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Peak Star Wars
Star Wars. It’s a thing.
Script be low the cut.
I grew up in this really weird era with regard to Star Wars. The original trilogy started in 1977 and wrapped up two years before I was born. By the time I was a half-self-aware kid the original film was 14 years old - a little further back than we are now from the first Lord of the Rings film. So I can’t say I have any real sense of ownership over Star Wars, not in the way that the group of kids that saw it in the 70’s and 80’s did. It wasn’t *my* thing, it was the thing that belonged to people five/ten/fifteen years older than me. Instead to me Star Wars was largely an inherited - and I dare even say a *used, pre-owned* - thing. A friend’s college aged brother saw it as a kid and fell in love with it, so my friend and I did too, by proxy. Hand-me down storm trooper action figures and ten plus years of cultural adulation were gifted to us. I never really got to decide if I liked Star Wars because by the time I was on the scene Star Wars had been enshrined as simply something geeky kids liked. I didn’t have any say in the matter, really. I never even saw the films in theaters - just molested special editions and TV versions without the original aspect ratio and cut for time. Like the toys we played with the films we saw were themselves hand-me-down versions.
And there wasn’t really any new material to call *my own* in the 90’s. At least, not like the early and mid 80’s, which had two new films and an Ewok cartoon and a Droids cartoon and a Holiday special. Okay, aside from the movies most of those were cheesey and awful, but at least it was something. And the 90’s were certainly not like today, where a trilogy of films recently wrapped up, there have been two separate Clone Wars animated series that have both been highly regarded, a Clone Wars film was released, cross overs were made with Family Guy and Robot Chicken, and three more movies are in preproduction.
If you spent your childhood in the late 80’s and most of the 90’s, though, you fell in between the cracks of Star Wars releases: too young to lay claim to the original trilogy and too old to enjoy the new one with fresh eyes. There were novels, I guess, but by the time I could read I was focused more on Crichton and Gibson and embarassingly enough a whole host of my mom’s Grisham, King, and Koontz novels. I wasn’t really interested in picking up canonized fanfiction. Really, there was only ever one set of Star Wars properties I felt comfortable calling my own - the videogames.
My Star Wars wasn’t one of celluloid but one of pixels; it wasn’t one of plot points but of systems, it wasn’t *an* adventure but a possibility space of themes and ideas. My Star Wars was an action shooter, a racer, an adventure game, a platformer, a role playing game, a real time strategy game, and a space combat game. My Star Wars contained multitudes, and was all the richer for it. My friends brother may have gotten to claim ownership of the thrills of watching Luke blow up the Death Star on the big screen, but kids *my* age got to lay claim to the experience of navigating the trench run themselves. My point isn’t that Star Wars works better as a video game, but rather that my childhood was spent exploring Star Wars as a series of systems and rules rather than as a story. And game developers were quick to toy with how the Star Wars universe worked as a system. Taking out AT-ATs on Hoth with a snowspeeder’s grapple hook, dogfighting in deep space, the Death Star’s trench run, and lightsaber duels became fast favorites of devs and players alike as soon as each became technologically feasible. They were game systems that held on to the series’ operatic emotions and epic scale while still affording a degree of mechanical depth.
But with each new mechanic discovered and each scene or idea systemized the picture games painted of Star Wars’ world became more complete. I don’t need to imagine what it’s like to fight TIE fighters or avoid Storm trooper fire or resist the temptation of the dark side of the force. I’ve done it. And done it. And done it. And now - over 35 years since the original film debuted - I think it’s safe to say we’ve systemized most of the meaningful, recognizable elements of the series. We’ve hit peak Star Wars. I mean, how many games have that infamous scrolling exposition?
That’s not to say there aren’t any systems left to explore or that there are no stories left to be told. But the most immediate and recognizable systems distinct to the Star Wars universe have been pretty thoroughly explored at this point. What’s left to experiment with? Moisture Farmer Tycoon? A flavor of The Incredible Machine where you help Ewoks build traps on Endor? A Star Wars twine game about an Imperial Officer from Alderaan wrestling with his emotions about being on the Death Star when it blew up his home planet? Not that any of these are bad - they all sound kind of cool, actually - but how do they either help us understand the universe that inspired them or even just justify the use of that expensive Disney license? How much better could a farm simulator, Home Alone trap builder, or space opera twine game be without the burden of the increasingly worn Star Wars license? How far removed from the core Star Wars experience are we willing to go just to hold on to this franchise instead of letting these games be themselves?
