Kotaku was invited to attend Blizzard Entertainment – Irvine headquarter on May 2011 for a StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm single player hands-on press event.

This is great news. While there isn’t any official statement indicating a demo will be available at BlizzCon, in October 22-23, chances are good.

I was invited to Irvine for the StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty single-player hands-on press event in July 17th, 2009. You can read Blizzplanet coverage here. I was among the first players to play the sinlge-player campaign, and had the awesome opportunity to video-interview Chris Metzen (Senior Vice-President of Creative Design). As someone who reads all the StarCraft novels, manga and the comic book I surprised him with a lot of questions concerning all these stories that tie-in with the single player, and pointed out some elements I recognized from those material sources.

A month later, the Wings of Liberty demo was available at BlizzCon 2009.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty shipped to stores in United States on July 27, 2010. That’s exactly a year and ten days after the single player hands-on press event.

Considering Kotaku has been invited to attend next month to play the Heart of the Swarm single-player, we might extrapolate or guess-timate a release date by Summer 2012.