History of Star Wars Video Games

Leafel writes "UGO has posted a feature on the history of Star Wars video games, dividing the timeline into 4 categories: The Golden Age (up to 1990), The Silver Age (1991-1996), The Gaming Renaissance (1996-2000), Modern Age (2001 on). From the article 'December 2004 saw the latest release in a long line of Star Wars related video games. As a sequel to one of 2003's top role playing games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has made a lot of Xbox owners and RPG fans very happy. In honor of KOTOR II's release and in anticipation of May's Revenge of the Sith movie event, we take a look at the long history of interactive Star Wars entertainment, complete with all of its highs and lows.'"

Comments

X-Wing & Tie Figher

[Ingolfke]

Those games were excellent... I wish they'd reissue them and update them to work on today's OSes or console systems.

Re:X-Wing & Tie Figher

[WIAKywbfatw]

I practically bought my first PC just to run X-Wing. Sure, I had played things like Wing Commander and Wing Commander 2 before then but X-Wing blew them out of the water: the sights, the sounds and the idea that you could take on the Empire in your very own X-Wing made it the best PC game of its era.

TIE Fighter, which came along a few years later, was technically superior but it was X-Wing that created the mould. It's definitely up there in my list of the top PC games of all time.

X-Wing!

[Xpilot]

One of the best things about the original Star Wars was the incredible space battles. We actually *cared* about the fighter pilots in the Death Star trenches even though they appeared briefly (in contrast, it's difficult to care about the entire main cast of the prequels). We actually got a sense of hopelessness as they got shot down one by one (Porkins! Noooo!), and we felt the jubilation as the Millenium Falcon swooped in for the rescue. We felt thrilled seeing all those ships dogfight each other, swarming all over in Return of the Jedi. The first X-Wing game really made you feel like one of the Rebel pilots. The subsequent ones just didn't have that feel. Ah well, nostalgia.

Milkin' It

[Tackhead]

> The Golden Age (up to 1990),
> The Silver Age (1991-1996),
> The Gaming Renaissance (1996-2000),
> Modern Age (2001 on).

The Failure to Suck Age (1977-1990)
The Suck Age (1991-1996)
The Apart From TIE vs. X-Wing, It Pretty Much Sucked Chrome off a Trailer Hitch (1996-2000)
The Sucked Neutron Stars Through A Straw Age (2001-2002)
The KOTOR Age, in which somebody at Lucasarts goofed badly by giving a contract to someone who actually gave a shit about storytelling (KOTOR, 2003)
The Jar Jar Binks Age (Star Wars Galaxies: A Galaxy Milkin' It)

Move along, nothing to see here, indeed! The goggles, they do NOTHING!

They missed a whole 'era' ...

[kclittle]

The first 'Star Wars' game I played on a computer was an ASCII-art version, in 1980. Using the VT100 control set, a 10x10 grid of single-character symbols was displayed (lots of extra whitespace was used, so the grid way probably 20 colums wide by 10 lines long). The 'interface' was a simple command line parser. The characters in the grid were a '.' for empty space, a '*' for a star, a 'p' for a planet, an 'E' for the Enterprise, a 'K' for a Klingon, and an 'S' for the dreaded 'Super Commander' (oooooo!)

The command line interface allowed you to move, to shoot photon torpedoes (an 'o' would track across the 10x10 grid as the torpedo moved), call for help, etc.

This was on a Prime 500. The game was, IIRC, written in Fortran and originally written an a PDP (8 or 11?).

Sigh! Those were the days! :)

Why did X-Wing die?

[FortKnox]

I want to know why there isn't a modern day version of "X-Wing vs TIE Fighter"? Think about it. Imagine setting up 4 squadrons of Rebel ships, and 6 squadrons of Imperial ships, and capital ships on both sides....

Now put in a different person in each ship (multiple people to man guns on capital ships), and use the web.

Who wouldn't want to play that?!?!

Where's the 'x-wing' of today?

[SamSeaborn]

I loved 'x-wing' when it first came out, and I liked 'x-wing vs tie fighter' too (except that the sequel had too many non-movie related ships). I liked that it was a "simulation" rather than an arcade shoot-em -up. Really felt like I was flying a real ship from the movie.

I'd love an updated version of X-Wing with state-of-the-art graphics and game-play. What is the closest thing to X-Wing out there today?

Also, I love Call Of Duty. Is there a "Call Of Duty"-type game set in the Star Wars universe?

