The original Starcraft and Brood War expansion are now completely free

With Starcraft's HD Remaster now just around the corner, Blizzard has gone ahead and made the original game and the Brood War expansion free to download. Starting from today, you can download and play the original versions of Starcraft and Broodwar on both PC and Mac, with a fresh new patch that makes a few additions.

Starcraft and Broodwar were both made free as part of Patch 1.18, which fixes the 80s Kerrigan face bug, fixes issues with LAN game discovery and improves anti-cheat capabilities.

Here are the full patch notes:

General:

• Added windowed fullscreen or windowed mode; use Alt+Enter to switch between.
• Added UTF-8 support.
• Added cursor clamping in-game while windowed; unclamped in menus.
• Added Popular Maps to streamline finding games or game types.
• Added options to display actions per minute.
• Added Observer mode.
• Added opponent information when joining a game lobby.
• Added autosaving for replays.
• Added an option to display the game timer.
• Added UPnP support.
• Updated to a new OpenGL backend.
• Improved gameplay responsiveness during multiplayer by increasing turn rate to match LAN speeds over Battle.net.
• Improved UI layout in Battle.net sections.
• Improved behavior of available lobbies within the ‘Join Game’ section.
• Improved compatibility with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.
• Improved anticheat capabilities.
• Improved installation and patching performance.
• Mac Beta support now available for 10.11 and up.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed palette issues to correct rainbow water, 80s Kerrigan face in the loading screen, and other graphic glitches.
• Fixed problems with LAN game discovery.
• Fixed IME support and other text artifacts in Battle.net menus.
• LAN and Legacy Battle.net fixes.

Known Issues:

• The profile section is currently unavailable.

You can find the free download and install links for Starcraft, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I missed out on the original Starcraft back In the day but having heard so many positive things about it, I may go back and check it out now. Are any of you planning on going back to the original Starcraft now that its free?

Become a Patron!