By skyforbes Our main league is ASL, the Afreeca/SOOP StarLeague for Brood War. It started in 2016 and we just finished Season 20 this year. If you count the 2024 SOOP StarCraft League Autumn as ASL Season 18, the champions by race from Season 1 to 20 come out to roughly: Terran 8 titles, Zerg 9 titles, Protoss 3 titles. Flash still has the most ASL wins with four, and in the current era SoulKey also put together four big titles in a row, with Soma winning Season 20 over Snow this year as Zerg. As a Protoss player, watching only three Protoss wins in twenty seasons hurts a little bit, ngl.
What makes all of this funny is that Brood War basically stopped getting real balance patches in the early 2000s, and Remastered was made to keep the original gameplay and balance. On paper nothing has changed for more than twenty years. In practice, the “patch notes” are the maps and the players. New maps change which race feels comfortable, and pros keep finding new builds, new timings and new late game plans, so the meta never really sits still. Early ASL felt like Terran heaven with Flash and other Terrans farming trophies; now it feels like we’re deep in a Zerg era and everyone else is just trying to survive it.
Outside the main league, Brood War is still a whole ecosystem on Korean streaming. On SOOP (the rebranded AfreecaTV), the StarCraft category can spike to well over a hundred thousand live viewers during big events, with a ton of active channels all restreaming, casting or just laddering. There’s even a big “Star University League” where thirteen streamer “universities” and around three hundred streamers play a month-long team league for about 60 million won in prize money, with offline finals in an arena. That league is split into multiple skill tiers (like League 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on), so brand-new or low-rank streamers start in the lower divisions, get coached by ex-pros, and slowly climb up. It keeps feeding fresh people into the scene.
A lot of old progamers and famous names basically pay their rent with Brood War plus streaming now. They coach in these leagues, play showmatches, cast ASL, and then go home and grind ladder in front of chat. For viewers it feels less like an “old game revival” and more like a weird, very long-running sports league that just never stopped.
From the outside it’s a 1998 game, but from here it still feels very alive: twenty seasons of ASL, maps acting like balance patches, a current Zerg meta that feels brutal to play against, and a bunch of people who literally make a living off SC1.
I’m curious: is there any game in your country that old that still feels this “present” to its fans?