I first discovered StarCraft while over a friend's house probably around 2001 or 2002, his older brother was playing Protoss. I asked if it was possible to take over someone else's units and it turns out you could indeed mind control, which blew my young mind. He later pulled open the map editor and started making a massing map; for some reason it's ingrained in my mind that he renamed the broodling to "farmer w/ pickaxe". My mind was blown again upon seeing that you could make custom maps at all. I got the game shortly after and started making stupid maps, eventually making less stupid maps, and that's culminated into a successful career in software engineering today.

Share your StarCraft memories.

I remember going to the store shortly after SC was released with my dad and picking out the Protoss box from the display they had set up - I thought the Zerg and Terran ones looked stupid. I always thought protoss were cool, and they've been by far my preferred race ever since.

I tried making a "paintball" map with ghosts in the installation tileset - was really happy when I got the doors to open. I gave up though because the triggers just weren't reliable enough for a multiplayer game - turns out that was the 2s trigger cycle that was fucking me up. Also being noob.

Nice.

I remember a friend let me have his pirated SC CD, he did not like the game. Ironically the pirated version had a working CD Key, so I played through the campaign, not knowing much english at the time I just sort of had an idea of what the story was telling, I mainly just played. Then moved on to B.net which I can thank for improving my english a whole fucking lot.

This was around 2001-ish then the guy asked for his CD back for some reason and I was left with nothing but a void in my life. Up until two days after when I dared to click the campaign editor icon and discovered the map editor which I instantly got into but, sadly, I had no multiplayer functionality anymore as I did not have the CD and I did not know what the hell a nocd was back at the time.

A few years later, like 2 or 3 years after that, I discovered that SC had an expansion called broodwar because it was being sold as a bundle with SC vanilla at a office depot at 10 bucks. I purchased it and you know the rest.

Became a bounder at some point, transitioned into mapping which made me find out about staredit.net and one of DTBK's news post caught my eye, it was a memgraft edit that made unbuildable units buildable from a barracks which compelled me to register to staredit.net and becoming a modder.

When I was about 6 years old, I had a game called Bedlam, and after an unknown amount of time lost it. Growing up, I still had memories of that game and wanted to know what it was, hoping to play it again. A few years later, late 1999, I visited some friends of my parents and I saw their kid playing StarCraft. I believed it was the same game because it looked very similar visually (at least based off of my faint memories of it) and got the game. When I played it myself, I quickly realized it wasn't the game I was looking for, but it quickly became my favorite game ever and was glad I took interest in it because of a mistake. (Only in 2016 did I finally rediscover Bedlam.)

I was about 8 (putting this in about 1999) and we moved to a new neighborhood, and my brother and I became friends with the kids across the street who were our same age and they were like HEY GET THIS GAME SO WE CAN PLAY TOGETHER. When my brother first told me about it I was more interested in the fact that it had an editor than the game itself, leading me to pretty much only play UMS. I would always try to figure out how people did stuff, but my brother for some reason was always paranoid that 3rd party editors and tools (and even maps made with such tools) contained viruses so I'd always have to hide it from him. xD i found SEN when googling for SC stuff (I don't remember what, specifically) and mostly read the tutorials and eventually registered. When the admins were convinced modding was acceptable, I found even more ways to explore SC's inner-workings.
I dunno if I've ever completed a map or mod. Most of them are just me screwing around with some concept and then losing interest in the project itself.

My older cousin who I used to always play video games told me about Starcraft when I was 9 or 10. He described it as a game where you "make spaceships and fight other people" and I thought it sounded really lame. Eventually, he brought a copy to my house and installed it, and the first map he played online was Teen Titans Mass. I loved Teen Titans and the map looked fun, so I pretty much only played massing games when I started out. For like the first year or two I had SC, I didn't even realize there was an expansion for it, and then my cousin eventually gave me a copy of BW to play (I have no idea why he had so many copies of this game), and I discovered so much more to what I thought was already a great game in vanilla.

I don't remember what got me into mapping; I probably wanted to try to recreate a massing or defense map and went from there. I was curious if there was a SC site, so I tried going to starcraft.com, but found starcraft.org instead, which was an amazing place for content back in the early 2000s. I eventually discovered their forum which had a pretty good mapping community, and I learned a lot from those people. One of the people there was also on SEN, but he said SEN sucked and that Maplantis was much better, so I didn't go on SEN for a while, but then I caved and w/e.

I remember being high school and instead of sleeping I'd spend many nights playing various UMS maps all night with my friend on speakerphone cause we didn't have headsets. Happy 20th anniversary StarCraft. You and the people I met through it changed my life and I wouldn't trade that experience in for anything in the world.

First forum was warboards in 2006, I was 12. Good times

I first picked up SC around 2000 - my first introduction was watching a friend playing a game of Sunken D. I was around 10 at the time and involved in the modding scene for Star Trek Armada, so naturally I started looking into the possibility of modding SC.

I was delighted to discover Arsenal II and StarDraft and spent a while playing around with that and hanging out on Blizzforums until eventually I found out about SEN some time around 2004. Spent a little time making maps, but my true love was always modding. I became an early advocate for modding on SEN and helped develop the community, including taking leadership of the (to my knowledge the only) modding clan [MM] where I met a lot of great people.

Real life has gotten in the way now and then, but SC modding is an itch I just can't scratch and I keep coming back to it. My hard drive is full of tons of projects that don't always see the light of day, but breaching new horizons in SC modding is satisfying in a way that nothing else has been able to march.

Happy 20th anniversary, StarCraft! Here's to many more!

I think the first time I saw Starcraft was when the documentary "Alias: Slayer" aired here in Norway back in early 2001. I don't think I quite caught the name of the game, but a while later one of my friends got his hands on a pirated copy (no BW iirc) and his dad was kind enough to burn me a copy as well. Played through the campaign with cheats, cause I was terrible at the game at the time (and still am) and didn't do much more until another friend got a cracked copy with BW. We played the hell out of it on LAN and in 2003 I finally bought the SC BW bundle so I could play online.
We only had dial-up at the time, so I didn't get to play all that much, but once we got broadband in 2004, I was able to play more and look up stuff online. Started signing up to various forums at some point and eventually found SEN through a news post on SCLegacy. I mostly signed up for all the cool games that was on the site back then, but eventually I got more interested in map-making, although I mostly stuck to melee maps, as I didn't have that much spare time to learn triggers and whatnot. In the end I only finished four or five maps, none of which were particularly good