Yesterday I ranted a bit in a twitter thread about how generally bad of a steward Electronic Arts has been over the Star Wars licensing. From 2010 to 2020, Lucasfilm had granted Electronic Arts the exclusive rights to develop video games for the Star Wars brand. At the time this maybe seemed like a good bet on the side of LucasFilm because Bioware was just about to released a Massively Online Roleplaying Game based on the wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic setting. However over the years Electronic Arts held the license they really did not do much with it. Here is a quick rundown of the titles that were released under this license agreement.
- Star Wars the Old Republic – 2011 – Started prior to the agreement
- Star Wars Battlefront – 2015
- Star Wars Battlefront II – 2017
- Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes – 2015 – Mobile Only
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – 2019
- Star Wars: Squadrons – 2020
- The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu – 2020
- Star Wars: Rise to Power – 2021 – Mobile Only
Of those titles other than SWTOR there is only one that I would really consider to be a great experience, but I’ve heard good things about Squadrons and the Sims pack but those are not really in my wheelhouse. What makes this extremely criminal is the fact that they held the reigns to this license during one of the most prolific periods in the history of the Star Wars brand. Let’s take a look really quick at the other Star Wars content that was released during this time frame.
- The Majority of the Star Wars Clone Wars series – Seasons 3-7 – 2010 > 2020
- The entirety of the Star Wars Rebels Series – 2014 > 2017
- The entirety of the Resistance series – 2014 > 2020
- Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – 2015
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – 2016
- Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
- Solo: A Star Wars Story – 2018
- Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – 2019
- Forces of Destiny micro series – 2017 > 2018
- Galaxy of Adventure micro series – 2018 > 2020
- The Mandalorian series – 2019 > 2020
If you look at the past list of games from the Star Wars franchise you will realize that more than likely every single one of those major touch points of film or media would have had some sort of game released for it. Instead we got two shooters, a really solid soulsian game, a space dog fighting game and an asset pack for the Sims. This all comes up because Disney just announced the creation of Lucasfilm Games and in doing so more or less verified that EA would be losing their exclusivity deal. Yesterday it was announced that Ubisoft Massive is working on a new open world Star Wars game just to further drive that point home. I am certain that EA will still be able to make games in the franchise, they are just going to have to compete with everyone else at the same time.
In light of all of this… I thought I would spend a little bit of time this morning talking about some of my favorite Star Wars games.
Star Wars: Yoda Stories
We are going to start off with what is likely the worst game on the list. Yoda Stories came out in 1997 and was in the weird category of desktop games. This was meant to compete with the likes of Minesweeper or Solitaire, but offered a small randomized adventure that you could flip over to and play while doing other things. There is just something nostalgic about this title and while it was arguably not great I still love it. It did so poorly that right now the game is largely considered abandonware and has made several worst games lists. That said it holds a special place in my heart. This came from a company called Torus Games.
Star Wars Arcade Game
Going back old school now, I remember the first time I experienced this game in the arcade. It had this sit down cabinet that made you feel like you were in the cockpit of an X-Wing and had voice sampling that I had never really experienced to that point. It felt like I was in the movie and I loved it… even though it cost two whole quarters to play it as opposed to the usual single quarter games. I was never terribly good at it because just the act of going to an arcade was rare enough, let alone going there with enough quarters to be able to play this game and practice on it. This was published by Atari.
Star Wars: Dark Forces
It was Doom… but Star Wars and while there were unofficial conversions of Doom that let you do the same basic thing I was completely hooked on this game. The graphics seemed amazing at the time and the storytelling was considerably better than most shooters that were available. It even had fully rendered spaceships… even though they were mostly just made out of the same blocky chunks that the texture mapped terrain was. It felt like I was legitimately on a mission to save the republic from the empire. This game hails from the Lucasarts era.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
Sure this game is the direct sequel to the game I just talked about, but it was so much more. While Dark Forces was a Doom like game that used 2D sprites to represent 3D enemies, Jedi Knight was rendered in low polygon glory with actual 3D models. This also allowed the player to shift out to the third person giving me my first taste of what it would be like to wield a lightsaber like a proper Jedi. This game also gave me my first real tastes of Nar Shaddaa, because while the first game allowed you to go there you didn’t really spend a whole lot of time exploring it. It also had an expansion to the game that featured Mara Jade which at this point was one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Again this is a title from the classic era of Lucasarts.
Star Wars Rebellion
This game comes from an era when maybe the licensing had loosened up a bit too much. There were several games that came out in the 1998-2000 era and not all of them were winners. This one however I thought had a lot of promise. Essentially it is a game that could be described as what if Civilization or Master of Orion were a Star Wars game. It came from the folks behind Civilization II Test of Time and essentially brought you into galactic conquest with a 4X style map. It wasn’t near as polished as Civ or MOO but it was still enjoyable because it let me do things I had always wanted to do with my then favorite franchise. This came from Coolhand Interactive which far as I am aware only really created the two games mentioned here. It however is still available through steam and gog.
Super Star Wars Series
I am going to lump the three games in this series together because effectively they were direct continuations of the same game and same mechanics. I probably played Super Empire Strikes Back the most of the three, but I loved them all the same. They were published by JVC but were developed by Acclaim via Sculptured Software and featured a very loose retelling of the original three movies in side scrolling 16 bit form. The biggest thing I remember about them is that they were extremely tough and had several moments that you just sort of had to memorize a pattern. None of that mattered because it let me run around with a lightsaber in a 16 bit game and it was my beloved Star Wars. There was a cycle of Nintendo Entertainment System games that predated these but I never really spent much time playing them.
