Happy Puppy, which served as yet another Blizzard's official download mirror, lists the Starcraft demo among the 'Newest PC Game Demos and Shareware' on June 29, 1998, whereas a snapshot from May 5th, 1998 makes no mention of Starcraft at all.

Another snapshot, from December 2nd, 1998, already has a demo download link, as expected. A snapshot of GameSpot's Starcraft downloads page from April 23rd, 1998 only features the v1.01 patch but no demo.The Adrenaline Vault website, which was one of the official download mirrors for the Starcraft demo, added the file on June 23rd, 1998, as indicated here.While the Wayback Machine snapshots only provide approximate information on dates, the Blizzard News Archive allows to narrow down the demo release date, as the stand-alone Precursor campaign add-on was released on September 3rd, 1998:ĩ-03-98 - Click here (7.6 Megs) if you want to play the Starcraft Precursor campaign but don't want to install the demo.Similarly, there is no download of a Starcraft demo on the demo downloads page snapshot from May, 1998, but on December 5th, 1998 it's already present.The snapshot of the Starcraft main page from May 19th, 1998 (less than two months after the launch of the retail version) makes no mention of the demo, whereas the snapshot of the same page from December 5th, 1998 already has a link to the 'Playable Demo' page.

I haven't been able to find any announcement of the demo release at the archive copies of, however there is circumstantial evidence that the demo was released after the retail version:

The shareware version will be available shortly after the release of the full game. We're currently looking at an early 1998 release. When is Starcraft coming out? Will there be a demo for it?

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