The StarCraft franchise has officially been added to PC Game Pass.
The official StarCraft Twitter account made the announcement a few hours ago:
“READY TO RAISE SOME HELL? StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft II: Campaign Collection are now live on @XboxGamePassPC!”
Xbox Wire also shared a blog post introducing the games to younger players, acknowledging the odd situation this good news arrives in.
The original StarCraft was released on Windows, years before Steam was a thing, all the way back in March 31, 1998. This was the real-time strategy game that raised the bar for the genre, in terms of presentation, gameplay innovations, and narrative.
Before fully rendered 3D graphics were playable on all PCs, Blizzard cannily chose to build pre-rendered sprites with 3D Studio Max (now known as Autodesk), and shifted to an isometric view.
While Xbox’s communication may downplay the game in favor of the sequel, this is the title that created a revolution., sparking a craze in Korea that would go on to form one of the oldest and most successful esports communities that video games has ever seen. Blizzard would release a remaster of the original in 2017.
For fans who do remember, StarCraft II always lived under the shadow of the original, even though Blizzard pushed the envelope on all fronts. Like the Final Fantasy VII remake today, Blizzard released StarCraft II as a trilogy of games throughout 2010 to 2016, with one DLC pack to boot. But they actually announced this sequel all the way back in 2003. Even at their peak, Blizzard wasn’t quite able to live up to the legacy that they built with the first game.
But even that is all ancient history in 2024. Today, the experiment Blizzard tried bringing StarCraft to the Nintendo 64 in 2000 has been fully realized today, with proper conversions of PC RTS games to console like Company of Heroes, Age of Empires, and Tropico.
For now, however, these games from the 2000s and 2010s are only in PC Game Pass. It isn’t quite a revival of the StarCraft franchise yet, but this is one of the first steps in Activision Blizzard games being integrated into Xbox’s services.
As we already mentioned Microsoft’s Age of Empires/Age of Mythology franchise, which they have successfully brought over to console, Microsoft may be looking to coordinate World’s Edge and Blizzard to get the StarCraft games properly adapted to consoles as well. And as for new StarCraft games? That may be determined by how much interest this release gets.
But before anyone else, Game Pass subscribers who use the service on PC get to eat good today. Microsoft has so many games on the way that they’re still pacing their schedule, but we can take this as confirmation that the drip feed of Activision Blizzard games to Game Pass is definitely on the way.
