Queue like your life depends on it: An account of the Starcraft 2 midnight launch.
It's a little hard to stand in line for a prolonged period without starting to feeling decidedly clammy. Somehow, however, the crowds waiting in line for Starcraft 2, one of the most eagerly anticipated gaming titles of the past decade, seemed immune. Well... to be fair, several members of the crowd outisde the store were complaining loudly, but the overall demeanour outside EB games on Melbourne’s Swanston Street was one of simmering giddiness, coupled with a humming undercurrent of cynicism. Imagine a couple of hundred nerds, flecked with rain, crowding a footpath and waiting to be proven wrong about their staggeringly high expectations. Got it? Good. You're coming close to approximating the experience.
If you've never encountered anything Starcraft related, odds are you're (a) not a nerd, or (b) not Korean. I’m not just trying to be obscure here, although I will confess to enjoying obscrutiry more than most people. OCELOT! AMPERSAND! Like so. No, I mention Korea because whilst Starcraft is a hallmark for gaming culture, in Korea Starcraft has effectively replaced Chess as the number one game played by snarky, OCD youths in televised matches taking place in massive, packed-out auditoriums. The OCD crack notwithstanding, Korea really has made Starcraft into something of a cultural lodestone; you could make a living as a professional player over there, though I imagine it’s a little hard to clean glitter and hooker sweat off power armor. Such are the heady perils of fame.
Blizzard entertainment, who created the much lauded (read: boneriffic) Warcraft franchise, came up with a real time strategy called Starcraft back in 1998, the very same year that noted cosmologists announced that the universe was expanding. Coincidence? Of course not. Don’t be a dick. The setting? A frightening, far-flung future, five hundred(ish) years from now. A dreggish splinter of humanity (the Terrans) have headed off into a distant corner of the galaxy, at the behest of a brutal regime back home, and become a power in their own right, complete with civil wars, political fear-mongering, and moral grey areas the size of the recent oil spill (which is technically black, or rainbowy, depending on the angle you look at it, but... fine, fine, it’s a stretch). They've been beset by a terrifying species of aliens called the Zerg, and there's also a benevolent but slightly "kill it with fire" oriented alien race with Elven traits lingering on the sidelines, the Protoss. These, then, are the players. The plot for the first Starcraft game was, for lack of a better word, operatic. It's an elegant narrative fusion of Starship Troopers, Warhammer 40 000, and the time-honored gentleman’s sport, Stabby Space-Death Magic McYahtzee*. And legions of fans have been obsessed with it (Starcraft) for over a decade.
So what form does this epic tale take? Well, the Starcraft games are what's known as RTS (real time strategy) games. You view the game world from a top-down perspective, and you have to build your armies from the ground-up. It's often incredibly stressful to multitask at the speeds required to prove victorious, but hell, Dance Dance Revolution is stressful and has made several computer game magnates (anonymous, I assume for fear of punching-based reprisals) furiously wealthy. But the genre, when executed with the requisite complexity and care, is exhilarating. This has proved doubly true with Starcraft, a game with a plot complex and epic enough to make the stress something you actually begin to crave; it immerses you in the game world deeper than is often medically advisable. For years, talk of Starcraft 2 has been swatted about the Internet like a giant, elusive ball of string by some cruel, smelly cat. Finally, however, I received the press release from Blizzard signifying a slew of midnight launches of the game around the world. And with that news, I sought out a clean pair of pants.
After talking with Blizzard management, I found out that the largest launch in Australia is being held in Brisbane, and will include actors in costume, developers doing Q&A sessions, swathes of prizes, some mild pyrotechnics and, of course, queues. Queues to rival the queueiest queues that ever were queued. Or something to that effect. However, sometimes the best launches are the ones adjacent to where you live. And besides, the best thing about midnight launches are the people, and you don't really get the enforced intimacy with five thousand strong crowds. You need a couple of hundred people spending hours exchanging their hopes for the game they're about to lay their sweaty hands on. You also want to hear people arguing, sometimes a little too animatedly, about the glorious, banal minutia of in-game lore. This, I'm proud to say, is something I excel at; I once (almost) became engaged in some rousing fisticuffs with a close friend regarding my prioritising a promising party below the prospect of fishing up a magical rat from a fictional sewer system. Impressed?
You don’t have to answer that right away.
The Swanson Street EB crew routinely hold midnight launches, but the last time I attended one at this venue was for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. As you can see from the pictures, the turn out was impressive; as with queues for tickets to gigs, people will brave often profoundly shitty weather to get what they want. The turnout was more modest this time around; I had an animated chat with Dan, an EB employee who, apparently rankled at not being eligible to enter the costume competition, had pilfered various costume components from attendees and as such, resembled some sort of demonic batlike Pokemon. He estimated that a couple of hundred people were in attendance, and went on to talk me through part of the appeal for fans to come to such a launch: the special edition. You see, Blizzard release regular versions of their games, but they also supply distributors with a limited supply of special editions. These seriously pimped out versions of the game tend to get booked up fast, but if you’re quick, you can land one at the last minute at the launch. It also helps if you show a little skin. I recommend anything around the boob area.
The costume competition had some spirited (if not confusing) entries, but as we approached the midnight mark, people started to get agitated. The manager attempted to calm people down by distributing prizes (which worked a treat; I may or may not have elbowed someone in the neck in a rush for a free poster), and at one point, he called out reluctant parents who’d been dragged to the event against their will. He then called out the equally reluctant girlfriends in attendance. It was at this point that I realised the girl to guy ratio was significantly lower here than at the Wrath of the Lich King launch. Sure, there were a handful scattered around, but apart from drawing broad and clumsy links between the elves vs. men in armoured suits dichotomy, I was somewhat at a loss as to why. I managed to track down a female fan, Mia, who grinned and told me that she was actually a World of Warcraft player by trade. She also revealed that she’d gotten into RTS games starting with Warcraft 3, a move made primarily to dive deeper into the lore and back-story of World of Warcraft (proving once and for all the World of Warcraft is a gateway drug). Mia does Game Design at RMIT in Melbourne, and seemed very eager to dive straight into the game; after a little probing, she revealed she’d be pulling an all-nighter. Props, Mia. Skipping a gaming class to game seems pretty much foolproof to me; like skipping Bushido classes because you had to duck out and fight some bastards with swords.
As midnight wound closer, the largest screen in the store began a countdown, and the crowds of baffled hipsters streaming out of HiFi bar began to waft by outside, their heckles going unheard under the exhausted but relieved roars of all in attendance. Perhaps my favourite moment of the night, though, was as the countdown finished and everyone began to rush forward. One of the people who’d emerged from the gig at Hi Fi was passing by, and had been asked about what was going on by one of his friends. To which I heard him respond, ‘a Zerg rush, I think’.
Well said, sir.
Starcraft 2 is now available on PC and Mac.