Before Star Wars Games Found a Formula, the 1990s Tried Everything

Flight simulator. CD-ROM spectacle. First-person shooter. Fighting game. Desktop adventure. In the 1990s, nobody seemed entirely sure what a Star Wars game was supposed to be. That was half the fun.

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There was a wonderful period when asking “What kind of game is Star Wars?” did not produce a sensible answer.

It produced another question.

Which year?

In 1993, Star Wars became a demanding space-combat simulator that expected players to manage shields, weapons and engine power.

Also in 1993, it became a CD-ROM rail shooter built around pre-rendered scenery and cinematic spectacle.

Two years later it was a first-person shooter.

By 1997, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo could settle their differences by punching one another in a PlayStation fighting game, while Yoda was handing out bite-sized randomly generated adventures designed to be played between more important things on your Windows desktop.

Nobody had found the formula yet.

There was no established Star Wars game template, no proven combination of lightsabers, skill trees, cinematic cutscenes and conveniently placed chest-high walls. LucasArts and its partners were looking at one of cinema’s most valuable licences and asking a much more interesting question:

What else can we do with this?

The answers were wildly inconsistent.

Some produced classics.

Some produced Masters of Teräs Käsi.

But taken together, they made the 1990s one of the most fascinating decades in the entire history of Star Wars video games.

Star Wars gaming was not a genre.

It was a laboratory.

1993: the year Star Wars split in two

The best place to see this experimentation is 1993, because LucasArts released two games that appeared to disagree fundamentally about what players wanted from Star Wars.

The first was X-Wing.

X-Wing did not simply put the player inside the famous Death Star sequence and shout “Good luck.”

It gave you a job.

You attended briefings. You identified targets. You escorted transports. You disabled ships rather than destroying them. You watched your radar, selected weapons and moved energy between engines, lasers and shields.

Flying an X-wing suddenly involved procedures.

That was the clever part.

The films made Rebel pilots look heroic because they flew directly towards enormous Imperial machinery while people shouted alarming things over the radio.

X-Wing asked what happened between those shots.

Apparently, quite a lot.

The result owed as much to serious PC flight simulators as it did to George Lucas. Designer Lawrence Holland had already worked on World War II air-combat games, and that lineage mattered. X-Wing understood that sitting in a famous cockpit was not enough.

The cockpit needed work to do.

Then, in the very same year, LucasArts released Rebel Assault and went almost completely in the opposite direction.

If X-Wing asked how deeply a player could inhabit Star Wars, Rebel Assault asked how much Star Wars could be shoved through a CD-ROM drive.

The answer was: quite a lot, provided the player agreed not to wander off.

Rebel Assault used pre-rendered environments, video sequences, digitised sound and carefully controlled movement to create something that looked spectacular on the multimedia PCs of 1993. You flew through canyons, attacked TIE fighters, raced across familiar battlefields and eventually found yourself doing the Death Star trench run again.

But where X-Wing offered systems, Rebel Assault offered spectacle.

Where X-Wing trusted the player with a cockpit full of responsibilities, Rebel Assault frequently put the player on rails and concentrated on making the journey look impressive.

Today, it is easy to call one approach deeper than the other.

That misses what made 1993 interesting.

Both were attempts to solve the same problem.

How do you put Star Wars inside a computer?

X-Wing said: simulate the fantasy.

Rebel Assault said: reproduce the sensation.

And LucasArts apparently saw no reason not to try both.

CD-ROM briefly looked like the future of everything

Rebel Assault also belonged to a larger moment in PC history.

The CD-ROM had arrived carrying an enormous amount of storage and an equally enormous amount of optimism.

Suddenly games could contain speech, video, rendered animation and music on a scale that floppy disks could only regard with deep suspicion.

The “multimedia PC” became a thing you were expected to want.

Rebel Assault was almost perfect for demonstrating why.

Its pre-rendered sequences allowed contemporary computers to display scenes that would have been impossible to render at the same quality in real time. The trick was that much of the movement had already been decided for you.

It was cinematic partly because cinema does not normally allow the audience to fly behind the camera and inspect a wall.

That limitation has not aged especially gracefully.

The ambition has.

Retro Replay’s page on The LucasArts Archives: Vol. I captures just how broad LucasArts had become around this period. A single compilation could contain traditional point-and-click adventures while also offering demos of Rebel Assault and the upcoming Dark Forces.

