After a three-year gap, Anaheim opens its doors today with the Koprulu Sector louder than anything on the official schedule.
Doors at the Anaheim Convention Center opened this morning for the first BlizzCon since 2023. Hall D fills on a first-come basis for a 10:30 a.m. Pacific opening ceremony that Blizzard has billed, as usual, as the home of “major announcements.” WoW, Diablo, and Overwatch sit on the printed card. The hallway conversation is about something else.
StarCraft has not shipped a new original game since Legacy of the Void in 2015. A remaster followed in 2017. Then the franchise went quiet. This week it started talking again, in glitches.
The show that finally came back
Blizzard announced the 2026 date in March 2025 and sold early-bird passes last November. The two-day run is Saturday, September 12 and Sunday, September 13. Show hours run 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific. Registration started Friday in Hall E.
The staples are back. Opening ceremony. Darkmoon Faire, now the largest edition of the attraction yet. Hands-on stations for World of Warcraft, Diablo IV, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Diablo Immortal. A Blizzard Arcade with StarCraft and Heroes of the Storm. Community Night on the main stage Saturday evening. LE SSERAFIM closes Sunday as a prelude to their North American tour. YOASOBI plays an in-arena Overwatch World Cup halftime that will not stream.
Esports prize money tops $1.2 million across the Overwatch World Cup, the Arena World Championship, the Mythic Dungeon International, the Hearthstone Masters Tour, and a new Blizzard Classic Cup that puts StarCraft II back under arena lights. Streams run free on official Twitch and YouTube channels.
That is the published show. The unpublished one started on a website that had barely moved in years.
A website that started screaming
Evolution Complete: Reimagining Classic StarCraft Units for StarCraft II — StarCraft II — Blizzard News
On September 3 the official StarCraft Remastered page began to flicker on purpose. Backgrounds warped. Text strobed. The Battle.net mark jumped. Fans opened the console and found transmissions dated August and September 2575. That is roughly 67 years after the close of Legacy of the Void.
Decoded logs name Theta Squadron, a lunar site called the Roxara Mining Complex, a freighter full of “research” cargo, a sensor grid at 2 percent power that reports zero occupants and fourteen motion signatures. Transmission 02 added cargo that “screeches and scratches” and a medical file tagged S. K███████. The letter count is why half of Reddit wrote Sarah Kerrigan in the blank. Blizzard has not confirmed the name.
Site code includes a variable, __argNetworkTracker. Fans treated that as permission to treat the page as an ARG, the first StarCraft one since Project Blackstone in 2013. Fragments keep rotating on repeat visits. The tone is containment-breach horror, not a ladder reset.
What the reporters say the game actually is
The shooter rumor is older than the glitch. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier wrote in his 2024 book Play Nice that Blizzard had a StarCraft game in development under Dan Hay, the former Far Cry lead who joined the studio in 2022. This month Schreier added a limiter: do not expect a Destiny-style live-service loop.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden has been more specific. He says he has seen early footage: third-person combat, cutscenes, voice work, a full single-player campaign with co-op, closer to Space Marine 2 or Far Cry than an always-online loot grind. Multiplayer modes are on the table, he says, in the way Gears of War keeps them on the table. He has also said StarCraft is the likely headline of this show. None of that is an official slide.
A separate thread out of Seoul complicates the picture. Chosun reported this month that Nexon is close to a deal for rights to develop a StarCraft successor, sometimes framed as StarCraft III. Schreier’s public response was blunt: if that report is true, it is not the Blizzard shooter. Two projects can exist. Only one of them has to walk onto Hall D this morning.
An unverified 4chan schedule dump even named a panel, “StarCraft Infantry.” Treat that as fan fiction until a producer says the words. The official day-one main-stage card still jumps from the opening ceremony to World of Warcraft: What’s Next with a gap that rumor-watchers have been circling for a week.
Why the heat is this high
StarCraft built Korean esports. It also left a cancelled third-person experiment, StarCraft: Ghost, in 2006. A new shooter would close that loop and give Microsoft a cinematic campaign franchise that does not live or die on a battle pass. An RTS sequel under Nexon would speak to the players who never left the ladder. The ARG’s 2575 date lets either project keep the old canon and start a new cast. Kerrigan in a medical file is catnip. It is also still a redaction.
Blizzard has not confirmed a reveal. The company has also not told anyone the glitches are a bug. That combination is doing more work than any trailer.
How to watch, and what else is on the floor
Opening ceremony: 10:30 a.m. PDT, about 75 minutes, on Blizzard’s Twitch and YouTube. Then WoW at noon, Diablo at 1:45 p.m., more WoW at 2:45, an Overwatch hero deep dive at 3:45, Community Night at 4:45. Classic Cup StarCraft II matches run on the classics stream. Watch an hour of StarCraft content on Twitch this weekend for a 10-day XP boost.
If Hall D stays quiet on StarCraft, the ARG still exists. The year on those logs is 2575. Someone at Blizzard typed that on purpose.
AI Disclosure: This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools and was reviewed and edited by the Glowls News editorial team before publication.