Starcraft stuff

Disclaimer: This post might be a little bit too hardcore for all of you non-gamers or casual gamers. If you get too confused, just ignore this post :) It is also a repost and was originally posted on my now strictly-political blog on March 19th, 2008 (yesterday).

Recently, the all-Korean Starcraft pro gaming scene has had a lot of action, many tournaments and it's fair share of drama. I do not play that game myself, but I do follow the professional scene on a weekly basis. Some of you (actually, most of you) might not understand why or how I could be entertained by watching two teenagers going at it in a strategy game. Well, to be honest, I don't know either! The games are just really exciting, the competition level is off-the-hook and in Korea, Starcraft ranks along regular sports like soccer in terms of popularity. The crowds at live events are huge (thousands of people), including people you would not expect in a video game tournament. The demographics of starcraft are actually quite spectacular; often you will see a majority of girls in the crowds. Yes, girls in a hardcore video game tournament, going crazy for their favorite players at every move (some of the pros have fan clubs of over 100,000 members). The players are part of teams backed by some of the biggest corporations in Korea: Samsung, KTF, MBC, OGN amongst others. Heck, even the Korean Air Force has it's own team. Not to mention that the proleague (where teams play against each other, rather than individual matches like most of the competitions are) is organized by the Shinan Bank, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in Korea.

So now that I have explained why I am fascinated by professional Starcraft, back to the topic I wanted to touch on: the last month in the Starcraft scene. The Starleagues (yes there are two, a third one on the way aswell) are the top of Starcraft individual competition. The most influent one, the OSL (Ongamenet StarLeague) just had it's finals last week, while the MSL (MBC StarLeague) had it's finals about three weeks ago. On top of that, we had two very interesting events in the last month, the GSI (GomTV Star Invitational) and the MBC All-Stars Skin Games. And if all of these competitions weren't enough, KeSPA, the governing body for professional eSports in Korea, had it's annual awards today. So as an introduction to starcraft, I thought I would post some videos of these events for all of my readers to enjoy. Hopefully you enjoy them and if not, well at least you now know to ignore my starcraft-related blogs from now on. If you did enjoy it, rest assured that many more of these videos are coming in the future.

Here are the videos, as well as links to reports from some of these events (I do not own these videos, neither did I film or upload them)

KeSPA Annual Awards results: LINK
GomTV Star Invitational results and VODs: LINK

MBC StarLeague Finals (Jaedong vs Kal), this is game 1 in a best of 5
Links for the other games: Game 2 Game 3 Game 4


Ongamenet StarLeague Finals (Flash vs Stork), this is game 1 in a best of 5 also
Links for the other games: Game 2 Game 3