The Complete History of Star Wars Games (part 1)

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.

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’.

STAR WARS: THE ARCADE GAME RELEASED: 1983 FORMAT: ATARI 2600, 5200 ALSO ON: 5200, ZX SPECTRUM, CPC, C64, AMIGA, ATARI ST, DOS, COLECOVISION
Yes Ripley, believe it or not Parker would try to cram the entire Star Wars Arcade game into a 2600 cart. Sure, chunky regimented sprites replaced the arcade’s clinical vector lines, and the cross-hair controls were a little smacky, but all the levels were there and the game did go some lengths to instil the feeling that you were playing the Atari arcade game, even if it was as flickery as hell. This decent effort by Parker is an impressive looking 2600 beast. It does right the wrongs of the previous two Star Wars shamers but it’s still not perfect.

STAR WARS: DEATH STAR BATTLE RELEASED: 1983 FORMAT: ATARI 2600, A800 ALSO ON: 5200, ZX SPECTRUM  
This abysmal Star Wars game – rushed out to cash in on the popularity of Return Of The Jedi – shoehorns the climax of Episode VI into a poor Asteroids clone. The first thing that grates about Death Star Battle is Parker’s ridiculous decision to condense the action into half the screen by cordoning it off with an annoying rainbow force field. As you can imagine, this makes for a pretty claustrophobic experience, helped none by seeing your enemies appearing from out of nowhere, some ships registering collisions with your ship while TIE fighters choose not to bother and an unfinished Death Star lurking at the top of the screen occasionally firing green lines of death at you.

The aim of Death Star Battle was to destroy the second Death Star by flying the Millennium Falcon into a mysterious wormhole that periodically appeared on an annoying force field. Doing so would cause your 2600 to do something quite spectacular and plonk you in front of the Death Star where you then prep your assault. Here you had to chip away at the pixels that made up the unfinished Death Star, à la Yars’ Revenge, and then try to hit the most diminutive and annoying weak spot in the entire annals of videogames: four 2600 sprites clumped together. And yes, it proves as annoyingly as it sounds. Typically, once the Death Star was obliterated, the game would loop back to the first section of the game and the banality would continue.

Namco Star Wars
This rare Star Wars game from Namco would become somewhat of an unknown among many Star Wars fans. With Luke Skywalker running and jumping over obstacles and fending off all manner of made-up and occasional wholesaled enemy with his Lightsaber, Namco Star Wars would mark the first in a wave of side-scrolling Star Wars games.

Where Atari and Parker’s style looked to take elements from the film – usually involving flying and fighting in a spaceship – in a bid to try to impart the feeling that you were prising the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca and so on, the intention now, pioneered (very loosely) by Namco, was to let you play out an entire episode of the movie, from start to finish.

Where this game will probably struggle with hardcore Star Wars fans is Namco’s candid disregard for integral Star Wars plots. Given that the game starts out in Tatooine with the feral Jawas kidnapping R2, it seems that the chaps at Namco watched five minutes of Star Wars before getting utterly bored and booting up some random platform game about fighting frogs somewhere in Egypt. Namco also decided to entrust Luke with the power of the Force by taking a leaf (quite literally) out of Mega Man’s second book, and having the Jedi’s mind-bending powers take the form of seven different interchangeable powers that could be channelled via the pause menu to make Skywalker fly, run faster and jump higher.

With stubby Stormtroopers, Mario-style bricks, and a jarring underwater level that finds Luke donning breathing apparatus (why not just opt for made-up gills, Namco?), the game certainly has ‘artistic licensed dripped NES side-scrolling platform game’ stamped all over it. But for everything Namco Star Wars gets so horribly wrong when it comes to attention to detail – Darth Vader turning into a giant scorpion with the head of Bubsy the Bobcat, Luke with black hair – what lies behind this rare and highly sought-after Famicom game is imaginative level design, lovely graphics and essentially a blueprint for the prevailing JVC Star Wars games that would follow.

STAR WARS: BATTLE FOR ENDOR RELEASED: 1983 FORMAT: ATARI 2600
Sadly, one of Parker’s best Star Wars games never actually found a 2600 release. Stumbled across at the turn of the millennium (spooky), this prototype for a game based on hang-gliding Ewoks was unearthed. The game has since been made available for play via ROM and despite it feeling somewhat unfinished, it’s not all bad news. Battle For Endor is based loosely around the events of Return Of The Jedi and finds you controlling a lowly Ewok perched from a grey hang-glider. Gameplay basically consists of dodging trees and lobbing super powerful rocks at stormtroopers and AT-ST’s that look like Scream Halloween masks.

