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Blizzard released StarCraft on March 31, 1998, with three factions that played nothing alike and matchmaking built into the game. In South Korea it became the foundation of the first large professional gaming scene.
Competitive gaming as a paid profession, with leagues, sponsors, broadcasts and a governing body, was worked out here first. It also showed that a game's competitive life can be measured in decades if the underlying design is deep enough, which changed how publishers think about supporting a title after release.
A hundred players parachute onto an island, scavenge weapons and fight until one remains, inside a boundary that keeps shrinking. Sold unfinished, it reached tens of millions of players within a year.
One design template reorganized competitive multiplayer for a decade. It also showed that a genre could be invented by players modifying existing games and then commercialized by a small studio, with the innovation arriving from outside the major publishers entirely.
