A long time ago in an arcade far, far away… actually, it was just down at the Westland Mall, sandwiched between the Orange Julius and a store that only sold decorative candles. That’s where I first laid eyes on the Star Wars arcade cabinet in 1983. I was barely tall enough to reach the controls, but man, those vector graphics! That wireframe Death Star trench run burned itself into my brain alongside the digitized voice clips. “Use the Force, Luke!” It would squawk through speakers that had definitely seen better days, probably from some kid spilling Coke into them. I’d drop quarters into that machine like they were on fire, much to my dad’s dismay as he’d wait patiently, pretending to be interested in candles.
It’s funny how Star Wars games have been with me through almost every stage of my life. When my family finally upgraded from the NES to the Super Nintendo in 1992, the Super Star Wars trilogy became our obsession. My brother Dave and I would take turns attempting to navigate Luke through the Jundland Wastes, dying repeatedly to those damn Jawas with their stunning guns. “This isn’t canon!” Dave would shout after Luke’s 15th death by womp rat. “Luke didn’t fight seven million creatures on Tatooine!” I’d just shrug and keep playing. The ridiculous difficulty of those games was part of their charm—you never really expected to beat them, just to get a little further each time.
The Mode 7 graphics of the SNES made for some impressive vehicle sections too. I still remember the first time I piloted the landspeeder in Super Star Wars, thinking this must be exactly what it felt like to actually drive one of these things. The rotating, scaling backgrounds seemed like technological wizardry at the time. Of course, looking back at it now makes me laugh. The “3D” was about as convincing as those Magic Eye posters everyone pretended they could see. (I never could. Another mall disappointment.)
But the real revolution came when we got our first family PC—a beige Compaq Presario that made noise like it was preparing for liftoff whenever you turned it on. X-Wing hit in 1993, and suddenly I was actually piloting a starfighter, not just watching pre-rendered backgrounds scroll by. I spent an entire summer vacation mastering energy management, learning when to divert power from lasers to shields, adjusting on the fly during intense dogfights. My mom would knock on my bedroom door at 3 AM: “Michael, are you still fighting the Empire? You have soccer practice in four hours.” I wasn’t just playing a game; I was living out my childhood fantasies.
The thing about X-Wing that most people forget is how punishingly difficult it was. There weren’t a lot of checkpoints—you’d fly a 30-minute mission, get blown up right at the end, and have to start completely over. I had a notebook filled with little diagrams and notes: “Mission 7: Take out turbolasers first, then go for communications array. Watch for TIE bombers at waypoint 3.” It was practically a part-time job. My friend Tom came over once and watched me play for an hour before saying, “This seems more stressful than fun.” He didn’t get it. The stress was the fun.
Then TIE Fighter came along in 1994 and somehow improved on perfection. Suddenly I was the bad guy, and weirdly, it felt good. The Empire had better ships, better organization, and honestly, better uniforms. Flying a TIE Defender made the rebel X-Wing feel like piloting a flying brick. The morally ambiguous storyline hit differently too—I was 16 and in my “question everything” phase, so playing as the ostensible villains while they explained their side of the conflict felt subversive. Plus, the Emperor had the coolest theme music. Sorry, Rebellion.
We can’t talk about 90s Star Wars games without mentioning Rebel Assault, which was basically a playable cutscene before we had a term for that. It was the first game we bought on CD-ROM, and I remember my dad being skeptical about spending extra money on a CD drive. “What’s wrong with floppy disks?” he asked. Then I showed him the full-motion video and orchestral soundtrack in Rebel Assault, and suddenly he was sitting next to me, backseat-piloting. “Bank left! No, your other left!” Thanks, Dad. Super helpful.
Of course, Rebel Assault was basically on rails—you had minimal control over your ship, just enough to feel like you weren’t watching a movie. But those production values! For a kid raised on sprites and pixels, seeing actual footage from the films integrated into gameplay was mind-blowing. It didn’t matter that the gameplay was essentially “move cursor, shoot thing.” We were still years away from understanding concepts like “gameplay loops” or “player agency.” If it looked like Star Wars and sounded like Star Wars, we were happy.