That is a remarkably strange family portrait.

Day of the Tentacle is solving time-travel inventory puzzles in one corner.

Rookie One is flying through pre-rendered Star Wars scenery in another.

Kyle Katarn is loading a blaster.

Nobody is worried about brand consistency.

Dark Forces looked at Doom and saw an Imperial corridor

Then Doom happened.

When id Software released Doom in December 1993, the first-person shooter stopped being an interesting technical experiment and became something close to an industry emergency.

Everybody needed one.

For a while, games that followed were not even routinely called first-person shooters. They were “Doom clones.” Retro Replay’s history of Doom makes the scale of that impact clear, and specifically places Dark Forces among the games that built on the foundation Doom created.

So in 1995, Star Wars became a Doom-style shooter.

Of course it did.

The remarkable thing is that Dark Forces did not stop there.

LucasArts built its own technology, the Jedi Engine, and used it to create environments with verticality, moving structures and a greater sense of physical space than a simple reskin would have provided. Players could jump, crouch and look up and down while exploring Imperial installations, mines, detention centres and enormous mechanical spaces.

More importantly, Dark Forces did not simply make the player Luke Skywalker with a gun.

It introduced Kyle Katarn.

That decision gave the game room to breathe.

Kyle was a mercenary rather than a Jedi hero, and Dark Forces could therefore concentrate on infiltration, firefights, Imperial hardware and a new Dark Trooper storyline without constantly stopping to recreate scenes from the films.

Stormtroopers suddenly worked beautifully as FPS enemies.

Imperial corridors turned out to be excellent levels.

Thermal detonators made complete sense when thrown around corners.

The Star Wars universe had discovered that one of its great strengths was architectural.

The Empire had spent decades building enormous facilities full of doors, lifts, control rooms, ventilation shafts and heavily armed personnel.

Somebody was eventually going to turn them into shooter maps.

Dark Forces simply got there first.

By the middle of the decade, almost anything was allowed

Once Star Wars had survived the transition into an FPS, there seemed to be very few genres LucasArts was unwilling to investigate.

Shadows of the Empire arrived in 1996 and behaved as though choosing a single form of gameplay would be unnecessarily restrictive.

One moment you were wrapping tow cables around AT-AT walkers on Hoth.

Then you were controlling Dash Rendar through third-person action levels.

Then came speeder-bike sequences and space combat.

It felt less like one genre than several Star Wars games sharing a trench coat.

Again, that inconsistency was revealing.

Today a large licensed game is generally expected to establish a central gameplay loop and refine it.

The 1990s could be much less disciplined.

Sometimes the licence itself was considered enough of a reason to keep changing ideas.

You liked the Hoth sequence?

Good. Here is some vehicle combat.

You like blasters?

There is a third-person shooter over there.

Spaceships?

Please wait until the next level.

It was messy.

It was also difficult to predict.

Masters of Teräs Käsi: because apparently Star Wars needed a fighting game

And then we arrive at 1997.

There are experiments that become new directions.

There are experiments that prove something probably did not need to become a new direction.

Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi is valuable partly because it belongs firmly in the second category.

The idea made a certain kind of late-1990s sense.

Three-dimensional fighting games were enormously important. Tekken was established, Virtua Fighter had helped define the form, and polygonal characters beating each other senseless had become one of the clearest demonstrations of what the PlayStation generation could do.

Star Wars had famous characters.

Fighting games needed famous characters.

You can see how the meeting happened.

The resulting game allowed Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Boba Fett and others to fight in 3D arenas using fists, feet and weapons.

And yes, this means there exists an official Star Wars game in which a lightsaber can become part of a conventional fighting-game health-bar discussion.

The Force moves in mysterious ways.

Masters of Teräs Käsi was not well received, and time has not produced a vast campaign demanding that competitive fighting tournaments restore it to the main stage.

Combat could feel sluggish. The weapon balance was awkward. And putting lightsabers into the same ruleset as fists and staffs created problems that perhaps should have been visible on the whiteboard.

But its failure is part of why the game matters historically.

LucasArts was willing to discover that Star Wars did not belong in a genre by actually putting it there.

There was no sacred template to protect.

