With BioWare’s MMO The Old Republic out now, Ryan wonders, does the future of the Star Wars franchise belong in games rather than movies…?
“We seem to be made to suffer,” C-3PO once moaned. “It's our lot in life.” It’s a lamentation that could just as easily be applied to a Star Wars fan as it could a shiny robot from a galaxy far, far away.
For more than a decade, the Star Wars fanatic’s lot has seldom been a happy one. In fact, this year marks not only the 35th anniversary of the original Star Wars, but also the 15th anniversary of its reissue – inarguably the point at which the suffering began. For it was in the reissued A New Hope that George Lucas and his team of filmmakers began to tinker with various scenes throughout the series – a portent, it could be argued, for the divisive prequels that would follow in years to come.
Now, I’m not going to go into any specific details about the rights or wrongs of the Star Wars prequels – the debate over the relative merits of The Phantom Menace has kicked off again in recent weeks, following that film’s 3D reissue, and I won’t rake over it again here. It’s sufficient to say that, for the past 15 years, Star Wars fans – or a vocal group of them on the Internet, at least – appear to have grown increasingly displeased with the way the original movies have been altered, and the way the prequel trilogy turned out.
Leaving the Star Wars movies aside, I think there’s one thing the universe’s fans can agree on – the property George Lucas created back in the 70s has resulted in some fantastic tie-in comic books, novels, animated shows and, most pertinently, videogames.
Star Wars’ impact on gaming was immediate, inspiring the creator of Space Invaders to apply a sci-fi theme to his seminal shooter, and establishing a genre template that would endure for decades. The first official Star Wars videogame was The Empire Strikes Back, first published for the Atari 2600 in 1982. A simple side-scrolling shooter, it marked the beginning of the franchise’s long lasting relationship with the medium.
And looking back over the history of Star Wars videogames, it’s startling how many there are, and further, how remarkably good the best of examples can be. Atari’s Star Wars arcade game set a high watermark back in 1983. Aiming to put would-be pilots right in the seat of Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing, the game was housed in a gigantic cabinet with booming sound that surrounded the player, and its depiction of the trench run on the Death Star was, for its time, technically stunning.
Where other franchises have offered up creatively moribund tie-in games (the rushed E.T. 1982 game became an infamous example of the practice at its most tawdry), many Star Wars games have bucked the trend. Some have been terrible, admittedly, but many have been fantastic, from the Super Star Wars games on the Super Nintendo to the Lego Star Wars titles of the past few years.
One of the reasons for this consistency is due to the richness of the Star Wars universe, I’d argue. There are so many planets, characters, cool ships and weapons, even the least imaginative game designer could surely find something to use as a basis for a videogame. And the best of those games allow us to get one step closer to answering the questions many of us used to wonder as younglings: what would it be like to be Boba Fett? How exhilarating would it be to deliver the killing blow to the Death Star?
In many ways, Star Wars videogames succeed in ways the prequels couldn’t. They allow us to step within a version of its universe, but without the distractions of characters we don’t like, or plots that don’t interest us.
This brings me to The Old Republic, BioWare’s long-in-the-making MMO, whose production mirrors one of the Star Wars movies. Certainly, its budget is almost as astronomical as a Star Wars movie, and its scale is equally ambitious – the first fully-voiced MMORPG, it reportedly cost anywhere between $150 to $200 million to make.
Having chosen to fill the shoes of a member of either the Sith or the Galactic Empire, The Old Republic allows players to navigate their own way through the Star Wars universe, creating the character however they want, and tackling missions in anyway they choose.
Given the Star Wars franchise’s lengthy relationship with videogames, and George Lucas’ interest in pushing the boundaries of computer graphics, could it be, therefore, that its future lies in videogames rather than movies? The Star Wars universe has always been deeply invested in by its fans, and many, I suspect, would visit it if they could – and it’s this emotional investment that probably leads to the outpourings of anger and frustration over Lucas’ repeated tinkering with key moments in his films.
The Old Republic, meanwhile, hands the control back to the fan. The Star Wars universe is the player’s to explore. George Lucas may think Greedo shot first, but maybe the future of the franchise belongs in a medium where fans can make those life and death decisions for themselves.
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