Let’s start with Doom (LucasArts did). Doom would have been a prime contender for my Uncharted series, looking at the games that make their impact outside of the world measured by the charts, if it wasn’t for the fact that it eventually did enter that world at #1. So before we get to Doom itself, we get to something thoroughly post-Doom.
Dark Forces isn’t the first time in this journey I’m meeting a first person shooter, exactly. In Operation Wolf you play from a first person perspective and you shoot things. In moving freely around in a 3D space for its shooting, though, Dark Forces is a very different type of game from that. It is not really an FPS in the modern sense either, though. Aiming is too tied to movement for that. It’s a game of a particular moment, and without even having played Doom much yet I know it’s a Doom moment, one where movement through place is its critical appeal.
Despite LucasArts and Star Wars vaulting their way across different genres and styles, it didn’t occur to me until I started playing that this genre might be one of them. All the other Star Wars games have been flying-flavoured in one way or another, and in a series whose most iconic battles are with, when it comes down to it, swords, why would you go with any other form of combat? You don’t get light sabres in Dark Forces, although you can punch a stormtrooper should you so choose.
The fit of subject to genre is great, though. The imprecision in the firefights works in an established universe of baddies who aren’t very good at shooting. Entering new spaces and reacting quickly to the enemies you see there is a big part of the game, and the Doom-improving engine and broad futuristic setting offer many inventive opportunities there. There is a constant flow of new types of opening doors, descending in lifts, and otherwise taking you from here to here-but-there. When the early 3D leaves much of the world around you as visibly made up of facades with no depth, and it starts to feel like being in limbo somewhere between a real place and a cheap film set, it enhances the experience more than it detracts.
The best bits of Dark Forces — the figuring out of how its intricate spaces fit together, map neatly imposed over your view, the what-is-that of the newly entered area — have nothing to do with Star Wars, but it works better for being a Star Wars game. In that it stands ahead of the previous games, official or otherwise. It uses its familiar setting for some helpful mood-setting shortcuts without relying on the player being a Star Wars fan enjoying Star Wars things to be the best thing about it.
Gallup Compact Disc chart, Computer Trade Weekly 20 March 1995 (chart for week to 11 March 1995)