Not that those questions matter anymore. I doubt whether we’ll even get to see wacky experiments like Star Wars Chess or quirky Japanese Star Wars platformers or Star Wars fighting games going forward. I think games like Force Unleashed and the cancelled 1313 and even Lego Star Wars show this desire to move beyond even trying to systemize Star Wars. The license is no longer something that inspires games - it’s something that inspires game settings. The vaguely Star Wars RPG, the vaguely Star Wars MMO, the vaguely Star Wars third person action game, the vaguely Star Wars family game. And let’s not forget that this happened. This universe that used to be fertile ground for countless new games with new mechanics is now just a wrapper to package stock genre titles in.
The earliest Star Wars games were obviously breaking new ground - Jedi Arena was pretty much a new game from the ground up, and the 1983 Star Wars arcade game established how the Trench Run would be turned into a game for the next 30 years. But even the later genre titles made an effort integrate newly minted Star Wars mechanics. Yeah, Dark Forces was a first person shooter, but it was a shooter that experimented with light and dark Jedi powers and how those crazy Star Wars blasters would actually work before those were things that had become commonplace. Yeah, Empire at War was an RTS, but it tried to be an RTS that incorporated ideas core to the Star Wars universe. Smugglers, droids, and bounty hunters were all units that had unique capabilities, and the game focused on balancing ground assaults with aerial combat like much of the third film showed. The Rebels had to steal technology while the Empire had to research it, which set up an interesting power dynamic between the two. I’d actually really recommend this game if you wanted to see some neat ways of systemizing a film. Battlefront was basically Battlefield, but that was sort of the point! It explored the pulpy World War 2 roots of Star Wars at the tail end of the World War 2 game craze, complete with grizzled soldiers speaking over oldtimey footage and dogfighting mechanics that kept everyone aligned with a singular “up” direction even though you were in space. It felt more like Red Baron than Freespace, and that was intentional. All of these games took systems and ideas that the films hinted at and turned them into something tangible, something you could test the limits of. Whether it was Podracing or taking part in Jedi training, Star Wars games of times past tried to explore Star Wars through systems.
In contrast, look at, say, The Force Unleashed. It’s a fine game, don’t get me wrong - it’s pretty and makes good use of lots of really neat tech. But its mechanics frame the game as basically “God of War with lightsabers.” It’s more interested in making the player feel incredibly powerful than in exploring how Star Wars works or what Star Wars means. I mean, it’s a game where Darth Vader can do this. It’s well intentioned and well designed, but it doesn’t seem interested in systemizing the universe the way previous games did. And you can see this with a lot of the more recent Star Wars games.
Knights of the Old Republic may have laid the foundation for games like Mass Effect, but in doing so it underscored how little the Star Wars license was core to its gameplay and systems. KOTOR was a bridge between Neverwinter Nights and the Modern Bioware RPGs that happened to be set in the Star Wars universe. Similarly, The Old Republic is a pretty stock post-World of Warcraft MMO. Its big selling point - a fully voice acted story - could’ve been applied to any license, really. Compare that to Galaxies, which may have struggled to come up with a Jedi system players could love but at least tried some interesting things by limiting the Jedi population on the servers. Lego Star Wars was cute and fun and had a million addictive collectibles to catch, but as all of the other licensed Lego games have shown there was nothing quintessentially Star Wars about it. Heck, by all accounts 1313 was gonna be a grimdark Star Wars coated version of Uncharted or Tomb Raider. I want to emphasize that these aren’t (or in 1313’s case might not have been) bad games, but they’re games that are more concerned with taking Star Wars and applying it as a wrapper for established game mechanics rather than a basis for new game mechanics. I mean, I don’t think I have to point to much more than Kinect Star Wars and its horrible Dance Mode for evidence of this.
