At the time it was the big figure-skating to-do with Tonya Harding and — StarCraft

"The races of Starcraft are now renowned for their balance and distinctive features but all started as being influenced by other science fiction properties and tropes. The Terrans were conceived of as “outlaw cowboys,” who would have a clunky, heavy feel to them, Art Director Sam Didier explains. “We wanted our human race, the Terrans, to be a bit more of scoundrels, rather than the uptight and polished humans of most science fiction stories.” The Protoss, in contrast, were meant to embody the trope of the little “gray aliens” you see in science-fiction films. They were designed to be the “most intelligent, advanced race in the game, but also the highest evolved warriors,” Didier explains. These “little gray aliens” ended up being seven feet tall and resembling “space samurai” where everything— their buildings, units, and armor— all were “ aesthetically pleasing to the eye.” The Zerg, finally, were always meant to be these frighteningly adaptive aliens that were heavily influenced by Aliens and Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. “They devoured and consumed and then took what was special about you and made it a part of their race. Oh, and they had teeth…lots of teeth,” Didier says."

"I grew up reading a lot of Thor — which has a Shakespearean component to the language — back from those Stan Lee days, or the Walt Simonson days, my favorite. I gave the Zerg campaign a Shakespeare meets Old Testament kind of vibe. But I needed that that human-like character down the line, and it was toward the end of the Terran campaign like, whoa, what if she becomes — again, we stumbled on those connector points."

"StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners; they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q. “Imagine playing a concerto on a piano, and if you miss one note the entire orchestra stops playing and you’re kicked off and you lose your job,” Sean Plott, one of the official commentators on the Scarlett-Bomber match, told me recently. “That’s what this is like.” The piano reference was not arbitrary; top-level StarCraft requires as many as three hundred actions per minute, or A.P.M.; an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects."

"The rest of the team was like, ‘I dunno man, space vampires are pretty wack. We want to do something a little broader."

"At its peak, in Korea, where w:Esports grew and led the world, there were three cable channels broadcasting StarCraft 24/7. That was both awesome and something that we hadn’t necessarily predicted, forecast."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"