Three asymmetric alien races in a real-time strategy game that South Korea adopted as a national sport. Brood War ran on two Korean television channels, made stars of players like Lim Yo-hwan, filled stadiums, and survived a 2010 match-fixing scandal. The record notes the game is still played professionally in Korea and that 'zerg rush' is filed separately.
Someone remembers watching a Korean broadcast with no idea what the casters were saying and understanding every second of it. The record notes this is how most non-Koreans discovered esports.
Correction: Brood War did not die when StarCraft II arrived in 2010. The Korean scene shrank, then returned; the Afreeca Starleague started in 2016 and Blizzard released a remaster in 2017. The record files it as alive without qualification.
A 2005 StarCraft final held on a beach in Busan, with a reported crowd in the tens of thousands. The record notes that the attendance figures vary by source and the beach is real.
The record notes that 'PC bang' means an internet café and that South Korea had around twenty thousand of them by 2001, most of them full of StarCraft. The game's success there is usually explained by the 1997 financial crisis and cheap broadband; the record accepts both.
The record is wrong. Show what it should say, and why.
