Starcraft: Insurrection ... ??

Posted by b33znutz@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 13 comments

I just stumbled across something I’d never even heard of, StarCraft: Insurrection.

It’s a fully licensed but totally non-Blizzard expansion pack from 1998, developed by WizardWorks under Aztech New Media. Blizzard actually signed off on it, which is wild considering how tightly they control their IP now.

It adds three new campaigns, one for each race, using only the base game’s assets. No new units, no new mechanics, just fresh missions, voice work, and storylines that spin off from the original campaign.

From what I’ve read, it wasn’t exactly a critical darling with uneven mission design, a few balance issues, and some gloriously over-the-top ‘90s voice acting. But that’s what makes it so damn interesting to me. It lives in that weird gray area between official content and fan mod.. something Blizzard apparently let happen once and never really repeated.

I played a lot of Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War when they came out, but this one is totally new to me which makes (re)discovering it all the more fun!

Anyone remember playing this one back in the day?

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_badwithcomputer@reddit

These 3rd party mission packs were pretty common in the 90s for computer games.

Game studio had a popular title, but were focusing on the next game and needed some money to fund development and release something as a stop-gap.

keithstellyes@reddit

Doom had a ton of these and some of the "mission packs" gained sort of pseudo-official status

AppropriateCap8891@reddit

There were also a ton of them for Age of Empires.

And for the most part, they were primarily low effort cash grabs by the companies releasing them.

majestic_ubertrout@reddit

More info here: https://www.mobygames.com/game/2193/insurrection-campaigns-for-starcraft/

b33znutz@reddit (OP)

Ya that's where I landed after I googled it too lol

In addition to the main expansions, official additional campaigns were also a thing in the 90s. Sort of reminds me how there's a whole additional official-ish campaign in Duke Xtreme 2. It's not very good of course.

Vinylmaster3000@reddit

You also had D!Zone which had it's own custom wad selector and dozens of missions to play. I found a Vol 2 CD and tried it a while back

In all honesty not that bad of a mission pack, it's kinda like how we have modpacks or mod compilations for modern games

Yup, D!Zone was among the first such level packs. But did it include a new professionally designed campaign? H!Zone (for Heretic) also included 12 professionally designed episodes for instance.

There were a lot of these releases - even S!Zone for SimCity and SC2000.

dtekle_54065@reddit

Can you make a good image of your CD and upload it to archive.org to save this software for the future, please? Thanks in advance!

Even if it may seem that a disk is already imaged, image all the disks that you got. Sometimes the disks have minor errors because of the aging disk media or there are minor updates/differences of the disk contents which is not indicated by the printed disk label. Too often having different images helped to reconstruct the original disk contents of several corrupted disk images.