Chapter 1. It Started with StarCraft

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 一 从星际争霸说起

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 12, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19611097

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Around 2004, on the private forum run by Chunyin, the former games editor of the newspaper CBI Computer Business Information, I got to know [AOQ]cat, a well-known writer in the StarCraft community. That forum, called Wushui de Yecha, or The Napping Yaksha, had gathered a great many of the people who worked behind the scenes in games. Senior figures such as Xiaosanshao and Kamantou, also known as commando, the author of the StarCraft novel Yongwang Zhiqian, or Press Forward, were all there.

By then I had already left CCSK for the CGA news team and was working exclusively on Counter-Strike. Because I had always been interested in the wider games world, my boss at the time, Yang Chen, marketing director of the Haofang gaming platform, brought me into that forum so that people would get to know my face. There were differences of age and seniority there, but we were all young men who played games, so we soon became friends.

Not long after we had got to know each other, [AOQ]cat said to me one day that the two of us should write a history of Chinese esports together, with him covering StarCraft and me covering Counter-Strike. I froze for a moment, thinking he was joking. Counter-Strike was already sliding downhill by then, losing players to online games such as Legend of Mir 2 and MU Online, and StarCraft had long since been reduced to a niche game by Counter-Strike. None of us had any idea where esports was heading, and whether any of us would still be working in it was very much an open question.

I talked it over with [AOQ]cat afterwards and found that he was serious. But I was busy with my graduation thesis, and I also felt that esports was still too vague and too young at that point, that the time to write it up as history had not yet come. Nothing more was said about it.

Today, reading [AOQ]cat's A Retrospective of Chinese StarCraft History, I feel deep regret. He set down the glory of StarCraft in China from 1998 to 2002, and he recorded the confusion of that era along with it, so that we now have the material to study that past.

All right. Let us start with StarCraft.

I still remember that going online in 1997 cost 20 yuan an hour, and that half an hour was often not enough to load a single web page. By 1998, dial-up charges had come down sharply and speeds had improved a great deal, but playing games online was still a luxury. Even so, the famous early StarCraft figures red-apple, the brothers lan.yf and lan.yq, caoyong, ss.glacier and Kulou (Wang Yinxiong) were already playing American opponents on battle.net.

By this time the concept of a team had already appeared abroad, and putting a shared tag before or after your name had become fashionable. So caoyong founded the well-known POC team, one of the earlier squads, and captained it under the name caoyong[POC]. Pretty cool, isn't it? That uniform, army-style structure attracted crowds of hot-blooded young men.

The way teams were run in those days had a distinctly warlord feel to it. These were tiny outfits, a dozen people at most, and yet they had an external affairs department and an internal affairs department, military ranks, military districts, corps commanders, branches and chapters. A crowd of teenagers took every bit of it extremely seriously. And once a team had any reputation at all, it grew at remarkable speed, with thousands of members across the country holding formal positions and ranks. If you tried the same thing today, people might well take you for a pyramid scheme.

This militarised way of operating went back to the days of Delta Force and Quake. It reached its peak in the StarCraft and Counter-Strike era, when people who could build websites joined the scene. Large, neatly organised sites listed every official member of a roster and carried photo albums, forums, news sections and download sections. All of these sites drew considerable traffic at the time. As Counter-Strike declined, however, the idea of the large team gradually faded. By the Warcraft III era, from 2003 to 2008, very few of the big corps were left, and today even famous esports clubs no longer operate that way.

Part of this was simply the enthusiasm of that era. The other part, judging from a memoir written by Wang Yinxiong (kulou.csa), was that in 1999, when amateur player organisations began moving towards professionalisation, there was one great debate, and the Counter-Strike community was having the same argument at the same time. Should games be played for fun, or should they be taken seriously and turned into esports? Many people opposed esports back then. That may be hard to believe now, but the fact is that the word esports was not accepted from the start. Some people even felt that professionalisation drained the human warmth out of things. It turned lively internet cafés silent, for example, because the competition rules of the day forbade players from talking out loud instead of using the in-game microphone, and everyone followed the rules for fear of being laughed at for not knowing them.

