As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I found few things more thrilling than the appearance of the iconic Star Wars logo on a screen. From the original film trilogy to the prequel series and the recent sequels, the space opera has largely entranced the international box office. But the “Star Wars” podium found in the advertising space of video games would set my heart on fire. In the years before the internet was common, new video games were word-of-mouth affairs that only spread when they hit store shelves. Star Wars space adventure video games! We were promised hours of playable time in which you took control of the story in a way films couldn’t let you (or the Kid from The Last Starfighter). We could step into the shoes of a Rebel military hero or a villainous Sith Lord. And I, for one, took both sides of the argument at different times in my life.
The Star Wars series of video games got off to a hot start in the 1980s, with the very first game being a marked success. The initial few games were released in the arcade, with the top-quality technology of the time. Any kid who made their way to a local arcade was probably thrilled to see a Star Wars game there. I, too, was once one of those kids.
The very first Star Wars game I remember playing was the 1983 Atari arcade title simply called Star Wars. To reach the controls, I had to stand on a stool—because my age as a player peeked with less than four years to my name. Yet the rush I got from the game’s lighting and sounds almost made up for my family’s inability to afford the return of the Jedi to the arcades at the end of that year.
The Empire Strikes Back, another title based on vector graphics, was released by Atari in 1984. While it did not achieve the same level of success as the original Star Wars game, it still managed to fill the hearts of Star Wars fans across the globe with glee. I remember the rush of excitement I felt as I piloted a snowspeeder across the icy plains of Hoth, in an attempt to bring down Imperial Walkers using harpoons and tow cables. Those early games allowed fans to inhabit the world of the films in a way that wasn’t possible through any other medium.
The transition of the Star Wars game began. The shift started from the arcade cabinet to the home console, with the growing market share of home consoles. The most popular and most well-known console of the time, the Nintendo Entertainment System, was the first home of the Star Wars series. The first title to arrive was Star Wars, which was released at the end of 1987. Soon after came The Empire Strikes Back, a first-of-its-kind game that set the trend of using titles like Force Unleashed to denote a unique entry inside of the Star Wars gaming universe.
The Star Wars fan base was handed an even greater selection of video games when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was first introduced as a 16-bit home video game console back in the 1990s. My personal favorites among the advanced Star Wars games that sprouted and bloomed like a glorious galaxy of movie tie-in games were the much-improved Super Star Wars series. This included the groundbreaker Super Star Wars (1992), Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1993), and Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1994). These were some of the best games of the 16-bit era, yet chemists, physicists, and mathematicians among the Star Wars video game-playing fan base can quibble over what “16-bit era (1989-’94)” and the “32-bit era (1994-’96)” add up to in terms of how it impacted fans of a certain night and day “long time ago” when the SNES was the standard bearer (no pun intended) for home video game consoles.
PC games for Star Wars fans, including many looking to a new wave of advanced Star Wars titles for their first spectacular foray into PC gaming, really started growing into themselves in the mid-1990s, fulfilling much of the console-borne promise of putting a player into a galaxy far, far away. Consoles of the day simply could not render the intricate worlds of Star Wars games in any kind of convincing detail. They were, by comparison, kiddie rides at a theme park. The Star Wars gaming experience on a 1990s-era PC, on the other hand, was nothing short of amazing.
I recall the anticipation of receiving my first game-specific joystick in the mail just to launch into a childhood dream of fighting in a starship along with the Rebel Alliance. (Yes, I had pledged my allegiance to Princess Leia. I had a crush on her at the time; don’t tell anyone, okay?) This was 1993! Lucasfilm Games’ Star Wars: X-Wing was the new big thing. Schools had just received their first couple of computer labs, and eager young students like me required little persuasion to join the after-school Computer Club in order to sneak our way into that new digital X-wing starfighter cockpit. Most awesome MS-DOS or Macintosh game ever? Until 1994, I thought so. But then Star Wars: TIE Fighter happened. Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995) was another game on the PC landscape that changed the playing field for good. This first-person shooter put the player into the role of the hardcore mercenary working for the Rebel Alliance, Kyle Katarn. In a universe filled with known characters, who could have imagined that more could be squeezed in, “sandwiched” between Episodes IV and V, no less? None of the story even takes place in those films’ locations. Dark Forces has players fighting in all-new locations and introduces incredible new villains and weapons of mass destruction in the Star Wars universe. Never before had a game felt so right on so many levels, giving the player the uncanny feeling that he or she was literally fighting for “Our Most Desperate Hour.”
