After losing an entire base, a battalion of reapers, about 10 siege tanks, and 3 battlecruisers, the terran commander says "NOW YOU'RE GONNA PAY THE PRICE" and promptly sends in 14 marines.

Just a little thing that Grant didn't notice in the video. If you look at that big ass Zealot warp-in at 11:20, you can see on the UI that the Immortal was a gateway unit. I say again. The Immortal was a gateway unit.

Mothership in Starcraft 2 alpha: eat an entire army for breakfast Mothership now: these tiny manines are bullying me. Send help

5:27 Those siege tanks look like they'd shout NOOT NOOT any moment now

Legacy of the Demo, Heart of the Beta, Wings of Alpha, what a nice series!

I really wish some of the "boss" motherships in the campaigns had that time bomb and black hole.

The Alpha mothership would have been amazing for a Selendis commander.

I still remember when they showed preview of wings of liberty campaign and it has a mass effect-ish features and also a lot more info about planets or units, all voiced. Quite a shame it was all scrapped

StarCraft 2 alpha: The marines can’t penetrate the mothership’s thick armor. StarCraft 2 now: The mothership dies against 8 marines.

On the one hand the mothership abilities would have been awesome... on the other hand, imagine the ABUSE. Vortex, their "little cousin" that doesn't even damage units, got so abused by players that it was removed from the game. Imagine if people could have a button that said "their projectiles do Literally No Damage for like 30 fucking seconds" or "delete all air units nearby from the game" or "delete all ground units nearby from the game". Like holy fuck.

13 years and I'm still bitter about not even getting to *TOUCH* this mothership in-game. Grant, you and your modder wizards are the only hope we have to getting even a fraction of this in the Protoss Real scale campaign or even, hell, a SC2 alpha's mod where all the ideas removed from the beta are dumped into a functioning map. Even that would be enough In the name of Adun, help us GiantGrantGames. You are our only hope

Ahhh I remember watching these back in the day lamenting that I couldn't buy the game as a kid!

This alpha was so ahead of it's time, it even predicted Giant Grant reacting to it 13 years later 29:31

Grant moving up and down to mimic the photon cannon is now officially one of the things that cheers me up after a bad day

Interesting that in the battle at the end, you can see the Phoenix shooting at ground units, makes some sense considering it fills the place of Scouts and the current version has graviton to hit ground.

Will you do C&C vids in the future, Grant?

It would be cool to see a mod that added the alpha motherships abilities, the protoss had huge potential here and then they got nerfed into the ground. Its a real shame

I like the warp wraith. I just imagine the protoss were in awe of the supreme might of the SC1 wraith and thougt 'yeah we need this but good'

Also the #1 way to fix colossus in modern SC2 is to simply let it attack while moving (this would fix a lot of things in this game). All of a sudden the colossus are actually deathwalkers instead of weird mobile photon canon things that are super vulnerable to everything in the game.

This is the first video I watched about Starcraft 2 and it was absolutely what made me want to play it. Oddly enough the only thing I remember was the Mothership and the physics.

15:25 Grant, its REALLY useful to go from triangle 3rd to defend a terran drop in your main. Happens quite often too. Stalkers blink, colossi cliff.

"Alright you alien freaks, Now it's time to pay the price!" "what should we do general?" "Send a small squadron of infantry against them"

The hardened shield had to be sacrificed to bring back the shield battery without being completely overpowered. Sad to see it go even in the singleplayer campaigns though, it's not like it would have been /more/ broken than the Vanguard.

Never saw this in english before, only saw the Korean live-reaction one, which admittedly was pretty cool too. I also remember that the Starcraft2 website had unit showcases, which included the Zealot and Immortal with the Alpha voices shown here, so I had downloaded all their voice lines and put them into Starcraft1.

Once again with this alpha footage reaction, I told myself 'I'll put this on Watch Later and check it out'... and then proceeded to watch the whole thing at once. 7:20 It is notable that modern Starcraft 2 maps feel like they have to almost completely restrict the cliff-jumping ability, there's typically exactly one marked 'jump entrance' into main bases and that's what's considered like, 'fair' now, which indicates it's strong asf and probably contributed towards Reapers being nightmares in WOL. And yeah, as you said famously the cliff jumping thing never matters unless it's enforced by design, like raptorlings aren't prized for that jump. Also, I really like the idea of expanding the Reaper jump ability being an upgrade you research later. Although I don't hate the idea of units that are just good at certain times. I think it helps prevent the Firebat 'no niche, never built' thing. 17:00 This environment is close to the finished product, in that it looks great. The like, engine of SC2 might be its biggest accomplishment as a game, and that's saying something, it's just... even in this early footage, or especially thinking about what it was like back then, a strategy game doing all of this was just so unreasonably hype. And as Grant has pointed out in videos, still unmatched to this day. It's not even close. 22:00 "How is this not in the game?!" Yeah, this was genuinely artistic and beautiful and inspiring even. Obviously some of that is nostalgia, but it's also just a great example of how... games should be.

