Saturday, March 13, 2010

Episode V - Dominating the Pixels

Let's take a look at the published Star Wars gaming commodities. Currently there are approximately 138 games with the brand name.

Starting from the 1982 Atari 2600's The Empire Strikes Back, the Empire has spread from console to console, PC and even mobile phones. Where does the Star Wars and video gaming relationship begin? Let's start at the beginning and what came before.

This is not a definitive list, it is a retrospective of games that have similar themes/style to Star Wars.

1960s

  • Spacewar!: Pitted two spaceships against each other while trying to combat the gravity well of a star.

  • Space Travel: A player operated ship would attempt to land on various planets and other space bodies.

  • Lunar Lander: A early text based game that also went under the names of Rocket, Lunar, LEM and Apollo.



1970s

  • Computer Space: Considered one of the world's first commercial coin-operated machine, this had you avoiding and returning fire from a pair of flying saucers.

  • Star Trek: A text game adventure where the player took command of the Enterprise and destroyed Klingon ships.

  • Space Attack & Space Battle: Due to a licensing hitch, these Battlestar Galactica games are a tiny dot in the Galactica franchise.

  • Space Invaders: Defend the world from aliens in one of the world's popular game.

  • Asteroids: Clear space of asteroids and pesky aliens in this famous game.

  • Star Fire: Heavily inspired from Star Wars, this game came with innovations like lock on, sit-down cock pit and allowed the player to enter their initials in the high score.

  • Star Raiders: A game that inspired the X-Wing series of the Star Wars franchise, it featured FP view in '3D' space and hyper space travelling.





Above: Biggs in the X-Wing cockpit
Below: Cover art for the video game Epic, look familiar?

Left: Cover art for Star Fire
Middle and Right: Ships from the Star Wars movies

During the early 80's, a toy company called Parker Brothers convinced Lucasfilms to let them produce games based on Star Wars for any platform. Quickly getting together a small team of operatives, the team set out to reverse engineer the Atari VCS and produce the first Star Wars game.

In general, the Atari[VCS] was so limited that we weren't so grandiose to say: 'Oh, we're going to recreate the experience of the move here'. It was clearly going to be a limited experience, something at best would remind you of the movie, evoke a little bit of the emotion and most importantly be a fun game to play. (Bradford, B in Edge, 2009)

Fun doesn't describe the results, over a million copies were sold and Parker Brothers would go on to make three more titled games. The Empire Strikes Back would prepare the world for the mass of Star Wars games that would arrive during the 80s and resurge in the new millennia.

One of the strangest video games to claim influence from Star Wars is Jeff Minter's Attack of the Mutant Camels.



Top: The Empire Strikes Back
Below: Attack of the Mutant Camels

“Normal camels aren’t that big, and so if they weren’t to be robot camels then they must be mutant camels. And thus was born a very silly game sequence indeed.” (Minter, J in Edge 2009)

Drawing inspiration from a review of the Parker Brothers' game, Minter created an imaginative experience which pitted the player against shielded camels that could fire lasers. With an aesthetic borrowed from The Empire Strikes Back, Minter's game could be seen as a parody but also as a retelling of the original game. The strangeness continued when Minter produced a sequel where the player assumes the role of a mutant camel flying its captors and evading the space ship from the original game.

Henry Jenkins(2005) writes that creative rewriting of science fiction, movies and television are now considered acceptable in main stream culture. With this in mind, the creation of Star Fire is not a subject of copyright infringement but a work of appreciation.

The industry increasingly refers to Star Trek or Star Wars as "franchises," using a term that makes clear the commercial stakes in these transactions. This new "franchise" system actively encourages viewers to pursue their interests in media content across various transmission channels, to be alert to the potential for new experiences offered by these various tie-ins.(Jenkins, H 2005)

When nascent technologies become more readily available, publishers and promoters are able to provide extensions of popular narrative to its fans. (Jenkins, H 2005) Star Fire places the player in a virtual cockpit of a spaceship which is modelled heavily off the x-wing fighters from Star Wars. Star Wars as a cultural phenomena seems to incite a desire to recreate the experiences in the movies.

In 1977, the movie "Star Wars" came out, and Ted(Michon) thought it was the best movie ever, and he wanted to develop a game in this genre... Ted and his wife prepared the graphics, which had a "Star Wars" look to them. He figured that either we would license the rights or we would make whatever changes were necessary to avoid legal infringements... So the succinct answer to your question is that Exidy had very little input into the game play, and Ted was responsible for the Star Wars look. (Rolfe, D in Good Deal Games 2006)

From this, one could argue that several of the x number of space games have been attempts to emulate the experience of Luke Skywalker and Rebel Army to reclaim their piece of the universe from the hand of the evil Empire.

References:

Backwards Compatible - Star Wars 2008, Good Game, ABC1, 28 September 2008.

Edge Magazine 2009, The Making Of:Attack of The Mutant Camels
http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-attack-of-the-mutant-camels.

Edge Magazine 2009, 'The Making Of... Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back', Edge Magazine, col 209, pp. 112 - 115.

Gametrailers.com 2008, The Star Wars Retrospective Episode I, viewed 13th March 2010, http://www.gametrailers.com/video/episode-i-star-wars/31944.

Good Deal Games 2006, Interview with David Rolfe
http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_rolfe.html.

Jenkins, H 2005, Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture, viewed 12th March 2010,
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html.

'History of Video Games', Wikipedia, viewed 5th March 2010,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games.

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