Look at your F10 key. Unostentatious. Unimpressive. Certainly doesn’t look like a direct portal straight to the ‘90s.
Yet if you press it in the StarCraft II test client, and navigate to the ‘Soundtrack’ option in a clickity extra step that somewhat ruins the mystique, you’ll be taken straight there via the OSTs of StarCraft 1 and Brood War.
Available currently only on the public test realm, the soundtracks aren’t picky about where in the game you play them. Want to channel your glory days for that next push up the ladder, for instance, and you can do so to ‘Terran 2’. Which I’m told is of significant nostalgic value to SC players.
I’ve just now sought out the original StarCraft OST, and was surprised. I guess I’d expected some of the techno-pistoned riffery of Hell March from Red Alert, the RTS I was actually playing at the time, so have seeped in via zeitgeisty osmosis.
Instead, there’s this gothic prog metal grandeur somewhere between Meatloaf and early Nine Inch Nails. And then: bluegrass? ‘90s Blizzard were weird.
Seems like a good time to link to the eminently weird Rob Zacny and his words on ‘90s Blizzard and now. What’re your memories of the StarCraft soundtrack? Or of StarCraft itself, for that matter?