The aim of the game was to commander the black imperial speeder bikes that occasionally darted towards you and then fly into the shield generator in some weird Ewok kamikaze mission. Boasting impressive looking explosions, smooth scrolling, shadowing and even a convincing hanggliding control physic, whereby quickly decreasing in altitude seems to make you go faster (which we’re sure wasn’t any kind of fluke on Parker’s part), this is certainly the best looking Star Wars game that could’ve appeared on the Atari.

RETURN OF THE JEDI RELEASED: 1984 FORMAT: ARCADE ALSO ON: C64, CPC, SPECTRUM
Given that the first Star Wars game was released alongside the release of Return Of The Jedi, LucasArts figured it’d try to capitalise on the hysteria of the last film by ignoring the events of The Empire Strikes Back and rolling with a colourful and rubbish isometric shoot-’em-up based on Jedi instead. Similar to games like Zaxxon and Highway Encounter, Atari scrapped the popular vector graphics of the first arcade game and replaced them with colourful and detailed raster graphics. Again, setting the action across scenes from the movie, you began your return to Jedi-ing by first guiding Princess Leia through the forest of Endor and drawing chasing stormtroopers into Ewok traps, shutting down the shield generator in the AT-ST with Chewy, flying the Millennium Falcon across the Star Destroyer and destroying and escaping the second Death Star.

Despite some vibrant looking visuals, the game suffered from linear gameplay, tetchy controls, and a collision detection that liked to play practical jokes. The final kick in the Ewoks is Atari’s maddening level design, which includes such gameplay greats as forcing you to dodge trees at breakneck speeds against a green backdrop, and an infamously bewildering stage that randomly cuts from you blasting the Imperials in outer space in the Falcon to blasting them in Endor in the AT-ST, which might’ve worked in the movie, but in a videogame kind of imparts the sensation that you’re experiencing some kind of boorish flashbacks from the Vietnam War.

STAR WARS RELEASED: 1983 FORMAT: ARCADE ALSO ON: ATARI 2600, 5200, ZX SPECTRUM, CPC, C64, AMIGA, ATARI ST, DOS, COLECOVISION
Released around the time that cinema-goers were getting their final slice of Star Wars cinema with Return Of The Jedi, this first Star Wars game to be released in arcades would hark back a massive six years to the first movie, but that wouldn’t dampen the piquancy of the game one bit.

As well as imparting the sensation that you were piloting an actual X-wing, through some clever sticker decals, handlebar controls and having a first-person perspective to the action, Atari also cleverly littered the game with emotive cinema triggers: John Williams’ strident score (so to speak), digitised speech taken straight from the movie (sort of) and it also borrowed three iconic scenes from the film. Beginning with Luke’s daring approach to the Space Station, leading into you destroying the excitable towers from the surface of the Death Star before finally getting the chance to relive the climatic trench battle where a timely proton shot (actually two if you’re being overly pernickety) is fired in the exhaust port causing the destruction of the Death Star. And when the planetary target was finally destroyed the game simply looped back to the beginning again like you were Bill Murray, it was Groundhog Day and your cash was Andie MacDowell.

STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RELEASED: 1985 FORMAT: ARCADE ALSO ON: ATARI 2600, C64, AMIGA, ST
For Empire Strikes Back Atari went back to the vectors for two reasons: first, Return Of The Jedi arcade was the gaming equivalent of paying someone from Atari to come to your house, spin you on a swivel chair and punch your sister in the jaw, and second it let Atari make further use of the original Star Wars arcade chipset that had raked in so much money to begin with.

Because the game was built from the same neon lines as Star Wars Arcade it meant arcade operators – with the aid of some giant stickers – could convert their old cigarette-stained Star Wars cabs to play Atari’s latest. The biggest problem with Empire, however, is that while the blackvector look worked well to create the sensation of being in space; it wasn’t as successful in re-creating the sensation of tripping up AT-AT’s in the white frothy snow of Hoth. Also, the game only charts the rebels escape act of the film. So, while the movie boasted an epic and jaw-dropping finale, the same couldn’t be said for its arcade brethren, which petered out into a TIE fighter skirmish that ends with Han and troupe’s escape into the asteroid belt.

What Empire did introduce, however, was the ‘stripes’ bonus that was awarded to the player for shooting down a specific amount of enemies. Doing so would earn you a letter per level, which they used like Smarties lids to spell ‘JEDI’. This would then momentarily disable enemy cannons and could be traded for stripes to put against your name if you were good enough to glean a spot on the game’s high-score table.

STAR WARS ARCADE RELEASED: 1993 FORMAT: ARCADE ALSO ON: 32X  
After an eight year absence, with the help of Sega’s System 1 arcade board, Star Wars would make a glorious-looking return to the arcade circuit, in a game that would retain its arcade heritage of keeping the action firmly in the skies. Star Wars Arcade shares a lot of similarities with Atari’s original arcade game but simply coats the vectors with broad-looking 3D polygons. Two players could assume the role of gunner and pilot and opt to pilot either an X-wing over three sequences confusingly set around Return Of The Jedi. The first stage sees Luke battling TIE fighters inside an asteroid field, the second destroying the Super Star Destroyer (much to relief of Admiral Akbar) and the finale ended with a familiar assault on the Death Star.

