Star Wars Games Learned The Medium-Switching Lesson The Hard Way. By Søren Ahrensborg Kamper.
From X-Wing to Episode I: Racer, the galaxy works best when a new medium gives us something new to do, not just something familiar to watch.
There is a surprisingly useful argument taking place between two reviews of the same Star Wars film. In Jake Peffer’s assessment of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the leap from streaming to cinema never quite becomes a change in storytelling: the result still feels shaped like television, only with more expensive action. Josiah Teal’s more generous reading sees value in that familiarity, particularly for younger viewers discovering their own version of Star Wars. Neither response is unreasonable. Both circle the same question: when a story moves somewhere new, what does the new medium actually contribute?
Video games have been answering that question for more than forty years, sometimes magnificently and sometimes by putting a film character on the box and hoping nobody notices the controls. The best Star Wars games learned that recognition is the invitation, not the reward. A lightsaber, an X-wing or a podracer can get us through the door. What matters is whether the game has a reason for handing over control.
X-Wing: the glamour of doing the work
Think of Luke’s trench run in A New Hope. On film, its genius is that every cut pushes the audience towards a single decisive moment. In 1993, X-Wing had to explain the practicalities of being a Rebel pilot. Its cockpit asked players to identify targets, balance power between engines, lasers and shields, protect vulnerable craft and survive objectives that could fail while they were busy enjoying the view.
Suddenly the Rebellion is more than an inspiring cause accompanied by John Williams. It is an organisation with difficult jobs and inadequate resources. Watching an escorted transport die because you chased the wrong enemy is more educational than another kill. The film gives Luke a moment of destiny. The simulator gives its pilots responsibility, usually followed by a stern mission debriefing.
And the machinery matters. A cockpit on a cinema screen is partly production design, a wonderfully convincing arrangement of lights and switches. In X-Wing, the instruments must tell the truth. If a shield indicator cannot be read while an Imperial fighter approaches, the fantasy falls apart. The game did not turn a film sequence into a longer film sequence. It turned the apparatus around that sequence into a place where decisions happen.
Knights of the Old Republic: a galaxy that has to answer back
Knights of the Old Republic approaches the problem from almost the opposite direction. Star Wars cinema is exceptionally good at making decisions seem fateful. But however much we plead with Anakin, he is going to make the choice already written for him. BioWare’s 2003 RPG could not offer the infinite freedom implied by its dialogue menus, yet it made the player participate in forming a character rather than merely witnessing one.
Conversations can open or close possibilities. Party members have opinions, histories and loyalties, and their reactions complicate the pleasant fiction that every heroic choice is obvious. The Light Side and Dark Side system sometimes makes morality look suspiciously like bookkeeping; a generous act can become another step towards an optimal build. Yet a film cannot reproduce the uncomfortable discovery that your behaviour is being measured by the world you inhabit.
The result is not a superior way of telling the films’ stories. It is a different way of making their central question personal. “What kind of person will you become?” stops being something an older Jedi asks a younger one and becomes a question the interface keeps asking us, often at a moment when we would rather just finish the quest.
Republic Commando: Star Wars without the chosen one
In 2005, Republic Commando rebelled against its own franchise: it removed the Jedi from the centre of the fantasy. Its Clone Wars soldiers do not solve problems by waving a lightsaber or announcing their destiny. They clear rooms, take cover, place explosives, revive wounded comrades and follow orders. They are special forces, not mythic exceptions to the rules.
The important feature is the squad-command system. A glance at a tactical position lets the player send a companion to do a specific job, and that small interaction changes the emotional grammar of combat. A corridor is no longer simply a space for the protagonist to conquer. It is an obstacle four soldiers must negotiate together. When someone goes down, the urgent issue is not the plot’s next revelation but whether a friend can reach him before the situation collapses.
A film can certainly show camaraderie, and Star Wars has produced memorable soldiers on screen. Republic Commando makes cooperation a practical obligation. Its characters are not compelling because they have inherited a prophecy. They matter because the game refuses to let you finish the job quite so comfortably alone.
Episode I: Racer: one film sequence, a whole new language
The neatest example is a game built around the podrace in The Phantom Menace. The movie’s sequence is an exhilarating piece of visual storytelling, from the thunder of engines to the comic terror of hurtling through a narrow canyon. There is only so much race to watch. LucasArts turned that sequence into a complete sport.
Episode I: Racer is about holding impossible speeds, learning circuits, choosing when to risk a boost and nursing a damaged machine towards the finish. New courses and competitors take it beyond Tatooine. In a retrospective interview with the developers, designer Jon Knoles recalled that faithfully reproducing the film’s Tatooine course would have made a single lap far too long for their game. The layout had to be shortened and adjusted because the demands of spectacle and the demands of driving are not the same.
That compromise is the point. The game does not need to reproduce the film’s geography with devotional accuracy. It needs to reproduce the extraordinary sensation that inspired it. A movie shows a machine travelling absurdly fast; a racing game lets the player become responsible for keeping it out of the scenery. The difference is about three seconds before the first fatal wall.
A familiar galaxy needs unfamiliar rules
None of this means that cinema should behave more like a video game, or that an interactive experience is automatically deeper. Extra buttons guarantee no more depth than a larger screen. The interesting part is how each medium finds the things only it can do. Cinema controls the cut, the performance and the length of a silence. Games can put a cost on a decision, make companionship operational and force us to live with a failed plan.
Looking across the history of Star Wars games, the triumphs are strikingly different from one another. X-Wing turns the starfighter into a workplace. KOTOR makes moral choices part of character building. Republic Commando makes loyalty something the player must practise. Racer gives a single film set-piece its own laws of physics and competition. The common achievement is not technical fidelity to the source. It is confidence in being a game.
That brings us back to The Mandalorian and Grogu. Whether the movie’s familiarity feels comforting or limiting is a legitimate disagreement, and a useful one. Every new format brings an audience’s expectations along for the ride. Star Wars survives those journeys not because the next medium can recreate everything we already loved, but because sometimes it discovers a new reason to love it. The galaxy may be familiar. The experience should be allowed to surprise us.
About the author: Søren Ahrensborg Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent publication documenting the history, design and culture of Star Wars video games since 2009.
