I was just starting to grow out of children's games about the time that Starcraft came out, and my first experiences with it were mind-blowing. There were so many things to build and manage and blow up, it was like my eyes had finally been opened to the potential that games could hold. I had to have it for myself, and so I saved up my allowance and finally got my hands on a game disc.

As excited as I was about the single player game, nothing could compare to the anticipation of playing the game online. Online. What a concept. That the same connection responsible for email and Yahoo! could coordinate a strategy game was almost too much to wrap my middle-school head around. I remember calling up a friend the night that I installed the game and forcing him to wait on the line nearly an hour while the game updated itself in order to connect to Battle.net the first time. I think my bedtime may have come before I was actually able to get a game in, but it didn't matter. The Battle.net lobby was the coolest thing since sliced bread and I don't think I had a coherent non-Starcraft thought for the next two weeks.

I learned very quickly, however, that I was not going to be competitive in this arena. That complexity that I got so worked up about continued to hold me in thrall while I played, slowing down my gameplay to a level far below where it should have been. The result was that I spent too much time micromanaging attacks and clicking on the units to hear their comments (always hilarious) and not nearly enough building the structures and units I would need in the endgame. Initial failures led quickly to discouragement, which pushed me out of the normal matches. How would I get my Starcraft fix, then?

Enter the custom maps.

Custom Starcraft maps could turn the game into anything from a racing sim to a...god, I don't even know what to label those "madness" maps. I guess bloodbath is the closest possible description. Standard tactics went out the window, and balance and pacing that Blizzard had so carefully crafted probably went with it but I didn't care. My favorites were always the RPGish maps, which generally featured a long tunnel of baddies, a couple of teammates, some scripts which allowed you to trade kills for upgrades or health, and a barebones leveling system. I could micromanage my one little character to my heart's content, waiting excitedly to see which character model would be used for his next level. It got to the point where I finally opened up the map editor for myself and modded one of the maps to be playable in the single player mode for those times when I wasn't allowed by my parents to use the internet. While I'm sure it completely defeated the purpose of the game to play it alone, I was happy ferrying my little "Nerd" (High Templar) through his "Day at School" in which he had to mow through hordes of teachers and bullies with only his psionic storm and floating computer (I think it was a Science Vessel) to keep him safe. It should have gotten old quickly, but I remember playing through a number of times and never getting particularly bored. I guess I was just particularly easily amused.

Why not just play an RPG, you ask? Because I didn't have one. Or at least not a halfway decent one. My gaming library remained rather limited for a long time, and Starcraft, by way of the user mods, introduced me to new genres without breaking my piggy bank. Maybe it wasn't the cleanest, most professional sort of introduction, but it certainly whet my appetite for new experiences. So I guess this is a thank you to all those amateur map-makers from the Starcraft era. Your grammar and spelling my have been atrocious, and your sense of humor juvenile at best and morbidly tasteless at worst, but without you I probably would have been driven out of gaming. And what a tragedy that would have been.