Man you never notice how gorgeous this game is when you play it at full speed.

Ahhh the nostalgia! I used to watch this clip over and over again when I was younger and hyped up for Starcraft 2. This was the very first gameplay video of SC2, and it shows. The game looked a lot more similar to Starcraft 1 than our current version. The units still had the SC1 style wireframes, the Siege Tanks had the boxy shape the SC1 tanks had, and the Battlecruisers here fired a slow firing singular laser like they did in SC1 as opposed to the rapid-firing Battlecruiser we have now.

22:00 thats like a "how to make the purifier boss fight not suck as much" xD

I think they missed an opportunity to make the wrathwalker have the alpha colossus firing animation. It looks so cool.

Apart from the units and the mechanics, I really liked the lighting, tone of coloring and metallic texture of this version over the actual release (textures in the release are indeed better looking and better detailed, but at times especially the buildings look too blocky and plastic)

I have an In Utter Darkness-esque custom map where after the player reaches 3000+ kills they can warp in one or more hovering Colossi-looking units that is armed the equivalent of 4 Protoss MG42s, and an amped Immortal cannon, and has a passive ability/behaviour aura akin to the alpha Mothership time bomb. Oh also you play as Terran with no base building, but an Alien Shooter-esque turret survival mixed with DotA 1.

To this day I sometimes wonder what a twilight archon would do. I remember they had a website that listed some of the units that would(maybe) be in the game. Don’t remember the exact details, but one protross unit it showed was something called a twilight archon, made by merging a high templar and a dark templar.

Thanks Grant. This was a great nostalgia trip down the memory lane! I still remember the shock and awe me and my friends felt as we saw this trailer for the first time in 2007 (and the hundreds of times we watched it religiously after 😂). With every expansion and game mode and then commander that was announced I hoped this mothership would be added but to no avail! If any modder can make this a reality, please do it. You will make a lot of old 20- 30-something people feel like a child again 🙏😊

I remember watching this video as a kid over and over again. SC2 was the first game i waited for and saved up to buy with my own money and got the special edition which came with that massive strategy book hardcover and other goodies.

It didn't show up in this demo, but a later mini demo showed off the ohase cannons, which even if they were basically just protoss spine/spore crawlers, I always liked and wisjed the showed up again in something.

The medivac goes pretty close to the ground when they drop troops. That’s pretty cool. Unfortunate that they don’t do it :( And the building seem to have a crash animation when they die when are in the air. Seeing these makes me sad 😢

I remember watching this as a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Still remember getting in the car with my mom to go to Walmart and get the box set for each StarCraft game

I always wanted to use the Alpha Protoss units, ever since I saw them. However, they didn't come out in 2010 - so I studied the Editor for a long time - and created them in my own SC2 Arcade maps. It felt soo good controlling those units, such as the Soul Hunter, the Alpha Mothership, Colossi, etc.... I hope someone makes a campaign featuring the Alpha units in the future, so that Grant could feel the joy of controlling those lovely units.

Interesting the Mothership doesn't have the mass cloak here.

This video is awesome. I fall in love with SC2 once again. Thank you

Grant loved that spaghetification. I honestly want to see a game mode where all the units are capable of the abilities showcased in the alpha. If there’s ever a mod for that Grant needs to play it.

Man, what a nostalgia trip! I definitely had the same feeling you did about RTS games being out of favour back in 2006. I remember being in highschool in the mid-aughts, when the PC gaming scene was so dominated by WoW and FPS games - basically nobody my age that I knew played RTS games at the time, although lots of people slightly older than me were still fans of AoE2 and Brood War. SC2 was a huge boost in popularity for RTSes, and honestly just having an engine that *worked* made it super hypeworthy. (Control groups of more than 12! Non-insane pathing! Actually being able to see the units!) With these early SC2 videos (I don't remember which one), the unit that struck me most was the original Tempest, which was a Nerazim carrier whose interceptors did melee damage. I think they ultimately scrapped it because of its similarity to the Carrier (and the love that Brood War players had for that unit), but the development team was clearly overflowing with ideas to play around with.