Star Wars: Jedi Knight – Dark Forces II pushed the Star Wars games to a whole new level when it was released in the late 1990s. It was the first game in the series to introduce lightsaber combat and the use of Force powers, two things fans had been waiting for. Finally, one could experience the thrill of Force-manipulating enemies in a first-person shooter game! The variety of different Force powers was also unparalleled: you could “push” enemies a la the cattle prod Torturer from Duke Nukem 3D, produce lightning, “pull” with a kind of telekinesis, and more. The lightsaber felt good, too. It had weight, seemed to carve through enemies, and produced a nice humming sound.
The more the Star Wars franchise grew, the more it diversified in terms of video games. In the 1990s, the role-playing video game format really began to come into its own, with games that broke away from typical action-adventure or straight-ahead shooting that we’d seen from earlier forays into the 8- and 16-bit era. On the engines of games like Rebel Assault, Star Wars contributed some of the most unforgettable characters and set pieces in the RPG and real-time strategy (RTS) genres.
One title in this category that really stands out to me is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. When this game came out in 1996, it was part of a huge multimedia event. Shadows of the Empire wasn’t just a video game. It was also a book that came with a Comic Book series, a video game, and a set of Topps trading cards. A whole new story was created as it weaved its way through all this media, creating a singular experience unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Some snidely dismissed all this as a massive cash-in event, but I tend to see it a bit more like a digital-age version of puppet show theater.
Star Wars: Rebellion (1998) was another important game in our list of Star Wars titles. It was a massive, real-time strategy-focused PC game set in the grand old Star Wars universe. For anyone who had ever dreamt of taking the reins as a Rebel commander or an Imperial one, this was the game that let you do it. It was a clever strategic sandbox, with more than just fleet tactics as its operative core. Players had to deal with many layers of stuff: sneaky tricks, economics, diplomacy, and resource management. You had to be thinking all the time (or as Princess Leia might say, ‘We’re getting a mission control headache’).
Even though it was released outside the time traditional time frame of pure nostalgia, “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” (2003) must be included when we talk about classic-era-appropriate video games. In addition to being a great game, it boasts a story that takes place far before the time of the original Star Wars Episode IV, where the player’s actions directly impact the narrative of the game. One of the reasons it holds up so well today, despite being “old for a video game,” is the current and still-beloved status of the Star Wars brand. Despite its immersive plenary planetary dialogue and poor voice acting, it remains a super good game that’s really fun to play.
The Star Wars games of the ’80s and ’90s were more than just entertainment; it was as though gates were opened into a universe that I was already in love with. I wasn’t passively watching a film; I was actively engaged. And if I could engage in the way I wanted, using the powers inherent to video gaming, I was representing what I imagined to be my actions in that universe, and also what I would do in the real world if I ever encountered the same imagined circumstances. This is the heart and soul of what is commonly referred to as the “immersion” aspect of video gaming.
In retrospect, it is beyond doubt that these games were critical to maintaining the Star Wars franchise during a time when there weren’t many fresh silver-screen experiences. They gave fans more, more tales, more people (and aliens), and more of the enchantment that is the sine qua non of Star Wars. Whether our consoles sat in the Death Star or on the orbiting forest moon of Endor, they offered something for every Star Wars fan to love.
For plenty of people of my generation and the one immediately preceding it, the games we played during our initial exploration of the medium were not just diversions; they were experiences that in many ways forced us to understand and inhabit this universe better than any other could. And for me, as a child and even more so as a teenager, pretty much any new Star Wars game to come out in the many years since the original movie trilogy was going to be an opportunity for making some pretty sweet new memories.
The influence of these early games appears in all the modern titles that have the Star Wars name. The very first Star Wars game was a true marvel of its time; it was so detailed, so innovative with its mechanics as compared to the relative simplicity of many contemporaneous titles, and had such variety in its art direction and enemy sprite angles that it looked like a much more realistic game than the first Legend of Zelda.
Even modern, preening graphics forces of the relatively current Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 (2003) and 2 (2004) can’t claim the excellence of the primitive knife Chosen One in that very first Star Wars game.
Come the third Star Wars game, The Empire Strikes Back (1982), and you had your revolution. Fans of the first game rushed to overthrow the second game mainly for the galling awfulness of its Isomorphic Projection.
To conclude, the Star Wars games of the 1980s and 1990s were an essential piece of franchise history. They were so important because, more than anything else, they were the first ways that you could truly immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe. They let you inhabit that world to an extent that the side-scrolling platforms of the 8-bit era or even the towering arcade machines of Skywalker’s day simply did not. The first wave of Star Wars on home computers offered side-scrolling, pixel-bashed adventures with special kinds of pointing devices. But press “I” for imagination—what playing these games mostly did was let me imagine, deeply, powerfully. “I am in that world,” the player (in me) could say, amounting to the fan’s most private form of “hero journey.”
