In the top 10 list of my favorite video game moments, a list that changes radically every year or so, there are two absolute cast irons. And both involve Star Wars. The first time I sat in the beautifully crafted game cabinet of Atari’s 1983 Star Wars game and experienced its exciting depiction of the assault on the Death Star was a life-changing moment on an uncomplicated holiday in Blackpool. Those sharp vector-based visuals, booming voice samples (“Yahoooo”), and a minimalist electronic version of the famous score? For a guy who watched the movie almost every week on video, it was a dream come true.
Much later, in 1996, as a young writer for Edge magazine, I visited Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for a story on its Direct X graphics technology. After the interviews I was taken to a new multiplayer gaming center. in the city; it was a room filled with pods, each housing a state-of-the-art PC and flight controls. There we played X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, an impressive aerial combat simulation, in which we weaved between Star Destroyers, chatted through headphones and enjoyed team space battles for hours. This experience convinced me that online multiplayer was the future and would change the industry forever.
Star Wars has been there throughout video game history, simultaneously benefiting from advances in computer technology and the growing global audience of shameless sci-fi fans. In many ways, the visual and narrative language that George Lucas developed for those films has become the de facto vernacular for games, even those not directly licensed by Lucasfilm.
The archetypal game design concept of rebel fighters challenging vast alien empires came from Star Wars rather than ancient storytelling tropes: it was the huge success of the original film that inspired designer Tomohiro Nishikado to cast aliens for Space Invaders, his seminal shooter from 1978, effectively providing the template for the entire shooter genre. It was also the Star Wars games, namely TIE Fighter and Dark Forces, that popularized the concept of playing as the bad guys in a cinematic tie-in. For those who have always secretly thought that the Empire’s gunships were the best and stormtroopers were style icons, the games allowed them to experiment and explore these modestly transgressive fantasies.
Star Wars has also proven to be a vital gateway to new genres. The acclaimed fantasy adventure Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) introduced a huge new audience to the emerging concept of epic role-playing games, and its developer, Bioware, would go on to create two of the most successful series in canon: Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Later, EA’s Battlefront titles provided an introduction to the intimidating world of online shooters, using their license to great effect with precise weapons, landscapes, and heroic characters.
For many parents, myself included, Lego Star Wars titles have been the default way of introducing children to gaming. With their two-player cooperative modes, logical puzzles, and sharp humor, they’ve provided spaces in which to navigate gaming conventions and controller whims, while effectively holding the hand of a mom, dad, or caregiver. .
What I love about those games is the gradual exchange that happens: At first, the parents solve the puzzles while the kids break things on the screen (a totally valid introduction to cause and effect in interactive media), but as As your child learns more safely, the roles are reversed and they begin to take control. It is, in many ways, a beautiful metaphor for good parenting: you show, you help, you accept responsibility, and then you step back. My kids are teenagers now, but we went back to last year’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga with gusto. No matter how mature your children are, there will always be little rituals of love and memory that they are willing to share. Star Wars has been a part of that for us.
This year we’ll see Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a sequel to Respawn’s excellent action-adventure Jedi: Fallen Order. It is a game that perfectly captured the aesthetics of the movies: the sounds, the music, the futuristic cities, the small civilizations that survived the imperial war. For me, Fallen Order epitomized the whole appeal of Star Wars games, and games in general I guess: it’s about the way they let us in.
what to play
I have to recommend a Star Wars game now, right? OK, I’m going with the fabulous Star Wars X-wing package, which is available on steam right now for just £22. You get the X-Wing Special Edition, as well as TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs TIE-Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. They all perform very well as space combat sims, with a great sense of speed, flight, and tactics.
Available in: personal computer
Approximate playing time: long, long time
what to click
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what to read
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This is an all too familiar story about a Japanese player who set up an experiment to control the last Pokemon play with his pet fish and a motion detector. Unfortunately, due to an error, the fish gained access to your credit card details and shared them with thousands of viewers. Why does this keep happening?
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New York Times front pages increasing gaming industry unionization.
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here is an explanation in the “nonsense switchtrope in video games I didn’t even realize this had a name!
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If you’re quick, it’s worth going to your newsstand and buying Edge magazine issue #380. It has a good feature in the future of PlayStation VR and all the magazine awards for the best games of 2022.
block of questions
This week’s question was tweeted to me by John Brazier: “What is technically the worst game you’ve spent the most time playing outside of your professional duties?”
I’ve played many technically terrible games in my career for much longer than I needed to (often because they were fascinating: Bow, Ephemeral Fantasia, Deadly Premonition, Polaroid Pete, and Call of Juarez: The Cartel). I’m going to have to go with the 2001 Dreamcast release though. UEFA dream football.
While working at DC-UK magazine, we played this mediocre soccer sim every lunch hour to months, even though it was riddled with bugs. Sometimes the goalie would just start to slowly levitate along the touchline and off the side of the stadium; sometimes at kickoff the ball would keep going up and up through the air and the camera would follow it, until the field was a blur in the distance, then the game would collapse. Also, their goalie could keep the ball, trick dribble past all defenders, and score from 30 yards, almost every time. But it was the only decent soccer game on the Dreamcast, so what could we do?
oh that and flying bird.
