The original version of StarCraft developed prior to 1996 was considered to be inferior to other RTS games shown at the time, most notably the competing game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 being developed by Ion Storm Dallas, which was also shown at E3 and the Consumer Electronics Show that year. The game appeared to be miles ahead of what StarCraft was, with consumers responding to the latter game weakly as "Warcraft in space". Realizing that the version of StarCraft they had was worse than they had thought, following the release of Diablo at the end of that year, Blizzard began to "lick [their] wounds and plan for the future" by restarting development on StarCraft and completely overhauling their development process as a whole. StarCraft eventually released in March of 1998 to critical and commercial success, and was retrospectively dubbed as one of the defining games of the RTS genre.

After Ion Storm Dallas closed in 2001, a few of their former employees were scooped up by Blizzard. Two of them later revealed to former Blizzard executive Patrick Wyatt that the demos Ion Storm presented of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 were actually pre-rendered trailers, and the players "presenting" the game's demos were actors pretending to play the game. This meant that a driving reason for why StarCraft was released as it is was because Blizzard got tricked into raising their standards to compete with a pre-rendered video, resulting in the creation of one of their most successful games.