When you play video games, you always remember the ones that absorbed huge blocks of time from your life. Starcraft was one of those games for me.

Well, it looks like the next great game from the company that brought us World of Warcraft will not be another Warcraft title or massively multiplayer game. Instead, they have taken the wraps off of a Starcraft sequel. The Starcraft 2 website is live!

For those of you who don’t play these types of games, Starcraft is a strategy game where you control armies of one of three species: Human, Zerg, or Protoss, and it’s a basic “mine, build & fight” kind of game. This one, however, was so well executed that it became the basis for professional competition in Korea, and a world-wide phenomenon.

The Blizzard games have inspired hundreds of copycat titles, but it’s an extremely hard problem to balance the design of the different races, units, resources, economics, technology and gameplay. In fact, it’s almost an impossible problem. Blizzard, however, does it better than anyone.

Here is a good write-up on the debut and press conference Q&A on GameSpot. Here is another one on Inside Mac Games.

Better yet… here is the CGI announcement trailer for the game, as debuted in Korea, on YouTube:

Here is a great video of the actual gameplay… notice again. Three key races (Terran, Zerg, Protoss) and a much better model of air/ground interaction.

Going back over 15 years, Blizzard has repeatedly demonstrated their ability to develop games that are outstanding in design and execution. What Pixar is to computer-animated film, Blizzard is to modern video games. As another hallmark of an exemplary shop, they deliver their titles for launch on both the Mac & PC simultaneously. You don’t see them complaining about time to market or cost. They know that a game of sufficient quality will pay for itself many times over, and with Blizzard’s track record, they always do.

I’m very excited to play this game, although I realize that in the modern Battle.net era, I will be hopelessly outclassed by other players before I even get the DVD home and installed 🙂

Update (5/22/2007): Nate has a post on this as well, and he found more great YouTube videos of the gameplay presentation.  I felt like I was getting a 20 minute tutorial on Protoss unit deployment.  Colossus!