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As the new season of Andor features an unexpected callback to the best Star Wars game of the 90s, GameCentral reminisces about the golden age of PC gaming.
Being a Star Wars fan is an emotionally and intellectually exhausting experience. The franchise will be 50 years old in a couple of years and in that time it’s seen some of the most acclaimed and influential movies of all time, and some of the most reviled. Hardcore Star Wars fans have a reputation for extreme intolerance of anything they don’t consider to be in keeping with the series’ tone, but as the franchise expands, and the number of artistically indefensible movies and TV series stack up, many fans have retreated into an increasingly unhinged toxicity.
As a fan since the original trilogy there is, to me, a world of difference between ‘proper’ Star Wars, aka the first three films, and everything else. The main contrast between being a fan in the 80s and now (other than the lack of internet) is that back in the day everything connected to Star Wars seemed amazing. Not just the films but the toys, the comics, the books, the duvets, the lunchboxes, and… the video games.
Nowadays that quality is spread much more thinly and while some of the above is purely nostalgia speaking (I suspect, in reality, the duvet covers were probably very unremarkable, from a textile point of view), Star Wars has been responsible for many classic video games over the years. I’m going to make the argument that 1994’s TIE Fighter is the best of these; a largely forgotten game nowadays, but one which was recently referenced in the only unequivocally great live action production of the Disney era: the TV show Andor.
Atari’s first Star Wars arcade game was a milestone in 3D gaming, regardless of whether it was a licensed product or not, while 1993’s Rebel Assault was another groundbreaking use of technology, in its exploitation of full motion video, streamed directly from a CD-ROM.
To this day, Knights Of The Old Republic remains arguably BioWare’s best work, and one of the greatest Western role-players of all-time. There have been many other great games too, from Jedi Knight to the ongoing Star Wars Jedi trilogy, that while not milestones in gaming are high quality titles in their own right.
But my favourite is definitely Star Wars: TIE Fighter on PC. In fact, I’d regard it as one of my favourite games of all-time.
TIE Fighter appeared during the first golden age of PC games, when exclusives, that would’ve been impossible to replicate on consoles, were commonplace from major publishers. This led to wild levels of experimentation and innovation, especially in terms of all but dead genres such as real-time strategies and space combat simulators.
Even real-world simulators have become rare in recent years but back in the 90s the idea of trying to simulate something that wasn’t real was not unusual. Mostly it was spaceships, such as with the excellent Freespace series, but the MechWarrior series took a similar line.
MechWarrior at least is still going, but now it’s a niche product from a small publisher, rather than being one of the centrepieces of Activision’s line-up, as it was in the 90s.
The sad truth is that TIE Fighter, and its predecessor X-Wing, would never be made today. They’re far too complicated, not just in the sense that they use every button on the keyboard to control your starfighter but because the movement through 3D space, often with no point of reference, is now deemed too disorientating for mainstream audiences.
Flying and swimming, or any kind of unrestricted 3D movement, has been vanishingly rare for years. But TIE Fighter was built around the idea of unrestricted movement and a sandbox style approach to mission structure, where you were free to play out strategies on the fly and order around allied spacecraft while pursuing optional secondary objectives.
As a Star Wars fan there was also a clear difference in attitude between the 90s era games and newer titles. Star Wars media at the time was heavily influenced by the West End Games tabletop role-playing system, which filled out the universe with additional vehicles and background lore, much of which has since been stricken from the record, after Disney bought Star Wars and reset the canon.
Before then it was easy to invent new concepts and add them to a game or novel, with little apparent interference from Lucasfilm. Since Disney took over, there seems to be an absurd amount of red tape in terms of maintaining canon and continuity, which rather than retaining a sense of consistency has done nothing but encourage endless contrived cameos and – unlike with Knights Of The Old Republic – a reticence to deal with any time frame outside of the first six films.
Sometimes this is just a minor frustration for fans wishing their favourite obscurity was officially part of Star Wars again (oh, how I’d love for TIE Fighter’s Star Wing assault gunboat to return to prominence), but the more obnoxious examples are having a serious, negative effect on the quality of Star Wars products.
Unexpectedly, one of TIE Fighter’s other inventions did return to canon just recently, with the appearance of a TIE Avenger in the opening episode of season 2 of Andor. Amongst fans, that’s already renewed interest in the ship’s design and hopefully will revive interest in the game itself, which is still available on Steam and GOG – even if it’s best played with a fan mod to upgrade the graphics.
Although the increasing cost of making games (exacerbated by the licensing fee charged by Lucasfilm) has made new Star Wars titles increasing rare, modern tie-ins are far more consistent in quality than the shows and movies. From EA’s Battlefront games and Star Wars Jedi to Ubisoft’s unfairly maligned Star Wars Outlaws, most titles have been very good.
The recently announced Zero Company also looks great and one shouldn’t be put off that it’s so obviously inspired by XCOM, since most Star Wars games have taken their cues from existing games that are themselves inspired by the movies (X-Wing and TIE Fighter were a reaction to the then popular Wing Commander series).
There was even the surprisingly good Star Wars Squadrons, which although it didn’t really advertise itself as such was clearly intended as a spiritual sequel to TIE Fighter et al. It was good, but as a fan of the originals it was hard not to see it as a dumbed down interpretation of an already fully formed concept (although the VR mode did make up for a lot).
You don’t need to be a Star Wars fan to be wistful about TIE Fighter. The point is that it’s a very good game in its own right and yet it’s economically impossible for anything like it to exist anymore. And even when there’s an attempt, as with Squadrons, it ends up being low budget and commercially unsuccessful.
To regret that we no longer get games like TIE Fighter is to also regret the absence of franchises like Command & Conquer, SimCity, Monkey Island, Deus Ex, Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock, Total Annihilation, and Battlezone. Many of these games are still available in their original form or modern remasters but more than the games themselves what I really miss is the spirit of invention and experimentation that led to their creation.
Modern games are by no means lacking in that, but 90s and early 2000s era PC games were comfortable with a level of gameplay and control complexity that is largely unknown today. And even when an attempt is made, such as with the superb XCOM reboots, they don’t sell.
Indie games make up for this to a degree, but these 90s classics were big budget games from major publishers – companies who nowadays would never dream of making such titles.
The problem is that the market for video games back then was much smaller and, generally speaking, much nerdier, but now that audience is a near irrelevant niche within the wider mainstream. Given that fact it’s a miracle that games as good as Star Wars Jedi and Squadrons still exist. They may not be at the cutting edge of game design or technology anymore but they’re solid games and good Star Wars tie-ins.
Elements of those games have already found themselves into other Star Wars media – the BD droid from Star Wars Jedi has featured in The Mandalorian, for example – but by going back to TIE Fighter it was very gratifying to see the best Star Wars show acknowledging the best Star Wars game.
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