Star Wars Episode I: Racer

One thing that playing through the ‘90s has taught me is that Star Wars as a starting point for games can adapt to nearly anything. A new trend for FMV-based games? Star Wars was one of the first there. Doom and its followers are the new big thing? Time for Star Wars Doom! And in both of those cases it worked. In 1999, so did the latest bold stretch: it’s time for Star Wars Wipeout.

I haven’t found anything that confirms that the pod-racing parts of The Phantom Menace, with their little craft racing at terrifying speed while hovering just above the ground, were directly inspired by Wipeout. Given how important advances in computer graphics were to the film’s creation, though, it would make sense for its makers to have been looking at places where those advances were happening including video games, and high speed futuristic racing had made a splash in that world in recent years. It’s hard to imagine them not being aware of it. However things came about, this is a Star Wars genre game where emphasising its relation to part of a (new!) Star Wars movie and piggybacking on a successful type of game are one and the same thing.

The first, most obvious thing that Star Wars Episode I: Racer gets right is that it is fast. Very fast. The setup of the craft being two huge engines dragging a little pod behind them increases the sense of runaway momentum as soon as you accelerate, and it does feel like you’re along for a ride and clinging on to whatever control you can. The sense of speed is so good that the fact a large part of the screen is taken up by showing REALLY BIG NUMBERS to emphasise how fast you are going shows a baffling lack of confidence. I don’t need something shouting 450 (with no units, so meaningless anyway) to get the idea that I am going fast. I can already see that.

The track design also enhances the sense of speed and risk. Having closed off paths that you just barely divert away from at the last moment down a different narrow tunnel is a thrill and test of skill each time. Dodging rocks or watching them explode into fragments as you hit them is a bit closer to unnecessarily showy, but I’ll take it. How harshly the game reacts to your failures is about right. The damage accumulation, with a display showing different bits of the craft in different colours as they take more hits, works rather well to allow some bashing around off the scenery while still making you keep it as strategic bashing around off the scenery. And when I hit the wall enough times that one engine exploded at the end of the last lap, but the other one just about carried me over the finish line in first place, I felt like a daredevil champion.

Going around the tracks feels good as a driving (flying?) experience. The racing is less spectacular – it felt like I was occupying the same space as opponents but not really interacting with them much, and a lot of races just had me way ahead or way behind all of them. Seeing your rivals in the distance represented by the number of their position in the race is a nice touch though, since the craft are too small and fiddly to properly see in the distance. The tracks also feel a bit underwhelming in terms of the wider experience. For every wonderful section crashing over ledges of glaciers (Beedo’s Wild Ride), there are  twice as many made from featureless tunnels.

The use of music is also weirdly lacking. There are a few hints of epic film score, but a lot of the time there is just the vwoosh of engines, the alien chatter of opponents, and the quickly-annoying voice breathlessly telling you that “it’s a new lap record!”. I wasn’t expecting Star Wars Wipeout to feature Star Wars The Prodigy, but music was absolutely central to Wipeout’s appeal, and failing on that front leaves a big gap. There are times when the game feels like it could be going somewhere more interesting but is cabled to the powerful engines of Star Wars™ pulling in another direction.

Perhaps there was some compensation for players who were fans of the film, who had the thrill of seeing loved cinematic moments turned into a whole game? If I’d seen The Phantom Menace, and if I’d enjoyed it, or at least the pod-racing part, might that fill in the gap? I don’t know, but in fact that can’t have been the case for the vast majority of the people who took Star Wars Episode I: Racer to UK #1 on its release in June 1999. Back then even a new Star Wars film was subject to the standard delay between US and UK release dates, and the film wasn’t out here for another month. So if there was a compensating factor it was anticipation, another powerful engine, and one that might come crashing against a wall soon enough.

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Top of the charts for week ending 12 June 1999:

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