StarCraft: Insurrection | A Forgotten Third-Party Expansion From 1998

Comments · 788

• SE

  @SeanzenGaming · 9 months ago (edited) · pinned

  Hi Everyone, there are a couple of points and corrections:<br><br>I appreciate all of you stopping by to watch the video. It’s been great and hilarious reading through personal experiences people have had with Insurrection and StarCraft in general!<br><br>In fact, the number of genuine comments ranging from deep knowledge of Insurrection to support for the video is beyond what I could’ve asked for. Even if I don’t reply directly to a comment, know that I have been reading each one. <br><br>Corrections:<br>- It looks like Aztech New Media was not allowed to change game files per Blizzard. <br>- Due to the game file restriction, it’s not that they forgot to change the dropship hero name, but there was no pre-existing dropship hero unit. Changing this would’ve re-named all dropships in the level.<br>- It’s not so much that Aztech didn’t know how to add custom voices to characters in-game, but weren’t allowed to per the game file restriction from Blizzard.<br><br>Thank you for being here!

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• WY

  @wymanrtaylor · 9 months ago

  I had this as a boy and I remember being incredibly disappointed. &nbsp;Thing is, I used to make my own campaigns in the map editor; I leaned how to make mission objectives, use doodads, have each level load into the next… I even made the mission briefings; recorded various characters in my pre-pubescent little voice. &nbsp;I absolutely loved making them. &nbsp;So I got this and discovered it was basically only slightly better than the garbage I was making as a 12 year-old lol

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• AL

  @AlexanderAudiobooks · 9 months ago (edited)

  As a Southerner, the voice acting in this Terran campaign left me feeling personally attacked. 🤣

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• MR

  @MrGeorgeFlorcus · 9 months ago

  I can&apos;t believe you went through the entire explanation of how that one over-powered zergling hero can practically solo a map, without ever mentioning that it&apos;s actually name is &quot;Devours Children&quot;

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• SI

  @SirGuinea8 · 9 months ago (edited)

  “The zerg don’t wear stinkin boots”<br><br>I remember this line from playing it back then. 😂 Thanks for the throwback!

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• VO

  @Vorgozz · 9 months ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=691">11:31</a> Those enemies aren&apos;t actually being spawned infinitely, they&apos;re spawned in once and then teleported around to have them patrol back and forth, it seems strange they would have done that instead of just telling them to patrol with the actual order trigger, so I&apos;m guessing the StarEdit they were working with didn&apos;t have that option yet given certain other triggering and design choices in future maps that would also be explained by version differences.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=780">13:00</a> This map is only 192x192, the largest dimensions are 256x256 so there are still 2 larger sizes (which Insurrection does liberally spam later).<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=1068">17:48</a> It was actually an intentional restriction from Blizzard themselves that Aztech wasn&apos;t allowed to change anything that would&apos;ve required modifying the game&apos;s files, which would&apos;ve been necessary for adding new units, unit responses, tiles, etc, they were limited to only things StarEdit could achieve, so Aztech were just forced to pick their poison in between having the character dialog with voices that don&apos;t fit the units they use or to try to imitate the original voices. It is rather ironic one of the early criticisms of the campaign was something Blizzard themselves forced upon it.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=1399">23:19</a> You losing enough units to make Jack Frost spawn is what&apos;s supposed to stop the endless waves of yellow units attacking you, clearly they expected people to struggle a lot more and lose a lot more units near the beginning (which given how early after the game&apos;s release this came out was a fair assumption considering one of the early criticisms the campaign got was being &quot;too hard&quot;) so Jack arriving would mark the end of the holdout, it&apos;s just bizarre they even gave the yellow player buildings and a defeat condition lol.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=1624">27:04</a> I actually think there are 2 other maps that fit this possibility a lot more. The first one is the 7th Protoss map, merely because of the fact that for some reason the file is called &quot;P7Jungle_final&quot;, there is no other map that has any sort of &quot;final&quot; addendum to the file name like that. The other possibility that I actually find the most likely is the 9th Protoss map, when looking through the files in it I found a plethora of unused voice lines that painted a very different picture for what the start of the map was meant to be like, something along the lines of your big base at the top right being destroyed and you having to evacuate to the top left, so my guess is that however that played like was a hot mess and they decided to simply make the intro a strong but survivable enemy attack.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=1749">29:09</a> There is only 1 Dropship unit in the game, so as per the not modifying files restriction Blizzard put, Aztech could only use the base Dropship for Black Morgan, but since renaming the normal Dropship would cause all Dropships built by the enemy to also be named &quot;Black Morgan&quot; they simply had to settle for keeping the normal name, though it does still have the side effect that enemy Dropships will also be way tankier than normal since Morgan has higher stats.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=2574">42:54</a> Base game campaign AI scripts are scripted expecting to have a large stockpile of money or even infinite so they already don&apos;t do great when they have limited resources, but as you can see with the score counter at the top left, the AI doesn&apos;t even start with anything here just like you, so they can brick themselves by having no money and no workers extremely easily.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=2712">45:12</a> I&apos;m pretty sure what Demioch means is that Xerxes &quot;died&quot; metaphorically and that the transformation into a new entity ended up with Aedus/Xerxes just being resentful forever.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=2870">47:50</a> This is something Aedus/Xerxes mentioned as well. When the Incubus Brood was rampaging across the planet after Aedus/Xerxes deprived it of resources, they were consuming the Terran they came across, and Auza (the Cerebrate of the Incubus Brood) consumed Carpenter, but him being a particularly strong psionic actually managed to overpower Auza and become the dominant entity in the Cerebrate, thus taking control of the entire Brood.<br><br>And hi yes it&apos;s me :^)<br>Insurrection will always be special to me because it effectively kickstarted both my modding career and my entire online history, I very much agree with you it has a really enjoyable charm that the goofy voice acting only adds to and the story is surprisingly decent. Insurrection Remastered is the least I could do in exchange so the gameplay would be enjoyable too and I still occasionally go back to it and I&apos;m always open to hear anyone about it.

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• PU

  @PunishmentDumplin · 9 months ago

  Dude, I thought I imagined this expansion. I didn&apos;t realize it was 3rd party.

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• OO

  @ooo-Cris-ooo · 8 days ago

  The Protoss voiceover is incredibly good, I wasn’t expecting such quality after the Terran campaign. <br>Also, thank you for the video, I had much fun.

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• MO

  @moffxanatos6376 · 9 months ago

  I asked specifically for Broodwar for Christmas that year, my mother went to the store and there was a guy who was in the process of stocking the shelves with the first copies of it in the city. The Copy I ended up opening on Christmas day never even hit the shelves, it went right from the storage box to her hand by the store employee.

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• CH

  @chainsawplayin · 9 months ago (edited)

  IMO the Overmind impersonation sounds awesome!<br>The comically evil laugh was hilarious.

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• DR

  @DragonDude321 · 8 months ago

  As someone who played and made a lot of dumb little custom maps for StarCraft that&apos;s what this &quot;expansion&quot; strikes me as. That&apos;s where a lot of the limitations you pointed out come from (not being able to replace all the unit audio, having to load the campaign map like any random map and not having a custom ingame menu, etc) I doubt Blizzard was willing to give these guys permission or direction on how to do much more than make custom maps using the map editor that shipped with the game, so that&apos;s what they did. Not to defend it or anything, but I didn&apos;t even know this existed and it was interesting to learn about.

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• 9B

  @9bit927 · 7 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcfFoInLq1E&amp;t=1065">17:45</a> hearing the actual firebat voicelines after the imitations is like drinking whole milk after being stuck with skim.

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