“Dor effectively highlights StarCraft’s complex and longstanding competitive gameplay landscape, emphasizing timing, anticipation, habits, power, and control within its multifaceted play cultures. Each chapter gleams with the essential minerals of early e-sports, offering invaluable insights and historical gems about game design and the vibrant game cultures that accompanied StarCraft’s ascent as a premier online multiplayer strategy game.”
—Emma Witkowski, RMIT University
— Emma Witkowski
“Simon Dor’s love for the game comes through every page of StarCraft: Legacy of the Real-Time Strategy. Dor takes special care to push back on a singular historical account of this landmark game, and show the ways StarCraft has played an important role through multiple cultural touchpoints and references, including his own. The book is a treat to read, weaving together the rich histories surrounding StarCraft and, very importantly, what the game’s legacy has come to mean worldwide. This work is sure to both edify and delight those who study games and longtime StarCraft enthusiasts alike.”
—Florence M. Chee, Loyola University Chicago, author of Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play— Florence M. Chee
"Blizzard’s Starcraft has, since its launch in 1998, been bedeviled by a split assessment as both the ultimate game in the real-time strategy genre and as a derivative of earlier games. Simon Dor embraces this division by characterizing Starcraft’s significance as transitional on many levels. We learn from his deep analysis of the move from solo to multiplayer gaming, the origins of e-sports, the rise of South Korea as a competitive gaming powerhouse, and players as a creative force in a complex, emerging gaming ecosystem. This list of topics demonstrates that this now 25-year-old game is still very relevant for game studies."
-Henry Lowood, Stanford University Libraries— Henry Lowood
"This book is poised to make a significant contribution to the history of games, and the study of the social and cultural dimensions of games and gaming. The distinction of decoding and foreseeing playstyles is valuable for its recognition of how play defines games, both in terms of circulating and establishing a particular set of social uses and as it impacts the continued development of a game and franchise."
—Gerald Voorhees, University of Waterloo
— Gerald Voorhees