We bring you an exhaustive guide to every Star Wars game ever made

When Star Wars was released in 1977 no one, least of all George Lucas, expected the impact the film would have. Inspired by his love for serial TV show Flash Gordon, it’s believed that bringing Flash to the big screen was initially Lucas’s objective.

But when the King Features deal didn’t go to plan, George instead began penning his own ‘space opera’. Taking inspiration from literature (Asimov and Tolkien), cinema (Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and Kubrick’s 2001) and Eastern cultures and teachings (the ways of the Samurai and the theory of Chi) he would culminate these elements, special effects and some cheesy dialogue into a cinematic epic that would capture the minds and imaginations of generations, for generations. Join Stuart Hunt as he traverses a well-visited galaxy far, far away and takes a retrospective look at the ongoing saga that is the Star Wars videogame.

STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RELEASED: 1982 FORMAT: ATARI 2600 ALSO ON: INTELLIVISON
Released by board game manufacturer Parker Bros, The Empire Strikes Back built a brilliant little twitch shoot-’em-up around the film’s memorable Rebel escape scene at Hoth. With a continuous convoy of lumbering AT-ATs for you to destroy, it was your job, as Luke inside a snowspeeder, to fire an obscene amount of bullets (48!) into fibrous Walkers or patiently wait for a flashing weak spot to appear in one of three different locales on their bodies to topple them in one shot.

Like the movie, Luke’s snowspeeder could only fly through the fragile legs of the AT-ATs, with waist-high collisions resulting in instant death for Luke but, as a payoff, would also sap quite a bit of energy from the camel-looking sprites. Even the Force pops up as an invincibility power-up that’s awarded for surviving two minutes of the game without dying. It was also possible to regenerate your shields (twice per ship) by landing on a nice piece of unsullied flat ground. While Empire didn’t look much, behind the basic looks is a surprisingly immersive Star Wars game. It’s just a shame that Parker wouldn’t keep that momentum going.

STAR WARS: JEDI ARENA RELEASED: 1983 FORMAT: ATARI 2600
The thought of finally being able to wield a Lightsaber and hear your 2600 make intentional ‘wharrrming’ and crashing sounds had all the ingredients to make any child wearing Star Wars pyjamas spontaneously combust on the spot. However, what we actually got with Star Wars: Jedi Arena was a peculiar game that played and looked like a pissing contest between two men in adjacent toilet cubicles.

Star Wars: Death Star Battle (1983)

Loosely based on a training scene from Episode IV, where we catch Luke fending off a training sphere with his Lightsaber, Jedi Arena allowed you to compete against the computer, or a friend, in an annoyingly constrained Lightsaber duel. By manically hitting fire, the central floating orb would shoot a bolt of lightning at your opponent in the direction your Lightsaber was facing. Both Jedi had a shield of sprites, which had to be whittled down using the orb’s blasts, with the aim being to create an opening in their shield with which to deliver the final blow. Despite being a novel use of the Star Wars licence that seemed to twist knowingly at the nipples of popular Atari 2600 games such as Breakout and Warlords, Jedi Arena just felt a bit too untidy, a little flawed and, as such, is widely regarded as one of the worst games in Parker’s Star Wars series. ‘But there is another’.

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