I think Starcraft and Warcraft before it are both stellar examples of inventive remixing and borrowing from existing worlds. That is very different from plagiarism.

Games Workshop does not own the copyright on nearly-dead-warriors-entombed-in-exoskeletons. Nor did they invent the idea of the nearly dead being sustained by cybernetics, or of using robotics to assist those of limited physical ability. We all are inspired by things.

It's especially odd to talk about about "Warhammer" or "Starcraft" as if they are managed by a single human, when in fact all of these worlds are written and envisioned by a multi-generational army of creative people who are all drawing on sources to come up with ideas. Are all of the employees of GW who write about dreadnoughts plagiarizing the employee who came up with the idea?

Starcraft copied a lot more than just that from Warhammer.

Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages. Also have plenty of units that looks rather similar to their Zerg equivalents.

The basic look of space marines and Starcraft marines are completely different why they toned down the skulls and well that’s about it.

That’s fine at least they didn’t copy the ancient psionic technology using Eldar who, wait never mind.

So what you're saying is that we shouldn't respect creative works that are too similar to their inspirations and you think a good example of the creative work we should respect is...Warhammer?

"It’s all in here, the neolithic bones of our current game system. Borrowing heavily from Tolkein, you get all the standard Fantasy races, standard beasties (heck even the Balrog is in there by name), and so many others...There is no Old World, no Warhammer world, no history, just some little crazed and revolutionary rules for using units of fantasy lead miniatures to fight out epic battles."[1]

[1] https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2012/01/lore-unboxing-warham...

Tossing a huge range of different properties in a blender is fine, ripping off a single property is just lazy. Which sounds more original pure Harry Potter fan fiction or ER the TV show + Harry Potter + Cheers the TV show.

Draw evenly from M*A*S*H + Dresden Files + Mass Effect + Dexter and your going to end up in some strange and interesting places. Play through Starcraft 1+2 on the other hand and the story is fine if a bit bland.

Also, Warhammer 40k heavily diverged from the original Warhammer.

I absolutely agree that Blizzard's worlds are weaker than Games Workshop's. GW has a real talent for genre fiction, where Blizzard struggles with the basics of plot structure.

The thing I disagree with is that Blizzard's problem is that they 'copied.' Everyone copies! The bits that Blizzard copied are the most compelling part of Starcraft. The reason it is weak is that they were not better at drawing on the ideas of others. They did not understand what was compelling about 40k, so they create this unsatisfying narrative mishmash.

Warhammer FB -> Warhammer 40k is a great example of this being done better. You could type out the same kind of demeaning summary of Warhammer 40k as you did for Starcraft: "Tyranids are gross, chitinous just like Geiger's xenomorph; the Eldar are just space-high-elves; The squats are just space dwarves." It's all true, as far as it goes. But - because GW is better than Blizzard - they went further and added other ideas (many of which also came from other works). The problem is never that they drew on other sources. In fact, looking at other worlds and using the core of what 'works' about that world before transforming it is at the center of basically all good works.

> Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages. Also have plenty of units that looks rather similar to their Zerg equivalents.

Tyranids barely existed when Starcraft got released, most of the things you talked about was created by games workshop afterwards, so likely they copied Starcraft instead.

Tyranids where part of the 1987 version of 40k and barely mentioned. Genestealers were first introduced in the board game Space Hulk published in 1989 and introduced into the Tyranids well before Starcraft’s release date.

1993, featured the Tyranids in the supplemental books Wargear and Codex Imperialis, and then later in their own devoted army Codex.

By comparison Starcraft 1 is from 1998 at which point Tyranids had gone through multiple revisions and had fairly close to their modern lore.

>Tyranids giant biological hive mind that rapidly adapts to new environments consuming or infecting existing species to plunder their genetic advantages.

Sounds like GW copied that from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or maybe Enders Game.

Ditto the Space Marines.

Culture is just copying/remixing, all the way down.

Enders game’s alien are quite different from both they aren’t a single unified hive mind but a species of queens and mindless drones using biological technology rather than literally being the ships or having a wide range of forms, also no rapid evolution or gene stealing etc. Starship Troupers share even less they don’t even use starships, aren’t a unified hive mind, etc their both great example of sci-fi space biological armies being a fairly huge space for different ideas.

Remixing at least involves using multiple sources, my only real issue is SC both only copied from 40k and changed so little. It’s like the figured after just crossing just past the line of copyright infringement was enough and they would go no further. But hey they did the same with the original Warhammer game to make Warcraft and that worked out just fine for them.

Like dreadnoughts? I'd argue fantasy and science fiction is all iterating over itself endlessly and there's creative ways of doing it. Plunging dragoons into a liquid bath puts dragoons at something of a cross-section of evangelion and 40k tomb-mech.

I could go on. The ghosts exhaling poison vapor with spider eyes or hydralisks vomiting buckets of saliva. Sunken colonies with their long knife-tongues; the Creep. As a whole I think Blizzard really made something special.