Retro Gaming Australia

We’ll never see another stretch of quality Star Wars games like we did on the PC in the 90s.

Star Wars: Dark Forces puts you in control of Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial officer who has turned into a rogue for hire. The Rebel Alliance has sought out his help to find the plans to the Death Star, but he discovers a much more sinister threat while on this mission – the Dark Trooper project. Arguably one of the best Star Wars games released.

Developed here in Melbourne by Beam Software.

While not the first Star Wars game to debut on Nintendo’s 8-bit system (a Namco developed game for the Famicom predates it), Beam Software’s take on Star Wars was hyped up as one of the biggest things to hit the NES. It wasn’t particularly great, but you’d have been easily convinced otherwise judging by the press reaction of the time. Then again, Lucas hadn’t allowed the worst of the Expanded Universe to happen yet, and had not touched Star Wars himself for many years. In fact, if I am not mistaken, the NES game was the first time LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) was allowed to do anything with the Star Wars IP.

The Star Wars saga hits Blu Ray next week, good excuse for a theme week, no?

The Star Wars arcade game didn’t come out until some five years after the first film, but it was arguably worth the wait. The Atari 2600 port was an admirable effort, even though most of the visual and audio fidelity was lost in the transition.

The original Atari coin-op! It has a pretty awesome cabinet, too.

Star Wars was a hugely successful arcade game in 1983. It was somewhat revolutionary, with its 3D vector graphics and speech samples from the movie. It’s best played in the cockpit style cab, if you can find one.