Sam

Re:Where's the 'x-wing' of today?

[keath_milligan]

That would be Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed - a massive multiplayer game you pay 15 bucks a month to play alone.

Re:Where's the 'x-wing' of today?

[neurojab]

I'd love an updated version of X-Wing with state-of-the-art graphics and game-play. What is the closest thing to X-Wing out there today?

They tried. "Totally games" produced an updated Windows version of Tie Fighter and X-Wing... unfortunately, they "updated" the gameplay a bit too much, and as a result, it totally sucked.

The DOS version of Tie Fighter may have lacked a bit in the graphics department, but the gameplay was just about perfect. .. Excellent MIDI music that changed according to what was happening on the screen, great controls, a smooth, space-like feeling.

Honestly, if you liked X-Wing, but haven't played TIE Fighter, I highly recommend you pick up the DOS "Collector's CD-ROM" edition of TIE Fighter. It's an excellent game, and you'll never notice that the graphics aren't that great. I've sucessfully run it under Windows 2000 (with a bit of help from Google). It may work under DosBox in Linux, but I haven't tried lately.

Stale Franchises?

[delta_avi_delta]

I think part of the problems with games like these is the franchise is now a little stale. The first time I saw the films, I wanted to be an X-wing pilot with all my heart. I read the paperbacks, I payed close attention to the dogfights. When I played X-Wing I was ecstatic - this was a dream come true!

Similarly the first time I read LOTR, I wanted to be one of the Fellowship, and had there been a game around back then, it would have been great. Likewise with Star Trek.

But all of these have been flogged to death, there's no magic left, the initial urge has been fulfilled long ago, and that's why it feels like something is missing.

X-wing vs Tie Fighter best of all mentioned IMO

[B5_geek]

In this era of online-capable = must-have feature, why don't they create an up-to-date version of XvsT ?

I still play the original, even though it is a crash-tastic and bug-ridden experience on a modern OS, it is still fun when it works.

OR is this what the MMORPG star-trek world is moving towards? Might that be the end-all/be-all climax to the ST:Galaxies world?

Re:How could they forget STAR WARS: TRILOGY????

[freeze128]

I know! The original Star Wars vector arcade game was loads of fun for its time, but the trilogy game actually made you feel like you were in the movie! How could you *NOT* get goosebumps when you are flying through the trench trying to destroy the death star?

They forgot one...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the silver age timeframe, 1993, they didn't mention "Star Wars Chess" for WIN 3.1. ..oh OK "The Software Toolworks Star Wars Chess" (lucasarts lamely made us use that title because they regretted licensing out the rights...grumble....)
http://mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,5/gameId,2033/

It was a damn good 'Battle Chess' beater..52 unique capture animations and shipped on 14 High-Density floppy disks!! Wheeeee
- ExToolworker

Dear UGO: It's called 'journalistic integrity.'

[fahrvergnugen]

Goddamn I hate articles like this. They're just fellating Lucasarts. Consider the following three paragraphs:

Amidst all of the new innovations and continuing franchises, LucasArts was also looking to inject the Star Wars mythos into every major gaming genre, leaving us with many ambitious yet underwhelming game titles, starting with 1997's Masters of Teras Kasi.

PC gamers saw Star Wars enter the real-time strategy genre with Rebellion and Force Commander, neither of which saw the success of their closest peers. Each of them seemed to break a little bit too far from the mold and never really seemed to catch on. Underwhelming? Masters of Teras Kasi sucked. Rebellion and Force Commander were steaming piles, some of the worst-reviewed games of the years in which they were released. This kind of pussy-footing continues through the entire article. They're kind to the ungodly awful Rebel Assault games. They barely touch upon the uniformly disappointing slate Episode I games, and focus only on the exception, Racer. They don't mention the massive failure of Rogue Squadron III. The huge disappointments of X-Wing Alliance, Obi-Wan, and Bounty Hunter are barely touched upon, the disastrous launch of Galaxies goes unmentioned, and the worst they can say about this year's Battlefront is that it's "slightly unbalanced." The incredibly poor level design of Jedi Knight II goes unmentioned.

Hey, UGO: Get off your knees, wipe off your face, and show a little dignity. The fact of the matter is, there've been tons of Star Wars licensed titles in the last two decades, and only a dozen or so of these have been any good. Instead of writing some fluff piece advertising the days of yore to generate hype for unreleased product, you had the opportunity to discuss how one of the greatest gaming licenses in history has been consistently squandered on mediocre games.