But all of that came later. In 1999, falling network charges and rising network speeds moved in opposite directions at great speed over the course of two years. Almost overnight, the computer rooms where people could only play Red Alert, StarCraft and Counter-Strike over a local area network turned into internet cafés. The computer room was an early form of the internet café. Now there were more machines and lower prices, and the number of players naturally rose sharply along with them.

StarCraft's popularity was truly unstoppable. More players meant more teams, and more teams meant alliances, in much the same way that a proliferation of martial arts schools will sooner or later produce a grand assembly of the martial world. Wang Yinxiong (kulou.csa) built CSA, the China StarCraft Alliance. Hong Zhefu (hongzf), who ran through both the StarCraft and the Counter-Strike eras and later served as ESWC's general agent in China, built the Northeast Harbin Game Base Camp. There was also Hunan Battle.net, which had the greatest concentration of strong players at the time. Chinese esports has always had strong regional characteristics, which a later chapter deals with specifically, so I will leave that aside here. Large organisations of every kind were starting to appear.

Because FSGS platform technology had arrived, players could set up servers themselves, and the number of servers inside China began to grow with them. First came Wuzhou Battle.net, built by Wuzhou Telecom, then Hunan Battle.net, then 263 Battle.net. Sina and 263 also began running StarCraft tournaments. Miao Xinyu, the former editor-in-chief of Sina Games and president of 178 at the time of writing, messaged me excitedly from his phone at three in the morning the night before last with his memories of those years, and he also helped me track down several esports pioneers I had lost touch with long ago. Knowing that everyone is doing well at their own level of the Chinese games industry left us all glad. We may have been competitors back then, but what we have now is the mutual regard of old friends meeting again and sharing a smile.

As tournaments grew more frequent, individual media began to appear. The earliest forms were match reports and tactical analysis, and the best known of the people doing that work were stoneman and the brother and sister Hanyuliang, the Chongqing StarCraft champion, and Acai. They regularly studied and translated the latest foreign tactics and match reports, which left readers astonished that StarCraft could be played that way at all.

After large numbers of video match reports started arriving from South Korea in particular, seemingly impossible techniques such as three marines circling a lurker in a windmill pattern drew in huge numbers of new players. Add to that how few games there were to choose from around 1999, and StarCraft became wildly popular.

Pay attention to this sequence.

1. The pioneers of a game, its stars, come together and form a small core group.

2. The internet and the quality of the product itself drive the expansion of the player base and of player organisations.

3. Competition between organisations grows more frequent and steadily more formal.

4. Individual media writing match reports and professional media covering events begin to take shape. The media raise the profile of teams and other organisations, which brings in sponsorship and more besides, and that in turn refines and improves the resources at every part of the chain.

With that, the basic chain of a competitive game was in place, a faint healthy growth had begun, and the snowball had rolled forward a few turns.

Core > spread > tournaments > media > a larger core, and on it goes.

Even now, 14 years later, this is still the road a new competitive game has to travel if it is to amount to anything. The only difference is that the steps in between are shorter and more practised.

If you work behind the scenes, then knowing this process, having a firm grasp of it and pushing the key steps hard at the right moments will get you twice the result for half the effort.

Look, by contrast, at the competitive titles that have not developed well, and you will find that the chain is unbalanced or else broken. Some parts of it are fat while others are close to starving. Perhaps that is one of the reasons they have not done well.

A competitive game is a very particular kind of creature. The whole chain has to develop well before the game can go from A to A+. China has a lot of people, so reaching A is easy. But turning a game into a classic, into something a whole generation remembers, calls for a broad view. You have to stand higher up and look at how the entire chain is supported and operated. And in the end, all of it comes down to whether what you want is an A or an A+.