Casey Monroe

I cannot begin to describe how profound the introduction of X-Wing in 1993 was for gaming and Star Wars in general. It was the dream come true: piloting a starfighter from Star Wars. And it would have been easy to put anything out with the label Star Wars on the side of it, but Lucasarts was not that kind of company. The single most important thing is the gameplay. Lawrence Holland and the other creators studied the films and notice that all of the fighters and ships didn't simply turn left or right, they slid along a curve as if they were moving on the circumference of a circle. They noticed that there were shields and that they could be reconfigured from one place to another. They noticed the different kinds of weapons, from torpedo's to lasers, to ion canons to concussion missiles. Each had different purposes. They noticed the differences between ship speeds, armament and handling. The galaxy these ships flew in was robust with Imperial capital ships like Star Destroyers, frigates, corvettes, boarding craft, shuttles, Calamari cruisers, cargo ships, cargo pods, tugs. TIE fighters, interceptors, bombers, Vader's TIE. This was a huge number of assets in 1993. I remember upgrading my 486 25MHz to a 33Mhz motherboard to see this at its top setting. But what was it's charm? It felt real. You started as a pilot cadet and if you went through the flight school training until you got your fighter qualification patch on your uniform, you would be able to handle your own through the rest of the game. You start on the Mon Cal cruiser independence. If you go to training you are transferred to a frigate that will allow you to run the obstacle course in different fighters. It is a timed course and there is not enough time to complete it. You add two seconds of time for each turret you shoot and there is no targeting computer to aid you. The early levels there is enough time. Later levels you have to shoot targets to get time. After a while the turrets shoot back. Finally, turrets hidden by the terrain shoot after you pass. If you succeed, the rest of the game becomes no issue. The music was a character in itself. Using the iMuse system, the midi music would change based on the action in the game. The results would be a unique composition with every mission and how you played. Another frigate gives you training by performing historical missions. Here you learn the fundamentals of starfighter combat AND you get to learn some of the Star Wars lore up to that point. My favorite was recreating the heist of the Incom T-65 X-wing prototypes as well as helping the engineering team defect. You can study the different ships shown in the game, learn their weak points and strengths. Much of this conforms to the info that came from LFL in the early 1980s and the West End Games RPGs that named ship builders and weapons companies. The attention to detail to at that time was existing lore was staggering. It also codified what had been talked about in the 10 years after Return of the Jedi. This all leads us to the campaigns. You are transferred to Home One where you begin missions against the empire in a series of campaigns. And here it should be noted... the stakes are real. You could be shotdown and recovered. You can get killed. Or you could be caught by the empire, tortured by Vader himself for information. You could continue playing, but any and all rank would be lost with you starting over as a new person. In the first campaign you are desperately outnumbered and chased. The empire finds one of your bases and you do your best to limit losses. You still take losses, but you don't want to lose everything. One of the missions defending a medical frigate offloading injured soldiers later went into one of the first X-wing novels. The rest of the first campaign is set on putting together a plan to capture a shuttle and smuggle a bomb onto the lead star destroyer in the sector. The second campaign is leading a direct assault on a Star Destroyer after its hyperdrive breaks down. It is a series of missions including peeling away the support ships and fighter defense until the final assault can happen. Its defenses conformed around the lore for what was in a task force's armament. The end of the campaign is assisting Princess Leia's Tantive IV get the Death Star plans. The last campaign are the events of A New Hope with the search for the Death Star leading up to the assault on the station. The last mission of the original game is the trench run. All historical missions are briefed by General Dodonna. All campaign missions are briefed by Admiral Ackbar. But after you do a campaign mission, it falls into Dodonna's inventory of historical missions and you can replay it with him giving the briefing this time. The briefings are worth the listen in themselves: what is planned and what is a surprise. Two other expansions were sold the following year. Imperial Pursuit showed the empire's reaction to the loss of the Death Star with the rebels abandoning Yavin and trying to lose the empire. B-wing was the introduction of the B-wing fighter as the search for a new rebel base continues. The end is the establishment of the Hoth base. When you watch Andor, this is its spiritual ancestor. When you wonder about how all the lore in the early 1990s became interconnected, this was the first LFL direct property that tied it all (all others were vendors or licensees before). It was the best space simulator of the 1990s, racing often times neck and neck with Origin's Wing Commander series. By the end of the 1998, the technology and story telling was perfected. By 1999, it was all gone. Episode 1's starfighter game was a cash in that lost all of the flight mechanics that were meticulously researched and replicated. We never got it back. Parts of it emerged in Star Wars Galaxies MMO, but it was not the same. Star Wars squadrons brought back some of it, but its campaign story was so rigid and its characters so bland it was practically stillborn. But if you are able to and have a proper flightstick.... it is worth going back to the story telling of this space simulator. youtu.be/nSSNonaBw-8?si=Mm0Y… It was one of the first games with cutscenes. I near lept out of my seat watching the imperial invasion. youtube.com/watch?v=Ea_e0qiZ… Gameplay can be seen here as well as the intros to the game and the menus. Edit: I should note that while not in the game itself, the game came with something called "the Farlander Papers". The protagonist of the game is a force sensitive pilot named Keyan Farlander who eventually becomes the one Y-wing pilot to survive the attack on the death star. He captures much of the data on the imperial forces that becomes the database you can reference. His story was told more extensively in the strategy guide that was published at the time.