13 years ago when I was sitting in my English 11 High School class I was just coming to grips with life post puberty, talking to some nerdy kid a grade beneath me, and trying not to stare at my English 11 teachers cleavage.

We talked about all sorts of things associated with that age back then like girls, boobs, drinking dad’s alcohol, boobs, girls, and video games.  It was then I was enlightened to the existence of a game called StarCraft.  Online gaming was just beginning to take off, though limited to the PC.  It was big, because it was free, and easy and nerds didn’t have to worry about sun exposure walking to their friend’s house.  The socially retarded could finally play games in a bully free environment, with no fear of ridicule from anyone other than disgruntled parents.  Instead of hard physical work, building hot rods and girls on roller skates, youth had entered the Dawn of the Vidiot!

It probably helped that a computer could now offer everything from unlimited, wrist crippling porno, to video games that allowed you to teabag your opponents once you had finished exploding their faces.   Now the big thing was that suddenly you didn’t even have to leave your house to play these games with your friends.  And it was always an occasion when you had rare cause to leave your electronic fortress of solitude.

That’s right, you could annihilate, blow up, jerk off, maim and so on from the comfort of your own home!  The only time you ever really had to get up was to go the bathroom and grab food.

Now, StarCraft wasn’t shooter type of game like Doom.  No, this one actually took a bit of thought to play.  You had to strategize, collect resources, build or ‘Craft’ (get it?!) if you will, and use all of that to raise an army to decimate your opponent.  But like most games, after a few months it was set aside for the latest and greatest North American craze; drinking and topless women!

My editor has informed me that drinking and boobs was never a new craze and that it’s debatable whether I ever finished puberty [You never started.  –ED].  Apparently, some people have a harder time getting over this phase than others.  But, now say if I were from South Korea that wouldn’t have mattered at all.  Maybe it’s the fact that their women never seemingly develop beyond that of a teenager, or drinking is the devil in their culture, so to this day StarCraft still draws in large crowds and is seen by many as a national sport!  I recently met someone who told me about the StarCraft craze going on in South Korea; entire stadiums, where literally thousands of people go to watch and cheer on the absolute best in the world at Star Craft!

The concept of this was about as true to me as the myth of a woman’s Clitoris, but once again, the internet does not lie!

I can’t believe this is an actual freaking sport!  People are playing this game 12 years after the fact?  I barely have the attention span to beat a game completely.  Hell, I even get bored with a girl after a matter of weeks let alone a game that would run on a computer with less memory than my cell phone!  And six figures a year!?  Now if either of those things made me 6 figures a year in sponsorships, I suppose I could tolerate a woman’s crap for a little while longer!

In an interview I couldn’t bother to look up online, one person was quoted as saying “to be a professional Star Craft player, one needs to be able to make between 300 to 400 moves a minute.”   That might not seem like a lot, but when each move requires a mouse click or keystroke or a combination of the two.  That in turn requires a thought and an action… Well, words can’t describe my thoughts, so “FUCKTASTIC” is what I will go with.

I still don’t believe it, and I read it on the internet!  Now that, don’t forget, is an average pro, but to be the South Korean Super Champ of Greatest All Time Ever Hero, you need to bump that number up another 100 moves.  So, like 10 to 12 clicks a second, which is an average, it’s not something you do every time of course, if that’s any consolation whatsoever.   But considering you probably had to turn your double-click speed way down so you stop accidentally renaming programs, I doubt it is.

Now, as is tradition, a Haiku:

Never forgotten
South Korean legacy
StartCraft never dies.
     –RLLD