Gallery: Wired's 7 Favorite Star Wars Videogames
01jedi-knight-ii-jedi-outcast
It's only natural that *Star Wars* and videogames go hand in hand – in a sense, they were born right around the same time. The name "Star Wars" isn't that far off from the title of the first computer game, [*Spacewar!*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!) Both tapped into the fantasies of the space race era: the intoxicating idea of leaving Earth in a rocket ship, meeting exotic life forms unlike anything we knew on Earth and fighting them with superpowered weapons. *Star Wars* was released in 1977, the same year that the Atari launched the [Video Computer System](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2009/03/racing-the-beam/). So it's quite ironic that many years passed before the release of the first *Star Wars* videogame, a 1982 Atari VCS game based on the snowspeeder sequence in *Empire Strikes Back*. But after that, the floodgates opened. *Star Wars* has inspired dozens of wildly divergent games. Name the genre, and there's a *Star Wars* game: First-person shooters, role-playing games, racers, platformers, martial arts, space dogfights, puzzles, strategy, car combat, two MMOs and [yes, even dancing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OnDizZ7UT0). With such a wide variety, presenting an authoritative list of the best *Star Wars* games would be a Herculean task. Instead, Wired editors have picked our personal favorites – some well-known classics, some games you forgot existed and some you may have never heard of. __Above:__ *Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast* (PC, 2002) --------------------------------------------------- The single-player component of *Jedi Knight II* is fine, but its the game's ridiculous free-for-all multiplayer matches that make it my favorite *Star Wars* game. I recently re-purchased the game [from the Mac App Store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-wars-jedi-knight-ii-jedi/id444786820?mt=12) and started up a match with 15 unlucky bots on the game's best level, the Nar Shaddaa Streets. With its towering, tangled knot of bridges and narrow platforms suspended over a bottomless pit, Nar Shaddaa is a great location for people who enjoy falling long distances. 15 minutes in, an incredible thing happened. I was hiding inside a building suspended in the middle of the level. As bots ran by, I'd leap out and snatch them up using my force grip power. Then, I'd slowly turn, dangle them off the platform and drop them into the pit. It was wonderful fun, until one bot got wise. The moment after I released him over the edge, he used his own power––force pull. I was yanked off the platform towards the falling bot, and as we tumbled into the black abyss below we swung at each other wildly with our lightsabers. Moments like that don’t happen in *Star Wars* games anymore.*–Ryan Rigney* *Screengrab: Wired*
02pit-droids
*Pit Droids* (PC, 1999) ----------------------- *Pit Droids* proves that not everything associated with *Star Wars Episode I* was a colossal mistake. This puzzle game, released in 1999 to coincide with the re-emergence of the franchise on the ears of Jar-Jar, [puts the player in thrall to the junk dealer/slave owner Watto](http://www.lucaslearning.com/products/pitdroids.htm) with a series of *Lemmings*-like puzzles. The player guides an army of mindless droids through the junkyard to safety using directional arrows, color-coded traps, and similar gimmicks. The Lucas Learning folks, naturally, pitched it a bit differently: "Players must gather and use evidence, form and test hypotheses, and develop and use logical reasoning skills, while dealing with various mathematical concepts such as attributes, geometry, numeracy sets and networks." Despite that dubious formula for fun, the game is a hoot to play and may soothe *Phantom Menace*-induced rages. Recently, it was given an [iOS upgrade](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-wars-pit-droids/id494450386?mt=8).*–Marty Cortinas* *Screengrab: Wired.com*
03star-wars-arcade-1983
*Star Wars* (Arcade, 1983) --------------------------- How was it possible to make a 3-D, first person space combat game almost 30 years ago? By making the graphics vector-based. If you can get past the fact that the Tie-Fighters and Death Star that your X-wing is contending with are just a few colored lines, Atari’s *Star Wars* arcade game was a geek's dream come true. It had digitized voice clips of a half dozen characters from the film and expert recreations of the theme song (and cantina theme!) The yoke-style steering wheel controller was extremely satisfying, especially if you were playing it in the enclosed sit-down cabinet. And holy hell, how did I not know until now that there was a conversion kit that turned it into an *Empire Strikes Back* game, with Probots and AT-Ats and asteroid fields?!*–Chris Baker* *Photo: goodrob13/[Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/6126441959/)/CC BY 2.0*