This gameplay looks really cool! I like the atmosphere! It clearly shows everything has its counter. Also, Protoss shields have great visuals there.

Old Siege Tanks looking like Pingu. Noot, noot!

5:29 siege tank lipstick paint job

This and the other videos of Starcraft 2 Alpha made me wanting to play the game even more, all this cool stuff? Man I really wanted to play around with everything they showed but of course since this was an Alpha and the people that playtested the game to see what balance changes they needed to do (especially for PVP) but man I would have love to do all that in the campaing or in the more casual content like Coop. Like you can keep all that crazy stuff for the campaing and even Coop and all of us would have been happy

I 'member watching these several times everyday coming home from work in complete and utter hype.

I remember watching this video over and over

Something interesting, I've been fucking around trying to learn how to use the editor, and I discovered that the planet cracker ability and animation are still in the game. I'd have to check to see if time bomb is there

Thanks for the nostalgia trip! ^^

Sucks that the wire frame was still in game at this point until it was removed in the base game :/ Also scv had a different building look than in the base game(no yellow crane) Also was the doodads with the machine that was shooting lasers at the mineral fields still in game? I remember back in the day, ppl believed those machines was a new terran unit, like mule I guess

Terran is really good right now because of stim bio. Reapers definitely need a mid/lategame buff, and the long range jump pack honestly sounds perfect, especially with modern reaper speed

wow! I think I saw some of it sometime bakc, but that black hole was INSANE!!! I guess this was the original idea of the Archon's black hole on the LOTV trailer

MAAAAAAAAAAN MY CHILDHOOD! this is like everything I wanted when I was a kid! I never played starcraft so seeing this for the first time when it was released I was so unbelievably excited for this game I actually could not wait for it to be released! the small little details like the color from the icon changing from green into parts of yellow and red was one of my favorites together with the mothership! I knew the moment I saw that final battle at the end that I was going to love this game no matter what

The cliffwalking ability of the colossus was very strong in wol and hots when protoss were turtling on 3 bases with a pocket third below the main base, you could put your colossi to the side of the main base ramp and they could defend all 3 bases from that position. In fact that was the only reason protoss could defend 3 bases and turtle until they could get enough units out to be able to move out on the map.

„You already got the cheese when playing Protoss so you get the planet cracker to go with it. Crackers and cheese - amazing“. That really... you know... cracked me up. ( 23:55 )

When I saw this video at around late 2007, an older cousin got the video in a CD played it on his PS2, holy moly my mind was blown

The third Ghost launching a nuke directly into the Terran line with few Protoss present in that area

Oh the Mothership. SC2 alpha had amazing doom units. That Time Stop actually holding the missles, the planet cracker, and that black hole. Animations were amazing, and easier to appreciate on Normal speed. So so so cool. Its sad that this kind of stuff never made it into the offline game - campaign, arcade, whatever. It would be so fun!!

this was mind blowing back when I saw it, we were fans of starcraft in my school, and starcraft and quake arena were about the most graphically demanding games we could run on the labs PCs so this was awsome

those banes were dealing 45 damage to the colosi

14:43 i never realized how cracked these Banelings were. it also looks like a SINGLE Baneling is almost entirely peeling the Colossus's shield off, which means at this stage in development units may have still damaged shields how they do in Brood War, IE doing "full" damage against Shields at all times (so, Siege Tanks would deal 70 damage to a Zealot, completely removing its shield, but then only 35 to the Zealot's hull in subsequent shots). you can also see that once the Shield is gone, the Baneling is only doing 39 damage. im guessing the Colossus had 1 armor and Banelings had at least 40 base damage. they probably had something like 40+40 vs light.

That Terran gameplay trailer also had an accompanying singleplayer video demo if you wanna check that out, the Terran ones were from 2008 I believe

I remember this preview; it was unusual seeing that the portraits for everyone but the Battlecruiser captain remaining essentially the same in the final product despite this being an early demo for the game.

I was waiting for this vid. Just like for Grant this gameplay trailer was the reason SC2 entered my life.

These are the videos that made go insane watching and waiting for starcraft 2 ❤

I still think about this video sometimes. It's just so cool and fun looking! And, like I think basically everything else, the Purifier Mothership should have been the alpha-version mothership. THAT would have made it a fun boss fight!

