17th June 2007, 7:51 PM
Starcraft took ideas from everything in science fiction, not just Warhammer 40k, and it's got plenty of new things in its plot too... saying it "ripped it off" is just wrong, just like how saying that D&D ripped off Tolkien or something is also false... of course there are connections, and perhaps inspiration (though I think the D&D creators said that it was more based off of later Tolkien-ish books and not LotR itself), but while some, less remembered, things truly are just copies of what came before the better ones, like Warhammer or Starcraft, may have been inspired by identifiable older sources but have their own way of doing things that makes them unique. Zelda works similarly, though less coherently because the Zelda series does not have much stable continuity... every game is really its own separate thing and any connections between the titles are as much supposition as they are fact. Within each separate game though, absolutely.