Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace was, best as I can tell, the seventeenth Star Wars game LucasArts released for PC. Of those seventeen, fourteen are available to buy on Steam now. That’s been one of the upsides of so many of the PC games I’ve had to play being Star Wars ones – at least I’ve been able to rely on it being easy to do so. The Phantom Menace is not available to buy on Steam. That puts it in the elevated company of: Star Wars Chess; Star Wars: Behind the Magic, which was not even really a game as such but an interactive CD-ROM; and the reportedly terrible Star Wars: Yoda Stories.

None of those games got anywhere near the top of the charts. The Phantom Menace, on the other hand, spent its first two weeks at UK #1 before returning to the top for a third week after an interruption for the Sega Dreamcast’s launch week. It was one of the most successful Star Wars games so far, and did well past the point where word of mouth was out there about how it played. And yet I had one of my less fun struggles to find a version I could play, and have been unable to get any pictures beyond the photo above. The game has been memory-holed. What gives?

It’s not even all bad. At the start of the game you take control of Obi-Wan Kenobi, with a third-person view, and your trade negotiations get interrupted by some poison gas and killer robots firing lasers at you. You can fight them by swinging your light sabre to reflect the laser beams back at them. It’s a little bit hit-or-miss, and while the game helps cheats things in your favour a bit you still have to time things enough that it feels like you are achieving this feat yourself. Doing cool things with a light sabre and watching droids blacken and sizzle out is a great starting point for a Star Wars game.

From there, it progresses through a lot of the sort of things that video games do to keep you busy while not actually providing much of a challenge. Pressing obvious buttons to open obvious doors, pushing boxes sort of thing. Later levels get some more open spaces and give you more interacting and chatting to do, as well as giving you some different characters to control, but the core of the game remains much the same. It also lets you save at any point, meaning that if you fail it’s not a big deal, and reducing the challenge factor further. This is because, much more so than the movie games of other eras, more than Robocop or even The Lion King, The Phantom Menace puts being the movie above pretty much everything in its list of priorities.

The Phantom Menace’s angular graphics do okay in high tech indoor settings that can be angular themselves, but because the film goes to a swamp, you go to a swamp, and get full on Tomb Raider III-style square trees. You don’t ever get to do pod-racing though, since that was its own better-remembered game, and you’re stuck just getting Qui-Gon to collect some parts. Every time you go to the menu, you see a photo of Ewan McGregor or whoever plays the character you are playing, the better to show up the character model they’re displayed next to and to remind you of the important thing here.

And that, ultimately, is what seals the game’s fate. It’s not that terrible, but almost everything it does well is tied so tightly to the film it’s based on. And the film in question is The Phantom Menace. You can probably already see the issue. After the anticipation and mania that fueled all of the Star Wars games succeeding in 1999, there was a backlash against the film which has never really ended since. The backlash wasn’t all immediate — this game’s success is actually evidence for that, since it came out after the film, not alongside it — but it did grow powerful. It would take until 2003 for another Star Wars game to reach UK #1, and that one would clearly distance itself from the prequel films. This game wasn’t its own disaster, but was collateral damage in one.