games (FFVII Remake/Rebirth) that have pre-rendered cutscenes that are visually indistinguishable from in-engine cutscenes, but they pre-rendered them because of e.g. wider / zoomed out camera angles or lots of effects.
Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic completely abandoned the formula and made the next game something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly it stood up to its predecessor.
Dawn of War 3 made DoW 2 look like Game of the Decade by comparison. I hear they're making a DoW 4, and they're not even mentioning 3 when talking about the history.
I consider WCIII TFT the apex but that is because i really like the hero mechanic and it spawned so many amazing custom games, including the moba genre. I know AoS was first but dota really made it.
Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command & Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.
I started playing at WCIII TFT too. it is personal for me too. so many good memories.
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.
The smaller armies, heroes, economy management, and increased micro-control that came from these things really push w3 to the top of the pile for me as well.
I feel like wc3 is undersung. To me it achieved the perfect balance of allowing potentially mechanically worse players to win with brilliant tactics or strategy. It put the emphasis on strategy in rts more then anything else.
As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
I like that even when a strong meta develops people can potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
The game's campaign being what it was made it so people never warmed up to it, the big hero-focused storylines and then mishandling of said characters (Kerrigan's abortive humanization and then rushed redemption, the Protoss being framed in entirely the wrong tone, the half baked epilogue) just made it so that the campaign didn't stick as Brod War's did, even if the gameplay was superior.
Yet two of the most played games out there in 2025 are RTSes, Dota and League. The genre just progressed forward.
WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
Dota and League are not RTS games. They are Moba. These are completely different genres. Dota happened to utilise Warcraft engine and assets back in the days, but that doesn't make it RTS.
Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
