StarCraft: Ghost, the Cancelled Game and Its Story

StarCraft: Ghost was a third-person action game for consoles that Blizzard announced in September 2002 and put on indefinite hold in March 2006. It starred Nova Terra, a ghost of the Terran Dominion, and would have swapped StarCraft's top-down strategy for stealth and shooting on the ground. The game never shipped, but Nova and the core of its plot became canon through novels and StarCraft II. (Blizzard Entertainment Announces StarCraft: Ghost; Blizzard postpones Ghost to evaluate next-gen consoles)

The game Blizzard announced#

Blizzard unveiled StarCraft: Ghost at a press conference at the Tokyo Game Show on 20 September 2002. It called the game a tactical-action console title set in the StarCraft universe, co-developed with Nihilistic Software and due in late 2003, with players taking the role of Nova, a ghost trained in espionage and combat. Capcom was named as co-publisher in Japan. (Blizzard Entertainment Announces StarCraft: Ghost)

Development did not stay with Nihilistic. Swingin' Ape Studios took over the project in July 2004, and on 16 May 2005 Blizzard announced it had bought the studio, keeping its team of more than 40 developers. (Blizzard Acquires Swingin' Ape Entertainment)

In late March 2006 Blizzard said it would move its console work to the next generation of hardware and, as part of that shift, postpone production of StarCraft: Ghost indefinitely while it weighed what the new consoles could do. The game never came back. It now appears only as a footnote in the full list of StarCraft games. When Blizzard cancelled its MMO Titan in 2014, Mike Morhaime told Polygon it had been hard to cancel Warcraft Adventures and StarCraft Ghost too, but that those calls had always led to better work. (Blizzard postpones Ghost to evaluate next-gen consoles; Blizzard cancels its next-gen MMO Titan after seven years)

The planned story (not canon)#

Everything in this section comes from the story page on Blizzard's StarCraft: Ghost website, pre-release material for a game that was never finished. Treat it as a design that changed, not as StarCraft history. (StarCraft: Ghost, Covert Ops: Story Overview)

The game was set four years after Brood War. Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, helped by his new adviser General Horace Warfield, was running a secret project called Project Shadow Blade, which used the rare gas terrazine to alter Dominion ghosts and turn them into spectres. Nova was to uncover the truth behind it while caught between the Dominion and a rebel group, the Koprulu Liberation Front. (StarCraft: Ghost, Covert Ops: Story Overview)

What became canon instead#

StarCraft: Ghost: Nova (2006)#

Keith R. A. DeCandido's novel, published in November 2006, tells Nova's early life. She was born to the Terra family, one of the Old Families of Tarsonis. When rebels murdered her family, her telepathy erupted and destroyed part of the Terra Skyscraper. She survived in the Gutter under the crime lord Fagin until the wrangler Malcolm Kelerchian brought her into the Ghost Program, where she accepted a memory wipe so she could forget. (StarCraft: Ghost: Nova)

StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres (2011)#

Nate Kenyon's novel is the closest thing to the game's plot in canon. Exposure to terrazine on Altara began undoing Nova's memory wipes, and she found that ghosts were being taken by renegade spectres. The trail led to Colonel Jackson Hauler, who was secretly running his own version of Shadow Blade as General Bennett from a hidden station, with Gabriel Tosh among his spectres. Nova freed Kelerchian and killed Bennett, and the station was destroyed, though Tosh got away. (StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)

StarCraft II (2010 to 2016)#

Nova reached the games in Wings of Liberty, where she warned Jim Raynor against helping Tosh and, if Raynor sided with her, killed Tosh. In Heart of the Swarm she led the Dominion raid that captured Raynor. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

Nova Covert Ops, released in mission packs through 2016, finally made her a playable lead. Working for Emperor Valerian Mengsk, she uncovered the Defenders of Man, a conspiracy that had wiped her memory and used her, and ended it by killing its leader Carolina Davis. It plays like an RTS campaign rather than the shooter Ghost was meant to be, but it is the story Blizzard eventually told about her. See the StarCraft II story guide for where it fits. (StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops)

Game vs canon: the key differences#

The Ghost game framed Shadow Blade as Mengsk and Warfield's own programme with Nova as the loyal agent who discovers it. In Spectres, the project's original form was dissolved and the threat came from Bennett's rogue revival, so Nova ended up protecting Mengsk rather than exposing him. (StarCraft: Ghost, Covert Ops: Story Overview; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)

Spectres survived the move too. The terrazine-altered ghosts planned for the game appear in StarCraft II as Tosh's spectres. (StarCraft: Ghost, Covert Ops: Story Overview; StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)