The literal term for that "bendy thing" in real life is called Spaghettification

the Nexus Coop custom map that's just the coop maps with custom commanders has a planet cracker mothership in it. IIRC that faction fills the calldown bar buttons with units passively and has to deploy one of its two heroes to be allowed to call down those units, one adept hero who allows you to deploy your ground units & one mothership hero who allows you to deploy your air units. the mothership gets flipped into "planet cracker" mode & begins firing a beam downward that grows in size & damage until the beam is as wide as the mothership is, making it basically an AOE super-void ray, but in exchange it cant use its defensive immortal shield ability. so you charge up the beam & then roll your mothership over the enemy alongside your air army, turning the beam off to activate its immortal shield when it's taking too much fire, and then right before it dies you hit the button on the calldown bar to recall your army and the mothership and its attending fleet jumps away, and then you call down the ground army to mop up what's left while the fleet recovers in orbit. its good stuff. also has a faction where you build barracks that produce units but instead of deploying them each unit they train gets put into the merc compound as a charge, & from the merc compound you pick where each unit is instantly orbitally dropped combining the best parts of Raynor's orbital deployment & merc compound with the best parts of the Protoss's Warp-ins

Lol I'm watching this at work, and the microsoft outlook notification had me scrambling to find what meeting I was about to be late for.

That comment on the RTS falling out around 2006 hit me hard xD my friends and i all grew up with Age Of Empires and Starcraft brood war, and played them almost religiously together. But then almost nothing new came out any good for around a decade. We fell into other genres, and didn't really look back, since there was nothing new to get into. we've all gone our separate paths now, and i miss playing RTS games with them all during our free time. Only found SC2 myself a couple years back when i decided to check blizzard games again. While i love Sc2, i can't sink myself into it as deeply as i did when my friends and I spent hours on end just playing each other and having fun. it's a great game still though, and i can't wait for SC3 to come out in 10 more years. it's just not as fun playing the games alone anymore when i have so many great memories of playing with my friends as a child.

22:22 all of the missile models in the game no longer have any kind of physics test (i dont remember exactly what it's called) to them from what i can tell, so that makes doing this exact effect really tricky nowadays, since the model file on disk itself has to have the correct data in it for the engine to properly simulate physics for it. ive had the idea of attaching an invisible physics barrel to missiles to get the effect that way, and in theory this would work, but the actor work is really tricky and i havent totally figured it out yet. the only other way would be to modify the models of each and every missile you'd want to have this be done to in order to give them a physics test. i do one day want to have this effect in my mod, though.

4:33 this is likely because the footprint for the barracks is a complete square. most footprints today have half squares for their corners, making a more octagon-like shape than a square. that's my guess, anyway. in which case, this could still be done via modding today.

cliffwalking can actually be really great though, especially in the campaign, where the AI doesn't usually replace any air spotter support quickly.

The absolute closest I can get to your question if physics in blackhole, if there are any games that do that. Closest (and it's not even that close) would be the Scrin Rift Generator. Buildings will shake when the rift is overhead and pieces will shoot off into the rift. But it's an older game than even this footage so it's not quite at the same level.

In titanfall 2 you can catch enemy projectiles and fling back at them. it was pretty dope cause it would routinely jib enemy grunts.

Soo awesome seeing Starcraft 2 veterans reacting to these time capsule videos. 😇

Looking at this normal game speed demo made me want to see a mod that would imitate "Even faster" game speed

Cliff walking is mostly used in base defense when stepping collosi away from zero all ins

I think it would be fun to look at old unit trailers and discussing how they would fit in modern Starcraft 2.

I definitely recall this video from way back in the day and it got me very hyped for the game. In a way, I feel like multiplayer balancing (and probably performance optimizing too) sapped a lot of the FUN away from StarCraft 2. If you look at this video and then look at a modern pro match with super responsive 200 supply deathballs killing each other at the speed of thought, it's like night and day. I almost wish they had kept this slower game speed as the default too - would have made it a little bit closer to WarCraft 3 and I think more digestible for audiences.

The "bendy thing" at the end is accomplished with non-linear mathematical transformations on some of the coordinates of the textures and interpolating between them. You can do this in pretty much any engine, the equations arent that complicated.

