Impressed by recent games like Zero Company and Galactic Racer, a reader suggests that the Star Wars licence is perfect for resurrecting video game genres that have fallen out of fashion.
Star Wars and video games have always been very closely related in my mind. The old Atari coin-op is a very fond childhood memory for me and I remember lots of great Star Wars games at virtually every stage of gaming and me growing up, from the coin-op conversions on the Spectrum to the Super Star Wars series on the SNES, Rogue Squadron on N64 and GameCube, through to Knights Of The Old Republic, Battlefront, The Force Unleashed, Lego Star Wars, and literally a mountain of others.
I’ve never had a gaming PC, so I missed out on things like Rebel Assault and the X-wing series and who knows what else on other consoles I didn’t have or games I didn’t know about. My point is, there have been a lot of Star Wars games, and the quality has ranged from all-time classic to good to bad to laughably bad.
A lot of that was back when most licensed games were terrible, so the fact that there were any good ones at all is actually doing really well. Heck, back then average was an achievement for most games based on films or TV.
Things have changed in recent years and for the better, because I’d say it’s now rare for licensed games to do badly. I guess because it costs too much to get the licence you’ve got to make an effort or there’s no point. Even so, that’s no guarantee that it will sell well, as the increasingly spooky Marvel curse proves.
I assume there’s someone at Disney that organises all the Marvel games and they do seem to do a good job in terms of quality but they’re obviously not picking the right projects for people to get into. Lucasfilm Games, though, are on a Capcom style roll at the moment. They came back in 2021 and before that we’d had the two Battlefront games from EA, Fallen Order, and Squadrons.
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The last two were good but I do feel the Battlefront games are still a missed opportunity, given they still feel like Battlefield with a Star Wars skin and not very unique. Once Lucasfilm took over properly we got the new Lego Star Wars game, Survivor, Outlaws, Zero Company, and now Galactic Racer. All of which I would say were good to fantastic.
It’s difficult to find a list of everything that came out during that same time but there were some clunkers like Hunters (I’ve only seen a video, it looks awful) and the PlayStation 2 Battlefront remasters and a new Monopoly game but overall, I feel that is a great run of video games.
Not only are they good games, but they all nail that Star Wars feel and, importantly to me, they help promote genres that otherwise don’t get made much anymore. EA would never publish a turn-based strategy if it didn’t have a licence attached and future racers like WipEout and F-Zero just don’t get made now, so Galactic Racer is the only way it could happen.
For the future, my hope is that Lucasfilm will push for more of this, as Star Wars fans are likely to be older and older gamers are more likely to appreciate more niche franchises, that you don’t get much of nowadays.
Unfortunately, I don’t see much evidence of that in the upcoming games, which include the third and final Jedi game, the Knights Of The Old Republic remake (if it ever happens), and Fate Of The Old Republic. I am hopeful for that, because it’s by the director of Mass Effect and I’m hoping it’ll be something new and interesting, since they went out of their way not to call it Knights Of The Old Republic 3.
Other kinds of games I’d like to see are some kind of real-time strategy, since we never get them anymore either. And an Elite style space trader, like GC has always wanted, would be great too. I don’t know if even Star Wars can do anything for rhythm action games, although I would totally play a Max Rebo band solo adventure.
Or how about an actual point ‘n’ click graphic adventure? In hindsight it’s a shame they never got the original trilogy crew together to do one of those when they had the chance but so many of them are dead now and Harrison Ford would never do it anyway. Although they could get the guy that impersonated him in the recent Indiana Jones game.
It doesn’t seem impossible to imagine a Star Wars 3D platformer, with one of the cuter characters. Or how about a 4X/grand strategy game? I’m actually surprised there’s never been a business sim or cosy game too. Maybe there has been on mobile but being a moisture farmer on Tatooine or that farm planet from Andor seems an obvious one, or you could run the Mos Eisley Cantina or something.
Star Wars is such a big universe you can make almost any kind of game in it and that’s great for reviving fading genres that don’t get made anymore. In theory, you could use any licence for the same reason but it’s clearly not working with Marvel, so I think my older fan theory is the explanation for why Star Wars is on such a roll right now, in the video game world at least.
By reader Grabboid
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