Dark Forces changed everything in 1995. I still remember the first time I stepped into the boots of Kyle Katarn. First-person shooters were still relatively new, with DOOM having rewired all our brains just a couple years earlier. But Dark Forces felt different—it wasn’t just a DOOM clone with a Star Wars skin. You could look up and down! Levels had multiple floors! Revolutionary stuff, I tell ya. Plus, there was an actual story that tied into the films without just recreating them. The mission on Anoat City with all those sewer systems still gives me anxiety. I got so hopelessly lost down there that I actually called the LucasArts hint line—which, at 95 cents a minute, resulted in a phone bill that my parents were… let’s say “not thrilled” about.
My college roommate freshman year, Eric, was maybe the only person I’ve ever met who was more into Star Wars games than me. He brought his N64 to the dorm, and that’s how I first experienced Shadows of the Empire. That podracing level on Tatooine was both amazing and infuriating. We’d take turns, best time getting control of the console for the next hour. I once stayed up until 4 AM shaving milliseconds off my time, only for Eric to wake up, groggily pick up the controller, and beat my time on his first try. I’m pretty sure I threw a textbook at him. (Sorry, Eric.)
What made these early Star Wars games special wasn’t just the connection to movies we loved—it was how they expanded the universe before that was really a thing. The X-Wing series introduced us to pilots and missions never mentioned in the films. Dark Forces showed Imperial projects beyond the Death Star. They made the galaxy feel bigger while still connecting to the story we knew. Modern Star Wars games are technically superior in every way, but they’re working from a universe that’s been mapped out in excruciating detail. There’s something special about those early games that were filling in blanks, making it up as they went along.
The multiplayer experience of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter deserves its own paragraph. Tom and I would connect our computers via null modem cable, which meant physically running a serial cable between our machines. This required convincing our parents to let us set up both computers in the same room for an entire weekend. “It’s for a school project,” was our go-to excuse, which somehow worked multiple times. We’d stage elaborate team battles, develop our own mission parameters, and keep track of our “pilot rankings” in the same spiral notebook I’d used for mission notes. I destroyed three joysticks through sheer white-knuckle intensity during these sessions. My Top Gun quotes were also off the charts annoying, apparently.
Looking back at these games now, it’s the technical innovations that impress me most. LucasArts wasn’t just slapping the Star Wars name on existing game types—they were pushing boundaries. The iMUSE system that dynamically changed music based on gameplay situations. The 3D engines that managed to create convincing space environments when most games were still strictly 2D. The fact that Dark Forces had true 3D environments a full year before Quake. These weren’t just good Star Wars games; they were good games, period.
I actually revisited many of these classics when they got digital re-releases on GOG a few years back. Some hold up better than others. The original X-Wing is… rough around the edges, to put it kindly. No texture mapping, minimal cockpit detail, and a mission structure that can be brutally unfair by today’s standards. But TIE Fighter still sings. The strategic elements of managing your ship systems while executing increasingly complex mission objectives feels as engaging now as it did 25 years ago. Maybe more so, since I actually have the patience to read the briefing materials now instead of just skipping straight to the pew-pew parts.
If you’ve never experienced these games and want to understand their appeal, it’s important to recognize that they weren’t just trying to recreate the movies—they were trying to make you feel like you lived in that universe. Modern Star Wars games often focus on letting you play out specific iconic moments. These older games were more interested in letting you create your own stories within that framework. There’s something beautifully open-ended about them, despite their technical limitations.
I sometimes wonder what my seven-year-old self, pumping quarters into that Star Wars arcade cabinet, would think of where Star Wars games have gone. I think he’d be amazed by the graphics and scope, but I also think he’d recognize something familiar in those early experiences that sometimes gets lost in the modern era—that sense of wonder, of stepping into an unexplored corner of a universe you love and making it your own, one quarter at a time.
Maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic. My nephew certainly thinks so when I try to explain why TIE Fighter was groundbreaking. He just rolls his eyes and goes back to whatever 200-gigabyte monstrosity he’s currently playing. But someday, he’ll be the one boring some kid about how revolutionary Fortnite was, and the cycle will continue. The Force is funny that way.