Whether you think we should be done making new Star Wars games or not, it’s clear that the games industry is done making new games out of Star Wars. There was a small cottage industry - almost an entire subgenre of games - dedicated to examining parts of the Star Wars universe. Its vehicles, its technology, its rituals, its black and white moral compass, its influences, and its warfare were all poked and prodded via game systems. But at this point the games industry has taken what’s worked or what’s been most popular like Lightsaber Duels and AT-AT harpooning, appropriated those mechanics into its established genres, and shunted the rest.
So with all of this in mind I struggle to really care about Disney’s acquisition of LucasArts and now EA’s exclusivity deal with Disney. We may very well see some amazing games and memorable stories come out of these deals. But it’s going to be in the form of a Star Wars license applied to a stock Bioware RPG or a third person shooter set in the Clone Wars. They won’t necessarily be bad games. But they also won’t be games that do much more than look like Star Wars on the surface. They’ll have the opening exposition crawl, they’ll have the Star Wars soundtrack, they’ll make the references Star Wars fans want… and they’ll play like any other game you’ve played in the past five years. But they’d be that way whether the series was licensed by LucasArts or by Disney; they’d play that way whether they publisher was EA, Activision, or 2K. These deals don’t impact how Star Wars gets turned into games because we stopped turning Star Wars into games years ago. And not because developers are creatively bankrupt, and not even because it costs to much to experiment with new mechanics - but because we’ve tapped just about every uniquely Star Wars experience possible. What’s left is either stuff that would be better suited to being its own stand alone game, or stuff that reinvents the wheel with yet another trench run, Second Death Star Escape, or Hoth battle reenactment. And so in a certain sense I think we need to let Star Wars go.
The brother of my childhood friend had his Star Wars experience end in 1983 with the release of Return of the Jedi. After that there may have been cartoons and holiday specials, but the core experience of the universe was over for him. They had stopped making Star Wars movies. The date of when my Star Wars ened is more nebulous, but I can tell you this - it happened not when they stopped making Star Wars games, but when they stopped exploring Star Wars with games.
I’ll catch you next time.
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13 Comments
MrTerrorFace
May 21, 2013 at 12:04 AM
While I understand the points you make in this video, I think trying to get over Star Wars is (imho) pointless.
Star Wars embodies many things about the popular unconscious. It had political commentary, it had religious leanings, it had a coming-of-age story, it had a humurous fun tale, in short it had everything. Star Wars can be viewed in various interpretations and most, if not all, are valid.
There’s a reason why Star Wars are still popular even after all those years. Even if people outgrow Star Wars, there’ll always be new viewers that’ll get to experience Star Wars in one way or another (my first real encounter with Star Wars was renting Lego Star Wars and watching the the movies on TV).
To sum it up, Star Wars, like baseball and hotdogs, will always be a part of our culture, because almost everyone has taken inspiration from it and did their own thing with it.
To quote John Lasster:”Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It’s what you do with the medium.” Change “medium” into “work” and you can see the point.
MrTerrorFace
May 21, 2013 at 12:06 AM
I apolgize in advance for any spelling/grammatical mistakes.
Michael Miller
May 21, 2013 at 4:52 PM
Bit harsh on KOTOR. While the gameplay might not have differed that much from other Bioware RPGs, KOTOR (and to an even greater degree the unfairly maligned KOTOR2) really had quite a few interesting things to say about morality in a universe where there WAS an actual black and white / right and wrong dichotomy. In fact, if you’re going for a Star Wars “system” (or “theme” as we humans like to call them) to explore, this is the one that really hasn’t been analysed much in the films at all…
Inquiring
May 22, 2013 at 2:35 AM
Did KotOR actually explore anything meaningfully? The only character that could be applied to is Jolee Bindo, and his character was not actually exploring anything new to the Star Wars universe. He was a “neutral” character in true Bioware fashion of not being neutral at all; Jolee was still pure light side of the Force. At best his character could be said to be a questioning of the purity of the Jedi order, but while that might have been a new theme for the games it was not a new theme for the franchise as the recently released first 2 of the prequels were already exploring the theme of the Jedi being out of touch and incapable of handling trickier issues of morality that might lead someone to the Dark Side. Further, those themes were explored in the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight franchise through Kyle Katarn.