Star Wars Arcade was ported to the 32X a year later, in a game which lacked some of the visual finesse from the arcade original. However, Sega would try to compensate the fact by adding some extra stages to the game. As a result, Star Wars Arcade became both a launch title and the first killer-app for the much maligned Mega Drive add-on.

STAR WARS STARFIGHTER RELEASED: 2003 FORMAT: ARCADE
If you say Star Wars Starfighter to most people, they’ll think back to the PS2 and Xbox arcade aerial combat games released by LucasArts. But there was another game under the same name that found its way into arcades two years later.

Putting you in the shoes of a rookie Starfighter pilot, and with a faithful R2 unit as co-pilot, it was your job to prevent the invasion of Naboo by infiltrating and destroying numerous Trade Federation ships through five levels that stretched across space, the vast plains of Naboo and inside the corridors of a Droid Control ship. We’d love to tell you if it was any good, but sadly we haven’t played it.

STAR WARS TRILOGY ARCADE RELEASED: 1998 FORMAT: ARCADE
This System 3 powerhouse was touted as a follow up to Star Wars Arcade. Star Wars Trilogy gave the player the chance to play through a cut-down first trilogy: an impressive and astonishing looking Death Star skirmish lifted from A New Hope, the Rebel’s escape from Hoth and a three-tiered stage charting the Rebel victory at Endor in Return Of The Jedi. The game finishes with Luke destroying the second Death Star inside an X-wing. Permeating the dog-fighting stages were two first-person bonus stages that included a duel between Boba Fett and another with Lord Vader. Switching the action from an on-rails cockpit blaster to Luke’s on-rails eye sockets, the arcade joystick would be used to control either a cross hair to blast away the Imperials or a virtual Ligthtsaber to parry Fett’s blaster shots and Vader’s Lightsaber attacks. Sadly, Star Wars Arcade never found a home port.

However, considering the System 3 racing game Scud Race was originally planned for a Dreamcast release and Star Wars Arcade found a release on the 32X, it’s probable that Sega may have envisioned an eventual DC release for the game if the console had fared better in the console war.

STAR WARS: RACER ARCADE RELEASED: 2000 FORMAT: ARCADE ALSO ON: N64, DC, GBA
Based on The Phantom Menace’s saving CGI grace, this colossal beast from Sega, running from its Haikaru board, set out to re-create Anakin’s exhilarating Pod Race in Tatooine. Peculiarly released on home consoles first, initially on the N64 and PC and followed up with ports to the DC and as a feeble top-down racer on the GBC, this peculiar arcade reboot – owing to its sheer gigantism – would come to strike a menacing pose in arcades when it was released. Re-creating the Boonta Eve Classic in Phantom Menace, Sega would focus on trying to replicate the exhilaration that Lucas projected brilliantly on cinema screens.

Choosing to play as either the young Anakin Skywalker or Sebulba (though two other pilots could be unlocked in the game), Racer Arcade adopted a weird, but perfectly workable, dualthrottle steering system making it a frenetic, but enjoyable, racing game that is one of the best games to come out of the first three episodes.

STAR WARS RELEASED: 1992 FORMAT: NES
Often mistaken as being a weird remixed Western version of Namco’s Star Wars game (see ‘Namco Star Wars’ boxout), JVC’s take on Episode IV may look very similar to its Eastern sibling, but it’s actually a very different feeling game altogether. First, the JVC iteration – although still taking a few liberties with the plot – does share more common ground with the movie.

Beginning with Luke in his landspeeder chugging across the dunes of Tatooine to find R2, the game then leads Luke to Mos Eisley and into Cantina Bar where he has to blast the faces off some debased alien revellers. The level ends with a conversation with Han Solo that gives the impression that Luke – despite almost getting his ass handed to him at the bar in the movie – gallantly saves Han from a band of bounty hunters and in gratitude is taken to Alderaan. The quick-fire Solo then becomes a playable member of your party, and when the pair eventually free the captured Princess she also becomes a playable character.

The biggest oversight by JVC though is that its version has no Chewbacca and more worryingly no Darth Vader, with all evidence that the Sith Lord ever existed confusingly wiped from the game’s story. The final trench battle, brilliantly re-created in the arcade game, is also shabbily re-created with an overhead X-wing section that smacks of Return Of The Jedi’s twitchy gameplay.

STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RELEASED: 1993 FORMAT: NES, GAME BOY
Released late in the machine’s life, The Empire Strikes Back moved away from the squishy and cartoon look of the first two NES outings and opted to breathe a little more style and accuracy into proceedings. Luke finally drops his boyish look for a mature and slenderlooking sprite, and many of the key elements from the film are lovingly re-mastered without the confusing story fudging.

Ignoring the glaring fact that towards the end of the game you actually save Han Solo in an X-wing versus Slave 1 dogfight, therefore nullifying the entire first section of Return Of The Jedi, the game stays relatively faithful to the events of the film. Luke has to tie up some Walkers in a level that’s structured very similarly to Parker’s Empire Strikes Back, has unfinished Jedi training with Yoda where he duels with both Phantom Vader and then faces the bona fide Vader in a re-creation of the film’s epic cliffhanger climax inside the Freezing Chamber.

The game also marks a return to Luke using the Force with the difference here being that instead of accessing the powers through the pause menu, as in Namco Star Wars, Luke can only use his powers when he finds various Force power-ups that are scattered around each level.

SUPER STAR WARS RELEASED: 1993 FORMAT: SNES
For many of our youngish readers, Super Star Wars will mark the first time they ever came to play a Star Wars game. JVC’s Super Star Wars would become an integral third-party Super Nintendo armament in the 16-bit console war for Nintendo. Forgetting for a moment that the game was based on one third of a very popular trilogy of films, what really appeased people about Super Star Wars was that it was simply a brilliant run-‘n’-gun action game. We don’t mind admitting that some members of the RG team had played through all three Super Star Wars games before even sniffing at the films. JVC didn’t lazily rest its laurels on the heritage and appeal of the films, it would simply refine what it had done previously on the NES and ensure, this time, that the trilogy would finally be complete.

God knows why Super Star Wars never made it into our top 25 run-‘n’-gun list, because after booting the thing up again recently its brilliance really has stood the test of time. Parallax-scrolling, fulsome palettes and now stereo sound bleating sections of Williams’ majestic score would heighten the Star Wars experience like no other movie tie-in game before it. Sure, cursory ‘super’ changes and artistic licence occurred, like Luke Skywalker facing a ‘super’ Womp Rat, ‘super’ Sarlacc Pit Monster, erm ‘super’ Star Destroyer bosses (erm, maybe not), but the game would try to patch things up with Chewy by making him a playable character alongside Han and would also brilliantly use the machine’s Mode 7 capabilities with F-Zero-style spaceship sections. The game is often cited as being a bit of a pad-biting beast, with maddening jumps and respawning enemies the game certainly poses quite a challenge, but those criticisms were nothing compared to the next Super Star Wars game that would follow.

SUPER STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RELEASED: 1994 FORMAT: SNES
There was high expectation for Super Empire Strikes Back to really build on the brilliance of Super Star Wars and deliver SNES owners the ultimate Star Wars videogame experience.

Thankfully, JVC and LucasArts had the foresight to keep the gameplay relatively similar to the first but would also decide to crank up the already tortuous difficulty (many believe this game to be the hardest in the series) and stretch it through some pretty tiresome stages – hence why this is the first Star Wars game to incorporate a password save system. On the plus side Empire would up the ante on the Mode 7 sections and add ‘Force powers’ and adopt the earlier NES style of splitting the Force into practical powers. Staying relatively faithful to the events and scenes of the film, for many fans, Empire would capture the sequel’s darker undertone brilliantly.

SUPER STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI RELEASED: 1995 FORMAT: SNES
Finally JVC would get the chance to put an end to its dwindling side-scrolling Star Wars series. The best-looking game in the Super series is also the worst. There’s a real sense that JVC and LucasArts were simply getting a little lazy by the time Return Of The Jedi was due for Super treatment. Here they’re simply ticking all the same boxes, but trying to conceal the fact by adding a few little nods – the film’s dropped Asumian Skiff Garr boss and dressing Leia in her bra and pants – to put a geek smile across a few fanboy faces.

Return Of The Jedi added two more playable characters to the game roster with Princess Leia and the Ewok Wicket. Where the game falls down hard, however, is its truly shambolic Mode 7 sections, which include the ugliest looking speeder bike chase imaginable, which gives the impression the scene was filmed in an alleyway of moss (seriously, 3D Deathcase puts it to visual shame), a bemusing and annoying first level that charts Luke’s journey to Jabba’s hut, and an infamous (for all the wrong reasons) Millennium Falcon finale that acts as a morose curtain call for both the Super Star Wars series and poor old Mode 7. Retaining Empire’s password system, Super Return Of The Jedi would also keep the series’ instantly steep difficulty curve, and pave itself with fidgety stages and taxing boss battles. While it could at least swank yet another worthy challenge for any wannabe Jedi, like the movies, it would be considered by many to be the weakest of the trilogy.

Check out part 2 of our history of Star Wars videogames.