Boba Fett, the rogue bounty hunter, was the only recurring character from the Star Wars movie to appear (species of characters were present but not individual characters). There were no lightsabers (think of it as a futuristic sword, replacing the metal blade with a laser one), the signature weapon of the Star Wars franchise because the first-person engines were too primitive to reproduce them. “Dark Forces” was limited in what it could do and there’s no fault in that.
It was, realistically, a Star Wars fan’s first opportunity to shoot a stormtrooper (the white-armored bad guys in the Star Wars movies) face-to-face. “Dark Forces” was the first entry of Lucasarts into the first-person shooter genre. “Dark Forces” was a first-person shooter created by Lucasarts, the computer and video game division of Lucasfilm which controls the Star Wars intellectual property.
Various tricks were employed to give the illusion of 3D game space – Multiple game fields that would switch out, camera tricks, game level tricks… Some of the tricks worked better then others but none of them could replace what was really needed – True room-over-room architecture that only a polygon-based game could provide (and eventually did).Īmongst the variety of first-person games to premiere between the release of “Doom” and “Quake,” the Star Wars-based “Dark Forces” first-person shooter was created. You couldn’t, for instance, walk under the bridge that you had just walked over – It wasn’t possible.
Until “Quake 1” arrived with it’s polygon capabilities, first-person gaming had to rely upon programming tricks in order to fool the player into thinking that the game world was three dimensional when it was, in fact, most decidedly not. We live in a time where, quite frankly, computing hardware can accomplish anything – Photo-realistic characters and settings… Sound effects… Music… Game play trickery of every shade and type… It is hard to imagine that, even twenty years ago, computer and video game developers wracked their brains to overcome crippling software and hardware limitations that made truly immersive game play impossible. Mods That Failed – Dark Forces Mod for Jedi Academy…įor every game modification (“mod”) that is released as intended, there is a phone book (“Hey, Dad, what’s a phone book?”) of mods that never make it past a few shiny screenshots and blog posts. Mods That Failed – Dark Forces Mod for Jedi Academy after the break…