Though it sometimes feels as if there is a new “Star Wars” installment every couple of months, there was a time when all that fans of George Lucas’s sci-fi universe had were three movies and a lot of imagination.
The 16-year gap between the end of that trilogy, 1983’s “Return of the Jedi,” and the start of the divisive prequels, 1999’s “The Phantom Menace,” was a vast creative void — one that video games helped fill.
Developers at LucasArts, the subsidiary of Lucasfilm known for its adventure titles Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, saw themselves as the standard-bearers of the “Star Wars” franchise for many years, said Jon Knoles, a longtime LucasArts designer. Unlike most games based on movies, its “Star Wars” games were not bogged down by market pressure or rushed to match a film’s release.
“We had all kinds of creative freedom,” said Knoles, who worked on more than a dozen “Star Wars” games in the 1990s and early 2000s, first as a background artist, then as a lead animator and finally as a writer and director.
The ability to take risks resulted in far more interesting games than other film adaptations, including Star Wars: Dark Forces, a first-person shooter released in 1995. On Wednesday, Nightdive Studios is releasing a remaster of Dark Forces that features enhanced lighting and textures but retains the look and feel of the original game. It is a testament to those LucasArts classics that are still beloved all these years later.
Super Nintendo
Super Star Wars (1992)
LucasArts had released rudimentary 8-bit action games based on “A New Hope” and “The Empire Strikes Back” for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was not until Super Star Wars that its hot streak really got underway.
A side-scrolling platformer, Super Star Wars and its two sequels were inspired by the run-and-gun arcade game Contra. The goal, Knoles said, was to fill in the blanks of the original movie’s story. “What really happened on the way to the Mos Eisley cantina?” he said. “Maybe Luke fell into a hole and had to shoot a bunch of womp rats.” Womp rats were mentioned but not shown in “A New Hope,” so Knoles had to make something up.
The frenetic Super Star Wars games were both exhilarating and difficult. “Those games were brutally hard. Just unforgiving,” Knoles said. “It was a game that punched you in the face.”
While LucasArts produced the Super Star Wars trilogy, it was also working on X-Wing, a state-of-the-art flight simulator that put players in the cockpit of a starfighter during the assault on the Death Star. Though the back and forth was stressful, Knoles said, the end result was considered a technological marvel.
“The first time that we had a TIE fighter flying toward the camera shooting laser bolts in fluid 3-D was a transformative moment for all of us,” Knoles said. “We sat around the monitor, our jaws dropped and we knew that we were doing something incredible.”
PC, Mac, Sega CD
Star Wars: Rebel Assault (1993)
The same year saw the release of Rebel Assault, a rail shooter in the vein of Time Crisis and The House of the Dead, in which a camera moves around an environment and the player shoots enemies as they appear. Rebel Assault used cutting-edge tech like full-motion video and 3-D modeling to give it the impression of a movie come to life.
“We felt like we were pioneers,” Knoles said of the game’s advances. “We were doing these incredible visual effects — or so we thought — that were light-years ahead of what we had thought could be done in a video game.”
PC, Mac, PlayStation
Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995-96)
For Dark Forces, LucasArts branched out into an emerging genre, the first-person shooter, to tell the story of a mercenary working for the Rebel Alliance who discovers the Empire’s nefarious plans in the lead-up to the events of “A New Hope.”
Knoles said Dark Forces “followed in the footsteps” of influential games by id Software, putting “a ‘Star Wars’ twist” on titles like Wolfenstein and Doom. LucasArts expanded on id’s work, making advances in controls and level design that were adopted across the industry. The success of Dark Forces led to the creation of two popular sequels, Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, that incorporated lightsabers.
Nintendo 64
Shadows of the Empire (1996)
When Nintendo asked LucasArts to design a “Star Wars” game for its new Nintendo 64 console, there was one stipulation: It had to be about a new character, not Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.
So Knoles pitched the idea of a game set between the events of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” that was based around “a carbon copy of Han Solo,” the cocksure smuggler Dash Rendar. The game, Shadows of the Empire, was an ambitious 3-D action-adventure that in many ways felt like an adaptation of a movie that does not exist.
Knoles said the ambition was a problem. “It was a lesson in how not to design a game,” he explained. “We took on too much.” The game combined many elements from previous LucasArts games, including running and gunning, flying spaceships and platforming.
“The five or six games we did within that game, we should have done half of them,” Knoles said. “Or if we really wanted to polish the hell out of it, we should have just done one thing, and done it really well.”
PC, Mac, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast
Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer (1999-2000)
For the team’s next game — its first tied to the forthcoming “Star Wars” prequels — it focused on one scene: the podracing sequence in “The Phantom Menace.” Among some “Star Wars” fans, Episode 1 Racer, an electrifying sci-fi racing game, is remembered more fondly than the movie it is based on.
“We wanted to do just one thing: Go fast,” said Knoles. He added that the mission was to make “‘Ben Hur’ at 600 miles per hour and three feet off the ground.”
With the prequel release cycle in full swing in the early 2000s, Knoles said that making “Star Wars” games had become “a lot more stressful and a lot less fun.” His final title with LucasArts — and in a lot of ways the last gasp for the era — was the slick action game Bounty Hunter, based around the character of Jango Fett from the movie “Attack of the Clones.”
The creation of Bounty Hunter, a complex game with deep combat and platforming, was not a pleasant experience for Knoles. “Man, that was tough — the scale, the amount of people, the amount of stress,” he said.
The most interesting part, for him, was working with Lucas, who offered creative guidance on the story.
“He said yes to almost everything I asked,” Knoles said. “But when it came to motivation for the character, he said to keep it simple, and let it be all about the money.”
