The original version of StarCraft developed prior to 1996 was considered to be inferior to other RTS games shown at the time, most notably the competing game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 being developed by Ion Storm Dallas, which was also shown at E3 and the Consumer Electronics Show that year. The game appeared to be miles ahead of what StarCraft was, with consumers responding to the latter game weakly as "Warcraft in space". Realizing that the version of StarCraft they had was worse than they had thought, following the release of Diablo at the end of that year, Blizzard began to "lick [their] wounds and plan for the future" by restarting development on StarCraft and completely overhauling their development process as a whole. StarCraft eventually released in March of 1998 to critical and commercial success, and was retrospectively dubbed as one of the defining games of the RTS genre.

After Ion Storm Dallas closed in 2001, a few of their former employees were scooped up by Blizzard. Two of them later revealed to former Blizzard executive Patrick Wyatt that the demos Ion Storm presented of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 were actually pre-rendered trailers, and the players "presenting" the game's demos were actors pretending to play the game. This meant that a driving reason for why StarCraft was released as it is was because Blizzard got tricked into raising their standards to compete with a pre-rendered video, resulting in the creation of one of their most successful games.

There is an unused fourth faction labeled "Independent".

Whether or not this faction was intended for play or was to be used exclusively in the campaign is unclear.

In the retail release of the game, Zerg Devourers use the same cocoon as Guardians, but Devourers have their own cocoon graphics that go unused.

There are three unused missions in game's retail release.
Spoiler:
•Biting The Bullet
A mission which would explain Tassadar's cooperation with Jim Raynor.
•Silent Scream
A mission where-in the player defeats the Confederacy.
•protoss/tutorial
An unused tutorial mission which would have featured a race called the Tagal.

There is an unused critter designated for the space platform tileset, simply called "space critter". During development it was originally called the V'ger, which is a reference to the entity of the same name from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Samir Duran's beret is the same color and shares the same insignia as the South Vietnamese Paratroopers during the Vietnam War.

During development, the Rhynadon was referred to as "wasteland critter".

The Ragnasaur critter was originally named "spots", and was found in the wasteland tileset. By the final release, they were given their present name of Ragnasaur and put in the ashworld tileset.

The Kakaru critter resembles a prehistoric pterosaur, and appears to have been named after the kakuru, a cretaceous theoropod.

The Terran Medic from the Brood War expansion-pack will say a couple of quotes from the Star Trek series. The first one is "State the nature of your medical emergency", referencing the EMH Program's opening line upon activation, predominantly in Star Trek: Voyager and a few times in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The second one is heard by continuously clicking on the Terran Medic until she finally says "He's Dead, Jim", which is an infamous quote said by Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy from Star Trek: The Original Series.

Waiting at the briefing screen for the 1st Terran training mission for about 3 minutes after the text ends will trigger a recipe for Chinese Lemon Chicken to scroll on the screen.