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My hero, it transpires, is a man named Grubby. Grubby's inferior human name is Manuel Schenkhuizen, and he hails from the Netherlands. He's mild-mannered and pleasant, as far as I can gather, and he's atypically good at StarCraft 2. He's a genius at it, a real pro. He's not as atypically good as some of the other pros gathered in Versailles for the European leg of Heart of the Swarm's Global Launch event, though. The pre-match chatter suggests that Grubby's not going to win tonight's competition. It's a four man affair composed of two semi-finals (each built of three games each), which are capped with a tense three-game decider. Grubby's good, but he's going out in the first round.
This competition is how Blizzard's chosen to let StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm loose upon the world, and it feels like a pretty good idea. Two years have passed since Wings of Liberty touched down, and Blizzard's RTS has made the most of them. That's two years of ingeniously asymmetrical warfare, in other words, of bewildered eSports articles in the mainstream press - and sometimes, admittedly, the gaming press. Two years of debates about whether this unit's OP or that race is imba, of tech strats and of build orders. It's hard not to look around Versailles tonight, to see all the moving parts - the crowds, the bunting, the stores shifting glossy copies of Sarah Kerrigan-fronted Risk - and feel like Blizzard's engaged in a deeply elaborate game of StarCraft itself. Squint and you might sense you're watching an RTS match being comprehensively steamrollered by a company that churns out blockbusters with an astonishing degree of confidence. Why's everyone so excited? Why did so many people travel from so far to be here? What's the build order that builds you this?
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