2:44 Zealot 4:57 Tank 5:42 Immotral 6:26 Reaper 8:01 Warp Prism 9:08 Stalker 10:33 Nydus 11:17 Warp Prism 12:23 Colossus(Changed) 14:30 Baneling 15:56 Mutalisk 16:04 Phoenix(Changed) 17:50 Battlecruiser 18:30 Void Ray 19:53 Marine 20:43 Mothership(Changed) 26:17 Summary

The video didn't cover much about the Zerg, but here's something I crafted out explaining why the Zerg race is so strong in SC2. The new Zerg units essentially sprung out of Protoss-themed ideas. And where does that leave the Protoss? Either lacking the abilities they previously had in Brood War, having been given to the Zerg, or the Zerg now having similar tools to what was only supposed to be available to the Protoss in Brood War. Examples below. Roach - Is so strong because it's essentially a ranged Zealot. Why even? Isn't Zerg early tech about cheap units mass produced? Why have a new class of unit? Ravager - Due to its association with Roaches, I saw them as upgraded Dragoons. Viper - Parasitic bomb is essentially Psi Storm which follows the target like Irradiate. Abduct is a single unit recall. Add on blinding cloud which is mass-version of Medic's Optic Flare. That's how it's strong. Swarm Host - Like a budget Reaver. Baneling - Scarabs available right out of recycled basic units. Infestor - Having the Dark Archon's mind control. All these are cheaper and budget versions of their Protoss equivalents, at the same time being so practical hence increasing the effectiveness of the Zerg race. They have too many copies of what another race has and in more practical versions, better packaged to adapt and handle any challenges from opponents.

2230: it is in the game, the raven's anti-projectile drone. the rest is just vfx :)

I don't know if it's true, but I heard they dialed back on certain effects because of lag. Like how you see bits and pieces of Battlecruisers and blown-up buildings for a while. The Timebomb ability collecting shots from a big army sounds potentially quite taxing. Would be really cool to have, though.

22:50 That is truly amazing. I want that. However, I have a feeling this was done just to create absolute hype - as that hype can be generated even today - and in practice they already knew it is impossible to pull off for the immense load this, combined with the physics, would put on everyone's system. Look how many extra units those rockets make up. They would at least have to limit the number of projectiles would be rendered in this, removing the oldest once the threshold is reached.

C&C generals actually had some cool things like chinese ECM tank that was deflecting some rockets (but not all of them) or disable vehicles laser point defence for US that also still can be overwhelmed by the number of rockets aurora bomber that could go "supersonic" and cannot be hit while dive mombing bomb trucks taht can change appearance to look like enemy I'd watch you going through the campaign, interesting what u'd say about it

Actually, the stasis bomb in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 works kind of like that chrono field. The ability kind of made its way in there, though the way to take advantage of it is to use laser weaponry rather than to have a unit that's immune to it.

I think the reason the time field got removed was how inconsistent it was with respect to the projectiles. Like some of the missiles hit the mothership (you see the HP go down) and others don't? Do the projectiles just slow in the middle of the field or does speed go down to 0 over time when they travel anywhere in the sphere? The time warp that's in LotV is a lot less flashy but it's a lot easier to understand.

Battlefleet Gothic Armada one and two have a stasis field ability that is reminiscent of the time bomb.

I’m glad you said you learned what GG was from this video, because I’m pretty sure that’s true for me too

Regarding the Mothership's time bomb ability, I think you can consider C&C Generals: Zero Hour's ECM tank also has a fun ability to temper with rockets. It creates a small dome around it that changes the trajectory of every missile that gets into its field. It made some cool looking moments when a dozen of rockets were trying to hit your army but a couple of ECM in the front would render those attacks useless. (Ofc the Mothership's ability is still much cooler)

Grant you need to hunt down the PC gamer cd that gave a ton of demonstration with none of the narration, as far as I can tell, it was an August issue, 2011 or 2010, it was awesome as hell and sold me on Wings of Liberty but I cannnnnnnot find the footage anywhere! There was a video where you could see tons of units fighting the Zerg, terran on one side, protoss on the other and both sides eventually used all their forces, it was really damn cool. The Protoss had Photon cannons that could reloate permanently, called Phase CAnnons.

Alphastar didn't have infinite apm, it was limited by apm per minute at first. So it would use it's actions as a resource, purposefully sitting back or kitting slowly to save up apm then to use it all in a burst of micro spiking to really high amounts. Since it was fighting itself it grew in a way built around that, trying to waste the actions of the other ai etc. That's why many of the things it did seemed odd to normal players.

I think this old Siege Tank design is used in Mass Recall

The data remians on the editor but shattered, incomplete but many has revived this alpha planet cracker skill

oh man, i remember watching this back in the day. It sure felt like a different game, just like how the infestors were able to infest building and the Corruptor literally corrupted air units. Good ol days!

Is it bad that when the Immortals came into the video that I noticed the holodancer was using animations from I believe the Night Elf female in World of Warcraft?

Now here I am hoping to see some kind of alpha restoration mod. As a Protoss player especially, I wish I had these tools to play with, even if just for the novelty of it.