So you’ve all doubtless heard about the leaked StarCraft: Ghost build with a few playable levels that’s circling around. What you may not have heard is that, in spite of only the first two “chapters” being playable, the game has a text document with conversations and dialogue from all chapters. From this, we can actually get an idea of what the story of Ghost was going to be for the Nihilistic version!
A bit of a preface: there are several text files, and some plot points seem to have been changed or added in even between them. General Warfield for example, who plays a big role in the first playable mission and who later sources imply would be a big antagonist, is absent in a lot of the text files that give the clear idea of the story. There seems to be six “chapters” of the main story, and a seventh set of maps. But this is the basic story as I can piece it together:
The story begins on Mar Sara, when a vespene refinery explodes. A strange gas is emitted from the refinery, which begins to attract swarms of zerg to the world. The Terran Dominion, under Colonel Jackson Hauler’s Omega Squadron (which is a bit of a contradiction of the SC1 manual and later versions of the story: Hauler commanded Nova Squadron) is sent to push back the zerg and investigate what caused the explosion. Nova discovers that the refinery was infiltrated by two saboteurs from a revolutionary group known as the Koprulu Liberation Front. Nova helps the forces of General Horace Warfield push back the zerg from Mar Sara, then goes to pursue the rebels, who stole massive canisters of the gas from the refinery, identified as terrazine.
She eventually is led to a facility on Vyctor 5, in an atmospheric anomaly named Fujita Pinnacle (incidentally, the same facility Kerrigan was experimented on with the zerg where Mengsk rescued her). Nova infiltrates the base, hunting their leader, Cole Hickson. After a few stealth levels and a boss battle with a Goliath, Nova corners Hickson, but he tells her that Hauler was up to something with the terrazine he was trying to stop, and her reading his mind revealed he wasn’t lying. Somehow Hauler gets Nova in stasis, but to prove he was telling the truth, he lets her live. Hickson escapes with a canister of terrazine.
Nova confronts Hauler, who is surprised a mind wipe he ordered on her didn’t take, and a scientists assumes it’s due to a “terrazine treatment” she had. They are forced to rewipe her memory (seems to take that time? Dialogue is unclear).
Nova is then ordered to the ruined protoss homeworld of Aiur, where a terran “intelligence operation” is overrun by the Khalai protoss. Nova infiltrates their base, and takes out key targets, including observers and arbiters, while being supported by the science vessel Magellan and a battlecruiser. All the while, she is watched from the shadows by a group of dark templar. As Nova pushes back the protoss, Nova is forced to fight a mysterious terran covert operative, and beats her. Hauler redirects a nuke to Nova’s position. Nova survives but is severely wounded.
Nova is picked up by a the dark templar who were observing her, who were of the Sari'jal Tribe, who are sworn to maintain balance in the universe and venerate terrazine. Their leader, Zangakkar, reveals terrazine is a dangerous element, and that Hauler had been mining it across the sector for his own schemes of domination, creating an army of psionic supersoldiers: spectres. In addition, Nova learns she had been secretly injected with terrazine over the years, and that due to cellular degradation she had only 20 hours to live unless she could find a way to undo the treatment. He leads her to a terrazine mining operation Hauler was doing deep underground on the zerg planet of Char.
Nova infiltrates the massive nydus canal network that wormed through the planet, and with the protoss infiltrated Hauler’s underground base. Within, she finds Cole Hickson (who was either attacking the base with the KLF or imprisoned; the text is a bit unclear), and the two ally together to take down Hauler. However, on the way out she encounters Hauler’s first spectre, a psionic enhanced with cybernetics named Vulcan. The battle begins to turn against them, until two of the protoss aiding Nova merge into a dark archon. Together, Nova and the dark archon kill Vulcan and escape Char.
Soon they discover Hauler’s mobile base that had been taking terrazine from Char; the armored asteroid of Gehenna Station, from which Hauler planned to coordinate his spectre operations. Nova and Zangakkar enter the base, and find pods lining the walls with spectres. Nova destroys many of these pods and fights the spectres Aries and Artemis. They set Gehenna Station to overload, and escape in spectre pods.
There’s a bit of a gap between here and the end, but eventually Nova and Zangakkar confront Hauler himself, and Hauler is able to mortally wound Zangakkar. Nova however is able to kill Hauler, though Hauler launches the remaining spectre pods, telling her his legacy would be assured. Nova swears she will hunt any down who escape. In his last moments, Zangakkar gives Nova his psi blade (though it should be a warp blade), and tells her to never brandish it without reason, and that he hopes she finds balance.
Hickson and Nova escape (where ever they were, maybe still Gehenna), and presumably she finds some way to undo the terrazine treatment that was killing her, and Nova goes decides to go on her own from the Dominion (similar to the ending of NCO). Hickson and Nova fly off into space, and the game ends.
Interestingly, there’s a few more levels in the game as a “chapter 7,” but they appear to all be from original StarCraft, with similar objectives from the base game. They are:
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Desperate Alliance
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Revolution
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Backwater Station
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The Jacobs Installation
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The Trump Card
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The Invasion of Aiur
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New Gettysburg (labeled as “The New Gettysburg”)
There’s also an objective as part of The Jacobs Installation tag that says “Rescue Zeratul,” which implies that the mission “Into the Darkness” from the protoss campaign may have also been playable.
It’s unclear whether these were test maps, or perhaps some unlockable maps that let you play through classic StarCraft moments.
So to stress: this was a very early version of the game, and the story seems to have drastically changed through development. It’s also very, very not canon. The game as presented here was basically scrapped and redone by the studio Swinging Ape as Blizzard didn’t like this version. The cinematic that was put out for the game for example has a completely different series of events, Warfield seems to have taken a different role, Jim Raynor and remnants of the UED forces were supposed to show up, there may have been some added allusions to the Amon story, and the planets you go to are VERY different in some of the later builds that got put out. The one here is a rather… Basic story, which may have been why it was redone. Incidentally, the story of Ghost was “canonized” into a book (albeit HEAVILY modified aside from very basic plot beats) in StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres.
Still, I think someone might find this interesting, will probably do a bit of a lore expose on the bits of lore that were retained or remade for SCII, since a lot of tiny things (Void Seeker, Cole Hickson, Bucephalus) were added to the story. I uploaded some of the conversation bits here for the interested, but there are a few more files I need to do so it’s not fully complete. Hope you all enjoyed this!
