The original StarCraft and its expansion Brood War have been made free by developer Blizzard Entertainment in preparation for the real-time strategy game's remaster due this summer.
There's no catch. It's just free on both PC and Mac. Windows booting process pdf.
Along with making the games free, Blizzard updated these perennial classics with a new 1.18 patch adding a few key features like the ability to toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes (Alt+Enter), an Observer mode, autosaves, improved UI layouts in Battle.net, improved compatibility with Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, and more. You can read the full patch notes here.
Dec 30, 2016 Brood War allowed players to oversaturate bases with workers to a far larger degree than StarCraft II, which severely punishes mining efficiency after the 17th worker. Furthermore, the large distance between bases meant that additional expansions were difficult to defend and hold. TLnet Fantasy StarCraft 2 / Brood War TL Fantasy StarCraft is a system that allows you to create your own fantasy StarCraft team in the Korean Proleague. You have a set number of points which you must spend on a number of players and a team that you think will do well, and another set of points you must spend on players that you think will perform poorly.
This shows a lot of confidence on Blizzard's part that people will still pay for the upgrade when the original games are free. As for the remake, this will include spruced up assets, resolution, audio, and story cinematics. You can see how it's evolved in the StarCraft Remastered trailer below.
The original StarCraft launched back in March 1998, at least in North America, while Brood War followed in November. Both were succeeded by StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty in 2010, that game's expansion Heart of the Swarm in 2013, then the final standalone chapter of the Starcraft 2 saga, Legacy of the Void, in 2015.