April 2, 2008 6:00 AMIGN has published a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Chris Sigaty, Sam Didier, and Frank Pearce. The three discuss the StarCraft phenomenon on its tenth anniversary, and look ahead to the future of the sci-fi RTS franchise.IGN: StarCraft has sold over 9.5 million copies worldwide. Everyone agrees it's a great game. But there has to be a reason it caught on as it did, worldwide. Because many great games don't sell anywhere as close to what StarCraft has done. Do you attribute to Battle.net? What do you think is the catalyst? Frank Pearce: Definitely Battle.net is a factor. The personality that we inject into the experience through the sounds; the personality that we inject through the portraits. Because the units are only so high. Looking at it from the top-down perspective, the units have a distinct look, but they don't have a lot of visual personality beyond their distinct look. But when you throw the portrait of the unit on the screen and you give it that voice, all of a sudden you've injected personality into this Chris Sigaty: The thing that we've always done--not me personally, but the company--has ended up hitting on are these sort of common themes. Grabbing the right portions of these common themes so that it's more accessible, so it's the coolest aspects of those things. So the coolest parts of the Star Wars thing, and the coolest parts of the characters and the story, and they all end up adding to why those games, and why particularly Blizzard does well, or why StarCraft does well in a situation where another great game didn't necessarily, maybe that accessibility? Not always necessarily due to the actual user interface or that sort of thing, but really the big themes that are there. Sam Didier: I kind of attribute the longevity of it, it all boils down for me to the gameplay. Because I look at the art now, and it's horrible. [laughter]. It's not the art that's keeping the game going. But the gameplay is super fun, everyone loves to play it. It's simple to play, but if you want to be a bad ass, it also has that component of the game. It's sort of like chess. The art is nothing really great to look at; it works, but it's still a fun game to play. You can play it against your friend; it doesn't take four hours to play a game, you can play a couple of games at lunch, and you're done. It has a good, timeless feel to it.Click on the link below to read the rest of the Q&A.IGN: StarCraft 10th Anniversary InterviewBlizzard EntertainmentStarCraft

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