KotOR is a, in typical Bioware fashion, and in typical Star Wars games fashion of that particular time, completely uninspired with the source material. Darth Vader rip off, check. Pointless destruction of a planet to stress how eeevvviiilllll Bioware’s Darth Vader rip off is, check. Pointless shoe horning in of Tantooine, because hey, fans love Tantooine and not like it has not been in tons of other Star Wars material, check.
For a game that was supposedly set 4,000 years before the events of the movies did it, in any way, actually feel like it was 4,000 years? No, it could have been 3 decades prior to the prequels. Ironically Bioware chose that time frame for the freedom it provided, and then proceeded to do nothing with that freedom. Did the Wookie planet actually feel like it was 4,000 years in the Star Wars galaxy’s past? Did any of it? Was there any point to have the Wookie planet, the Hutts, the Mandalorians, and Tantooine beyond pointless fan service since Bioware did not actually do anything interesting with them?
Then there is the typical Bioware morality system. Burn down orphanages with associated orphans inside or make all the world’s humanitarians look like uncultured thugs. This is topped off by the inept handling of Bastila’s fall to the Dark Side. Apparently being tortured can cause someone to completely embrace the Dark Side and throw out any previously held morals and ethics.
The only reason Bioware put that in was because of Return of the Jedi, but they completely failed to note that the Emperor did that to painfully execute Luke, only after Luke rejected the Emperor. Bioware completely went tone deaf that the Dark Side has to be a conscious choice and is an insidious path. Nope, in Bioware land, one can just be tortured (over an exceedingly short period) and will throw away every bit of morality and ethics one possessed. What an exploration of a universe with Black and White morality —that actually does have many shades of grey even if Lucas did not intend it— but apparently that was too complex for Bioware’s morality masters.
Oh, but then it had the tweest with your character! For everyone who did not see that coming, and for the deeper ethical questions that were just hand waved off.
Throw in the predictable Bioware one dimensional comedy character for everyone to latch onto —he said Meat bags! What a knee slapper! Meat bags! Meat bags! Go for the eyes Boo!— and what you have is standard Bioware fare: over hyped, over praised, over wrought.
Halceon
May 22, 2013 at 7:58 AM
But are Star Wars popular? And with whom are they popular? The claim here (and I tend to agree) is that the people who care(d) about Star Wars are not the ones new Star Wars content is marketed to. And the ones marketed to don’t have the necessary background to be interested.
I can say that in my circles it works as a bit of shared cultural background that gets referenced roughly once a year. Compared to Doctor Who or Dune, SW is a mere blip on the radar. I was very young when I saw the original trilogy, I liked it and still think that those are good movies. But when suggesting good sci fi movies, it’s not something that’ll come up.
Basically Star Wars isn’t all that culturally relevant to me and the people around me. We may be an outlier, but I’m fairly certain that there’s a significant number of others who don’t care about Star Wars, despite being part of the social and cultural groups that would be expected to be fans.
Mike O
May 22, 2013 at 6:13 PM
Very interesting video. I really like how you explored Star Wars *from* the perspective of games themselves.
It is an interesting distinction (and useful for discussion) that you make between.games that explore what Star Wars *is* via gameplay and mechanics, and those games that use Star Wars *as* a theme/setting/flavor. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”, I add hastily in the voice of Jerry Seinfeld)
Thought provoking, as it makes me think of all the other types of games that are designed to explore a concept, as opposed to simply presenting well liked and well trodden concepts, and also the merits and drawbacks of each.
I think it is a folly to take away from this commentary simply whether one is or isn’t *over*, Star Wars itself.
Insightful and thought provoking. The best kind of commentary IMO. Keep it up!
Michael Miller
May 23, 2013 at 3:06 PM
Wow, easy there Tiger. Much anger I sense in you…
Everything is relative. Kotor (and especially KOTOR 2, which is mechanically identical, if not thematically) have SOME exploration of morality in a Star Wars Universe, which is more than the films do. Yes, a lot of this might not be terribly deep, but it’s deeper than most SW games have to say one way or the other. So I just thought it’s a tad unfair to bungle it with Force Unleashed, which is pap.
