Hundreds of North American StarCraft prodigies team up for the first collegiate “Archon” tournament in history.

Last January, following the release of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, the latest multiplayer expansion to the Blizzard’s real-time strategy series timeline, we announced our very first Tespa Collegiate Series for StarCraft, featuring $50,000 in scholarship prizing.

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As one the oldest and most technical esports in gaming history, StarCraft is a game that, historically, has attracted only the most die-hard players. This year, we challenged players from across North America to tackle StarCraft’s challenging gameplay with the help of a teammate in a new competitive two-versus-two team format called “Archon Mode”, named after a powerful in-game psionic titan created by merging two weaker Protoss units.

For the first time ever, over 300 players from 131 different colleges joined forces with their classmates to balance the infamously challenging micro and macro unit control demanded of high-level StarCraft players. Over the course of the 7-week collegiate playoffs, the best Archon teams from each region battled for a ticket to the grand finals, held at Dreamhack Austin!

DREAMHACK

And then, there were two. Emerging victorious from the the online semifinals, the Archons from the University of Kansas and Rensselaer Polytechnic University arrived at the very first North American launch of Dreamhack, the world’s largest LAN festival, for a clash of the titans.

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GRAND FINALS: KANSAS VS. RPI

Representing the University of Kansas with an undefeated record in their region, Protoss faction players Bails and JamesBrown faced off against RPI’s Jobama and Freshman prodigy JonSnow, a well-known Grandmaster player and champion of the Highschool Starleague.

Kansas and RPI each displayed impressive technical mastery of the game, but RPI’s aggressive Zerg playstyle dominated Kansas's methodical Protoss play for a 3-1 victory, ending with a desperate base race by Kansas in the final match that was foiled when RPI’s mutalisk swarm halted a critically-important range upgrade for Kansas’s anti-air Pheonix squadron.

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Dominating their way through a challenging bracket with very close sets from from well-known Starcraft masters like UC Berkeley's Archon team, starring professional StarCraft player EG Suppy, and the runner-ups from Kansas University, Rensselaer's Jobama and JonSnow tag-teamed their way to victory in our very first Tespa Collegiate Series for StarCraft, winning $12,000 in scholarships apiece and the title of "Best Collegiate StarCraft Archon" in North America.

Watch the official replays, browse our favorite news articles, and learn more about next year’s competition and more Tespa collegiate tournaments below.