Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 this week is the latest in a long line of Star Wars game video that goes back almost 30 years. The films were a natural choice to become parties. The great adventure, lightsabers, space battles and an epic story involving the fight against a rebellion by an evil empire lends itself perfectly to video games. And from the first Star Wars appeared in 1982, hundreds of games for almost every system imaginable have been done.
In the first Star Wars games in the 80′s, although limited by the hardware, began the tradition of bringing the magic of the display in the gallery or at home. Games of this period tend to concentrate on the flying sequences, as the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back cons, or racing against the stars of the death of cinema, fourth and sixth. Perhaps the most famous game of the decade was the first Star Wars Arcade, according Rusel DeMaria in the illustrated history of electronic games, allowing gamers to play as Luke Skywalker, fall into the trench to destroy the Death Star from the top of A New Hope.
After the 1983 video game crash, new games based on the franchise didn’t appear until 1991, with the release of three games, each based on one of the movies, for the Nintendo. All three games were re-released with updated graphics and gameplay in the early nineties on the Super Nintendo. Both generations of games were simple platformers and sidescrollers with little resemblance to the movie plots, and soon new generations of Star Wars gamers were wanting more.
Starting in the mid-’90s, the games began to fan out both in terms of gameplay and story material. The PC gaming front exploded on to the scene with the introduction of X-Wing, the first Star Wars combat flight simulator, in 1993. First-person shooters were added to the lineup with 1995′s Dark Forces. Other popular series that would run into the 2000s, such as Jedi Knight and Rogue Squadron, got their start near the end of the decade.
Star Wars games experienced a massive resurgence with the release of the prequel movies. Movie tie-ins quickly appeared in all systems. The genre of real-time strategy in the PC occurred during this period, too. The presence of Star Wars role-playing during this decade has emerged with the award-winning games like Knights of the Old Republic and its consequences. Other notable games from this period include the Battlefront series, Lego Star Wars series and the Power of the Force series.
Even if the films were released, still writing new novels and new games to be produced. Open the Star Wars universe continues to fascinate a new generation of players, and it seems that as long as there are games, there will be a Star Wars video.