By the way, I like the intentionally misspelled ‘tweest’. LOL.
drkeiscool
May 25, 2013 at 2:26 AM
The premise of your video seems to be that because Star Wars games have hit some mechanical or innovative limit, that Star Wars games should no longer be made.
Why?
I think you’re putting far to much importance on the meaning of the setting whether than the setting itself. No, the moisture farmer simulator, Twine game, and Incredible Machine Game don’t need to be Star Wars games. But why would they not need to be Star Wars games? Just because the setting has been thoroughly explored?
Star Wars games shouldn’t cease being made just because the setting has been thoroughly explored; if anything, that’s an excellent reason to keep making them. Developers can now hone the stories in the Star Wars to an amazingly in-depth degree, and might even discover meaning that wasn’t seen before because it was well-hidden.
Yes, we’ve had a very long string of ‘generic’ Star Wars games, but is that because Star Wars has been wrung out of ideas, or because of outside factors that have more to do with the industry itself?
Peter
May 26, 2013 at 6:36 PM
As said by others, i’d argue against star wars being finished. The original star wars setting (taken here as the original trilogy) wasn’t terribly original on a lot of fronts, most notably story wise. What made it great was a style and feel that a lot of people latched on to. Just because there would be no pure mechanical property to explore does not mean that there can’t be great star wars games (as opposed to just great games that happen to feature the star wars setting).
I’d say there’s two points here,
A: There aren’t any modern good star wars games that are innately star wars and would become a lot less potent without the license. The latest game i’d see as truly star wars would be kotor (while the sequel might have a more interesting story, its feel is decidedly less star wars), ten years ago, so this seems fair.
B: There CAN’T be any games like this any more. You seem to reason this is because the mechanical field of the setting has been fully explored. Again i’d point to kotor which, like you said in the video, doesn’t have mechanics deeply tied to star wars (aside arguably from the light/dark dichotomy which has been used and (mostly) abused in many other settings). It is however very much star wars, the story, the feeling, the structure and trappings are all there.
I’d argue one part of star wars hasn’t been played out mechanically however, and one that seems popular, if we look at the fetts. Bounty hunter. Yes, there’s been a decent-ish bounty hunter game on the ps2, and i believe it was an option in SW galaxies, but there is so much more that could be done with the theme, especially in star wars. Space ship boardings, dealing with slimy huttese, perhaps assasinations like was attempted at amidala. From sprawling cityscapes to western-like dusty backwaters like tatooine to grassy dantooine, intruige at korriban. A bounty on a jedi. Carbonite, lasso, hand blaster. There’s been decent comics to this effect, but no real strong games.
sofawall
May 30, 2013 at 10:27 PM
I sorta realized recently that I only ever watch your new videos is when they get mentioned on TwentySided. Is there anything I’m missing (or that you’re deprived of) if I just keep watching your videos when they get embedded on TwentySided?
Griffin
June 6, 2013 at 6:34 PM
I’m not exactly a big star wars fan, so I can’t speak to most of what you mention in this video. I do want to mention two things however. First, do you really think the trend you notice unique in Star Wars video games? I’d say it has less to do with Star Wars and more that games in general have gotten more bland and samey. Just that with Star Wars you don’t get the outlier creative stuff that the games industry as a whole puts out because of it being a IP.
Second, just because something has been explored once, doesn’t mean you can’t go back and re-explore it. Sure the games lately have been bland. If there really is worthwhile things to explore in the Star Wars universe, which I think there is, then they can be explored over and over. To take your comment on ‘just another trench run’ how about doing it from the other side? Anyone done a tower defense game that is the empire defending against waves of rebel ships? If dedicated and talented people were allowed to express their visions of what is interesting about Star Wars I believe you would find that creative explorations of that universe through systems would start to show up again.
Adam
June 25, 2013 at 10:28 PM
I, too am interested to hear what you have to say about KotOR II, especially in regards to what it says about the writing and development style of Obsidian vs Bioware.
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