No committee appears to have stood up and declared that a Star Wars game must contain exploration, cinematic storytelling and lightsaber progression.

Someone suggested a fighting game.

And they made the fighting game.

There is something almost admirable about that.

Almost.

Yoda Stories made the galaxy small on purpose

The same year produced an experiment heading in exactly the opposite direction.

No spectacle.

No grand campaign.

No attempt to make the PlayStation sweat.

Star Wars: Yoda Stories was designed for Windows as part of LucasArts’ Desktop Adventures line.

And Yoda Stories had a wonderfully modest ambition.

It wanted to be something you played for a little while.

Each session sent Luke Skywalker from Dagobah into a small, procedurally assembled adventure involving exploration, combat, items and puzzles. Missions could send him into deserts, snowy environments or forests, with Yoda providing the assignment and R2-D2 offering help.

This was Star Wars reduced to desktop scale.

Not a galaxy.

A lunch break.

There is something wonderfully 1997 about that idea.

PCs were increasingly becoming everyday machines rather than mysterious boxes reserved for spreadsheets, enthusiasts and the relative who understood CONFIG.SYS. Small diversions that could sit on the desktop had a natural place there.

So LucasArts took one of cinema’s biggest fictional universes and made it bite-sized.

Yoda Stories is repetitive. Its systems reveal their patterns. It was never going to make X-Wing pilots throw away their joysticks.

Retro Replay scores it accordingly modestly.

But that is precisely why it belongs in this story.

Nobody was insisting that every Star Wars game had to become larger than the last.

One team could chase CD-ROM cinema.

Another could build a serious simulator.

And another could make Yoda give you a small puzzle to solve before dinner.

The experiments kept coming

By the end of the decade, the list had become wonderfully unruly.

Star Wars: Rebellion turned the Galactic Civil War into strategy and resource management.

Rogue Squadron concentrated on accessible, mission-based flight combat.

The Phantom Menace became a third-person action adventure.

The Gungan Frontier turned part of Naboo into an ecological management problem.

And Star Wars: Episode I – Racer looked at one sequence from The Phantom Menace and correctly concluded that what Star Wars really needed was a racing game moving at an irresponsible speed.

That one worked rather well.

Perhaps that is the clearest sign of how the decade operated.

Nobody needed to prove that racing was central to Star Wars.

There was a race in the film.

It looked fun.

Build a game.

Sometimes the experiments succeeded because developers found a genre that revealed something new about the universe.

X-Wing made the Rebel Alliance feel like a military organisation.

Dark Forces made Imperial facilities into physical places that could be explored.

Racer made podracing feel like an actual sport rather than a twenty-minute sequence we watched once.

Other games simply discovered the limits of the idea.

That was useful too.

There was no Star Wars game formula — and that was the formula

Eventually, patterns emerged.

Successful ideas produced sequels.

X-Wing led to TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.

Dark Forces helped begin a lineage that moved through Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy.

The industry became more expensive. Development teams grew. Large licensed games became harder to treat as casual experiments.

A strange PlayStation fighting game is easier to approve when it does not cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Modern Star Wars games still move between genres, of course. We have shooters, action adventures, strategy, mobile games, LEGO games and space combat.

But the 1990s had a particular kind of uncertainty that is difficult to recreate.

The rules had not been written yet.

Nobody knew that a serious Star Wars simulator would work until X-Wing did it.

Nobody knew that Star Wars could produce a first-person shooter hero with no lightsaber until Kyle Katarn started opening Imperial doors.

Nobody knew whether the galaxy needed a desktop adventure.

Or a fighting game.

The answer to at least one of those questions was probably no.

But LucasArts asked anyway.

That is what makes the decade so enjoyable to revisit.

The failures sit beside the classics and make both more interesting. They show a licence discovering what it could become through trial, technology, fashion and occasional acts of magnificent bad judgement.

Before Star Wars games found formulas, they had curiosity.

A cockpit could become a simulation.

A CD-ROM could become a movie ride.

An Imperial base could become an FPS.

A podrace could become an entire racing game.

And Chewbacca could kick Luke Skywalker in the head.

Not every experiment needed to survive.

But gaming history would be considerably duller if nobody had tried them.

About the author

Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent editorial archive documenting the history of Star Wars video games across arcades, home computers, consoles, handheld systems and mobile platforms.