An Important Development: How to get Starcraft 2 without a Beta Key

In 1998, Blizzard unleashed their secret weapon for taking over the world: Starcraft. Making an absolutely huge splash in the gaming and RTS community, Starcraft still has a huge fanbase and is still one of the most popular games in the world.

When Starcraft 2 was announced, followers (including myself) shed tears of joy as Tychus Findlay uttered the fateful words: “Hell, it’s about time.” And when you found out about the opportunity to sign up for the open beta you jumped at the opportunity.

Jimmy Raynor, Heaven's Devils.

Like myself, you didn’t get into the beta. (If you did, congratulations and you should be proud.) So you watched videos that HD Starcraft and Husky post onto the Youtube channels, and that kept your fix in check.

Now, I am proud to announce that even you can play the Starcraft 2 beta on your computer. I’ll tell you the catch straight up front — you can’t play against other players online, only against AI bots. But what the hell, that made no difference for me and probably wouldn’t for you.

You need, of course, the Starcraft 2 beta. You can probably find it on some Torrenting sites, but I’m not going to point them out. Do your own dirty work. Haha. Or, if you’re in university, you can get it off your DC++ network! It’s approximately 1.68GB in size, shouldn’t take anymore than a night to download.

Once downloaded, head over to the Teknogods forums using this link: http://teknogods.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2229 and download the launcher (but follow the instructions on the page, please). This launcher allows you to directly start a SC2 game without going through SC2. And that’s basically it, you can now play SC2.

With that said, you will probably run into an issue. There will be an antivirus warning claiming that the launcher is a piece of spyware or a trojan. This is because it is a piece of third-party software that illegitimately accesses SC2 and forces it to start the game. So it is kind of malicious. But it shouldn’t harm you.*

So, fellow Starcraft 2 lovers, game on and enjoy. Tell me what you think of SC2!

Image source: http://us.starcraft2.com/screenshots.xml

*I am not responsible for what happens to your computer, use at your own risk. But for what it’s worth, it hasn’t harmed me yet. The juice is definitely worth the squeeze.