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Comment by CursedSilicon | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that when a Redditor discovered the source code for the original StarCraft "gold master" on a CD, they sent it back to Blizzard in exchange for some fucking blizzard merch [1]

EA a while back released the source code to (most) of the old Command & Conquer games [2] though interestingly left out Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, StarCraft's closest competitors at the time.

Would've been nice for historical preservation to be able to peek behind the curtain and see StarCraft's code in a similar fashion

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/68xzxt/star...

[2] https://github.com/electronicarts

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This entire reddit thread aged really poorly now that Blizzard is a shell of its former self. If anything, the attitude in that thread is what paved Blizzard's decline: complete disrespect for its origin.

The StarCraft source code is something that must be kept behind closed walls, under tight control by Blizzard, even though the original people working on the game at Blizzard have already left and there is nothing to protect here other than eternal shame.

Game source code often includes other people's source code (eg middleware) under NDA, and Blizzard is still under contract for protecting that.

That person obviously did not want to be at risk for legal issues from Blizzard by publhsing it though. I personally wouldn't take that risk either.

> peek behind the curtain and see StarCraft's code in a similar fashion

Oh, you wouldn't want to, believe me. You'd be scarred by code like this:

    class CUnit ... {
        #include "header_1.h"
        #include "header_2.h"
        #include "header_3.h"
        #include "header_4.h"
    };

It's remarkable the game functioned as well as it did. See https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...

I've read the blog posts (actually we corresponded about Battle.Net back in 2012!) but I'd love to see StarCraft opened for historical interest :)

PS: Still waiting to hear about the "Westwood's reaction" blog post! :p

I don't think [1] is 100% accurate.

What part of it isn't accurate? They're the top commenter and said exactly what I stated

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