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
There are not words enough in the galaxy to fully explain just how much I love this game. During the prequel era I had started to fall out of love with Star Wars as a construct. This means I missed a lot of games that were probably pretty solid, because I felt betrayed by those movies. Looking back in hindsight they are far better than I gave them credit for at the time, but I was a jaded GenXer mad at them for fucking up my Star Wars. Knights of the Old Republic brought me by to the fold by fully realizing the comic book setting in glorious 3D roleplaying action. This is still my favorite setting in the entirety of Star Wars and now that we are entering this time of boutique Disney Plus series, I am hoping that maybe just maybe we will get something in the Old Republic Bioware setting. Star Wars the Old Republic is also phenomenal, but I largely think of it as a direct continuation of this same game. I do hope at some point we will get a KOTOR 3. I don’t consider any of this an EA game even though EA gobbled up Bioware, because KOTOR and SWTOR date back to a storied past of Bioware that I don’t think exists any longer.
Jedi Fallen Order
I’ve talked a lot about this game recently, and as such I am probably not going to talk at length about it right now. Suffice to say this is the only Electronic Arts Star Wars game on the list. Even at that this is probably a game that should not have existed were it not for the willpower of Vince Zampella and Respawn Entertainment. This game breaks all of the things that EA was setting out to do at that time. It is not a service based title, it has no micro transactions and it tells a single player narrative story. However it is probably the best game to come out of the Electronic Arts hive mind during the last decade. My hope is that the overwhelming success of this title along with the critical acclaim it garnered makes EA rethink their business practices.
A Bright Future for Star Wars
I hope we are just about to enter a new era of greatness for Star Wars games. I am giddy at thinking about what the team at Massive can do in creating a vast open world Star Wars adventure. I love the detail of the world of Division 1 and 2 and could see that applied to a gritty Star Wars setting. Image a game like Cyberpunk set in a setting like Nar Shaddaa where you operate in an out of all of the gangs in that city as a free agent ultimately carving your own path through the city. That seems like an experience that would be firmly in the wheelhouse of that team and I would absolutely be excited to play it.
What were some of your favorite Star Wars games that I missed on my personal list? Drop me a line below and let me know. I realize there are a lot of games that I never touched during the prequels era due to general fatigue in the franchise.
I too hated the prequals, but after the two hour trainwreck that was “Rise of Skywalker” they are starting to look pretty good. So far that movie is X-men 3 “does not exist, what movie are you talking about?” bad to me (though I may change my mind in the future). I was actually one of the few nutters that loved the Last Jedi and didn’t mind how derivative the first sequel was. On the balance I thought both movies were pretty good. All JJ had to do was have a story in RoS that makes remote sense and I would have been happy. Did not happen . . .
I hadn’t really thought about the lack of content from EA compared to the prequal era, but yes you are absolutely right. Even when I was being disappointed by the prequels, tons of great games set in that era came out that kept my Star Wars fandom alive. Per year there were probably two or three times as many games coming out back then. Not all of them were great, but a lot of them were. Certainly more than the one good game (besides SWTOR) that EA has put out in the last decade. Much of what has been put out also has nothing to do with new media. Where are the clone wars and rebels tie ins? Where are the games set in the sequel era?
Fun read, remember the dark forces games fondly playing them on an old Mac many many years ago. Did you ever play the X wing or tie fighter games? Did a lot of modding of those with a group of friends recording and changing all the wav files so we were the pilots, good times 😏
That rebellion game reminds me a lot of birth of the federation, a civ like 4x game they did with the Star Trek license. Interesting both space drama series opted to do a very similar game with their licenses
Not to be that person, but there’s actually a lot more Star Wars content than just the movies that was released during that period. In 2011 the expanded universe novels and comics were thriving with various Legends books/comics before the Disney take-over and then even more after. People don’t realise that with every new movie and tv show Disney have released media tie-ins which is why people watched the new movies and were like ‘this is missing/doesn’t make sense’ – they were designed to be watched alongside the books and comics.
You raise a really good point. There is probably ten times the volume of content released in book/comic form as the other medium but it is largely only consumed by the most diehard of fans. I was a rabid zealot of anything Star Wars from pretty much the Timmothy Zahn novels/Dark Horse Comic era until the prequels when I had the wind knocked out of my sail. During that time thought I consumed every novel that came out and pretty much every comic book. I both love and hate transmedia narratives because they feature some extremely rich content, but are largely non-existent to anything but the already indoctrinated. This is the Destiny problem since it is the clearest example in recent memory. That game has some of the strongest world building and narrative lore that I have experienced in ANY setting period, but it doesn’t exist to most players because it doesn’t take place in the game. Instead it takes place in lore books and ARGs and snippets of text on random collectables and not in a single cohesive story that is told to the player as they experience the game content. The same is true for all of the books that knit between the islands of Star Wars content. Because it isn’t taking place in a mainline movie it is only going to be consumed by the most fervent fans and regardless of how clever it is… will be largely lost in the overarching storyline.
All of that said, I do need to pick back up and start reading the Star Wars movels again because I have heard they are really good. Thanks to my Marvel Unlimited subscription I am slowly catching up on the comics, albeit with a 6 month delay.
Yep, it bugs me as a fan because the final movie came out and people kept saying things and I’m like ‘but it’s in the comics!!!!’. /facepalm
I’m also behind in the books, and I have to admit I’m not all that eager to play catch up. The few I have read have not been anywhere near close to Zahn or his contemporaries standard. I had great hopes for Alphabet Squadron as I loved the X-Wing novels and yeah… not good. I have non-spoiler reviews for the first two coming this month if you’re interested.
As for the comics; love them. They have been far superior to the novels I’ve read so far. I’m actually excited for the new High Republic stuff because two of the comic writers, Cavan Scott and Charles Soule (check out the Darth Vader comics if you haven’t yet), are two of the writers involved in it.