My first mission in Star Wars: Squadrons (which I shall now call Squadwarns for the sake of ease), saw me jumping into a TIE fighter to have a nose around a big asteroidy space dock thing, looking for refugees from the recently-burst planet of Alderaan. My space boss reckoned those refugees might be hiding in cargo transports, so he told me to scan some cargo transports. ‘That looks familiar’, I thought to myself, as I approached one of the big, blocky things. I’d seen that ship design before, you see.
And when the scan started, and the transport’s model appeared in wireframe on my simulated cockpit’s little computer screen, I had a real little moment. Because it was, of course, the exact transport design encountered in 1994’s TIE Fighter. That was why it looked so blocky, I think: because if you were designing a ship for a 3D flight sim in the early nineties, it kinda had to be blocky. But what really did me in, was that the transport looked more impressive as a wireframe model on a deliberately rubbish retrofuturist computer screen, inside my computer screen, than it had done on my actual computer screen in 1994. Huh.