04star-wars-arcade-1993
*Star Wars* (Arcade, 1993) -------------------------- Sega’s *Star Wars* arcade game excised the boring Jedi bits from the original films and turned the rest into an on-rails shooter. You blow up the Death Star (twice!), trip up Imperial Walkers on Hoth and speed through the forests of Endor. Two bonus stages pit you against Boba Fett and Darth Vader. It was dumb fun, but what made it one of the best arcade games ever was the sit-down cabinet with speakers built into the seat. You relived all three films in a first-person perspective with every blaster round, every lightsaber “vwoom” and every John Williams note blasting into your ears.*–Daniel Feit* *Photo: Adrian Purser /[Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuse/215461453/sizes/l/in/photostream/)/CC BY-SA 2.0*
05star-wars-episode-i-racer
*Star Wars Episode I Racer* (Nintendo 64, 1999) ----------------------------------------------- Want speed? Jump into young Anakin Skywalker’s podracer, the three-piece, one-pilot rocketcraft that sent players on a breakneck ride through the Star Wars universe back in 1999. Players who could keep up had to navigate diverse planetscapes whose obstacles seemed to change thirty times per lap: floating boulders one leg, laser ropes the next. The game was one of the earlier racing titles that allowed a fair amount of vehicle customization, not to mention offer a wide character selection of multi-headed, scaly looking alien pilots. Finally, there was the junkyard proprietor, Watto. The gravel-voiced tapir-with-wings growled at players in a vaguely Italian accent, urging them to buy something or get out. Wicked fast racing, awesome vehicles, loitering at a space scrap shop -- *Episode I Racer* had it all.*–Bryan Lufkin* *Screengrab: [Wikipedia](http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star_Wars_-_Episode_I_Racer_-_PC.png)*
06star-wars-operation
Operation Star Wars (Board game, 2011) -------------------------------------- Who says we have to limit this to videogames? *Star Wars* has spawned some classic (and-not-so classic) board games and tabletop RPGs. The most unique has got to be Operation Star Wars. It eschews the [*complete anatomical accuracy*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game)#Gameplay) of the classic 1965 Operation board game as it tasks you with plucking malfunctioning components from Artoo Deetoo. Several of the components are true to the flicks, like the Bad Motivator and the Restraining Bolt and the Death Star Plans. But at no point in the movies or tie-in novels do I recall Artoo ever suffering from a "Cranky Crankshaft." The game also violates the fundamental logic of Operation, in that some of the items you have to remove aren't even in Artoo's body—they must be plucked from the ground around him (a Dagobah Swamp Snake and a Jabba-shaped Overweight Blob of Grease) or from the nearby body of Cee Threepio (a Robotic Worry Wart and a Pain in the Neck). If you're going to go all meta like that, why not have a slot where you can pull out Kenny Baker's spleen?*–Chris Baker* *Image: Hasbro*
07star-wars-famicom
*Star Wars* (Famicom/NES, 1987/1991) ------------------------------------ I don't have a favorite *Star Wars* game. In fact, I don't think I ever found a *Star Wars* game that I really enjoyed. But there is one I love talking about. In 1987, Namco released a *Star Wars* game for the Famicom (pictured above left), the Japanese version of the 8-bit NES. It was only ever released in Japan and boy was it weird. At the end of the first level you see Darth Vader, who turns into a scorpion. (Technically, the instruction book says, it's really a scorpion pretending to be Darth Vader. I don't know if that makes it okay.) I sat down to actually give Famicom *Star Wars* some serious playtime recently. It's a remarkably difficult game. Luke has three lives and dies in one hit. If you make it past Darth Scorpion you fly the Millennium Falcon into space, where you die. If you make it past that, you actually go to the planet Kessel -- not sure how many parsecs the trip takes – on which you climb up a mountain of bricks with Egyptian pharaoh heads on them. If Namco didn't make this entire game using only the cover of a *Star Wars* VHS tape for reference, it's hard to tell. But here's the ironic part. This bizarro *Star Wars* is actually a better game than the totally different version released by LucasArts for the NES in 1991 (pictured right). Although the plot more closely follows the movie (insofar as it actually bears some resemblance to it) and the graphics are much prettier, the whole game is basically a string of devious torture devices set up by sadist designers who delight in tricking the player into killing himself: Conveyor belts whisk you into deadly spikes, traps fall without warning from outside your field of view, et cetera.*–Chris Kohler* *Screengrabs: Wired/VGMuseum*
