A (Brief) History of Star Wars Games

3 years 7 months ago

Welcome to Star Wars Week, where we're celebrating all things from that galaxy far, far away. From retrospectives on old favorites to explainers on timely topics to Face-Offs between beloved characters and beyond, Star Wars Week features articles, videos, slideshows and more on the beloved franchise.

[poilib element="accentDivider"]

No film franchise has had a more complicated relationship with video games than Star Wars. The Force has been adapted to home consoles ever since the original trilogies were playing in theaters, and in that time we've watched the license change multiple publishing hands, enter several elongated peaks and valleys, establish the bedrock for LucasArts' golden age, and fill in the many empty spaces left wide open in that galaxy far, far away.

We played through the existential probings of KOTOR 2 and the razor-sharp simulations of X-Wing, only to watch those games get dubbed non-canon by the powers that be at Disney. We fed a fortune of quarters into Star Wars arcade cabinets and suffered through the broken mechanics of Masters of Teräs Käsi, and considered if developers everywhere suddenly forgot how to make a fun game set in the universe. Now, we're standing in the shallow end of the EA Star Wars era, with the electrifying new Squadrons on the horizon, and it's never felt better to love these games. Trust us, it wasn't always that way.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2016/07/25/top-10-worst-star-wars-games-ever-made"]

So here is a brief history of Star Wars games. From the early '80s prototypes to those sublime SNES games, to the first Battlefronts, the Angry Birds era, and everything else in between. All together, this timeline represents a slow movement of studios learning from earlier mistakes, and fine-tuning the Star Wars fantasy until it's polished to a mirror shine. Like Yoda says, pass on what you have learned.

1982 to 1991: The Prehistory

The early video game ‘industry’ was the wild west. So naturally, the publishing rights of early Star Wars games were incredibly lenient compared to the tight lock-and-key Disney keeps the series under today. So here's something you might not know. The Empire Strikes Back totally had a concurrent movie tie-in game. It came out in 1982, two years after the release of the film, for the Atari 2600. Mechanically, it is an extremely stripped-down interpretation of the battle of Hoth. A nine-pixel snowspeeder flits around a psychedelic backdrop, taking aim at a series of moose-like AT-ATs. Congratulations, that is the first console Star Wars game in history, and it's about as inauspicious as you might think. The Empire adaptation was developed by Parker Brothers -- you know, the Cluedo guys -- as further proof that the games industry used to be a complete free-for-all. Long before we were double-jumping through Kashyyyk with Cal Kestis, we first needed to shoot down Vader's forces with a one-button joystick.

 A number of vaguely Star Wars-themed games followed suit for the 2600, Intellivision, and arcades from a slew of different developers. Parker Brothers followed up with Star Wars: Jedi Arena, which was the first time a lightsaber was simulated in home entertainment. And then, in 1983, they put out their tie-in for Return of the Jedi, which replicated the siege of the Death Star on screen.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2015/08/21/darth-vader-is-a-scorpion-in-japanese-star-wars-ign-plays-star-wars"]

Meanwhile, Atari was pumping out a series of arcade games built around the Star Wars license. The most famous of all is probably the first one. 1983's Star Wars was a vectorized version of A New Hope's finale, and was leaps and bounds ahead of what the 2600 was capable of rendering. That was followed by another cabinet-based Return of the Jedi game, which introduced hitherto unseen Star Wars video game features like, *gasp* discernable color schemes! In an odd bit of continuity weirdness, Atari actually put out their Empire cabinet after Jedi, in 1985. Who knows why, but this also might be the arcade game anyone born after the ‘80s might be the most familiar with -- it was an unlockable bonus feature in Rogue Squadron III, so go dig out your Gamecube if you're curious to see it in action.

And those were the heaviest hitters of Star Wars' earliest foray into video games! It's funny in retrospect how all of these titles came from different publishers. The next three decades of Star Wars will be produced entirely in-house by a few stray megacorps. But that's also the charm of the video game business when it was at its smallest and most malleable. Skywalker Ranch once entrusted Luke and Leia to Atari. What a strange world we lived in.

1991 to 1999: The Lucasarts Golden Age

By 1991, George Lucas began to realize how much money was rushing out the window as he outsourced the Star Wars franchises to bit players around the games industry. So the man decided to bring Star Wars inhouse to his already well-established LucasArts brand. The following decade is responsible for what is still generally believed to be the greatest period for Star Wars video games. LucasArts itself was founded all the way back in 1982, (then known as Lucasfilm Games,) where it  developed a historic hot-streak of adventure titles on its SCUMM engine, (Loom, Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Isle, and so on.) which continue to define the genre to this day. Frankly, it was only a matter of time before the team were going to take their talents to Cloud City.

So, in 1991, LucasArts released an 8-bit game called, you guessed it, Star Wars. There were a few more NES games in that ilk until 1992, and the release of Super Star Wars, which is not-so-arguably the first truly great video game set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. The quintessential Jedi acrobatics paired beautifully into the floaty side-scrolling template of the 16-bit generation, and the sprite work is still pretty gorgeous by today's standards.

LucasArts followed up with two more 16-bit adaptations of the original trilogy, Empire and Return of the Jedi respectively, which arrived in '93 and '94. And yes, if you're keeping count, the Atari 2600, the NES, and the SNES each received comprehensive Star Wars trilogy tie-ins, which is quite a feat. But the franchise was about to take a huge leap forward. Instead of retelling these same old stories, LucasArts began to explore all of the stones left unturned in this universe.

1993's X-Wing  can still be argued as the greatest Star Wars game of all time. At the very least, it was the first  game to fully embody the film's fantasy. You sat behind the throttle of a starfighter -- simulated perfectly to satiate every nerdy obsession -- and buzzed around deep space sending Imperial scions to the oblivion. Most importantly, it didn't force you down the same mainline path that was repeated ad nauseum by every other Star Wars game that came before it. Instead, players had the chance to experience citizens of this galaxy who've never met Luke Skywalker. Two expansions followed: B-Wing and Imperial Pursuit, before LucasArts switched up the perspective completely with TIE Fighter in 1994. Now, you were flying alongside the strength of the Empire in 13 tours of duty, cutting off a coup aiming for Emperor Palpatine's head.

LucasArts was also beginning to get its feet wet on the first wave of 3D home consoles. The lightsaber side scrolling era was over. Star Wars: Dark Forces arrived in 1995 for the Playstation. That game received a decent response, but it was its sequel, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, that really took the world by storm, proving Star Wars could thrive in an FPS environment. Less successful was Shadows of the Empire, which was effectively an N64 launch title in 1996. "if you like Star Wars and you love games, you're in for disappointment and disbelief," finished Doug Perry, in his IGN review.

Yes, there were some hits and misses in the early LucasArts oeuvre. For instance, did you know there was a GameBoy Color action game called Yoda Stories released in 1997? It was terrible.  That same year, the company tried its hand at a fighting game with Masters of Teräs Käsi, which might honestly be the worst Star Wars game ever made. (Though it has earned a bit of a cult following.) By the late '90s, LucasArts was prototyping for the publisher they'd soon become. We saw their first RTS, (Star Wars: Rebellion,) a more casual interpretation of X-Wing, (Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D) and of course Star Wars: Yoda's Challenge Activity Center. (Don't ask.) Within a decade, LucasArts exceeded the expectations of any director-driven vanity project to unleash an undeniably classic catalogue on the global Star Wars audience. Unfortunately, the prequels await.

Author
Luke Winkie

Tags