It’s been a long time coming, but it’s no surprise to get here. After an Epic attempt at Star Wars without the licence, after LucasArts getting to #1 with something that wasn’t anything to do with George Lucas’s most famous series, here is a game based on Star Wars itself. On one level it is a peculiar thing for 1993. I’ve done plenty of other games based on films, but all the films in question were a lot less than a decade old at the time. This is not a game designed to track a particular new film as part of an initial release rush of promotion, but as part of turning an extended universe into an everlasting source of new material.
Except that, in fact, Rebel Assault sticks pretty close to A New Hope, with the player as Rookie 1 in the role of Luke Skywalker, up to and including the run on the Death Star. Rebel Assault is not a game concept which stands on its own with the Star Wars dressing as a bonus. As sole coder Vince Lee tells it, it was made with two priorities – to put the player in Star Wars, and to demonstrate the possibilities of the CD-ROM as a games format which many PCs could now play. The way he approached the first priority is in part a product of the second. The improved technology allows a level of detail in its graphics well above that possible on the cassette, disk and cartridge games that had gone before.
Computing power to actually process the increased amounts of data in any sophisticated way was not keeping up so well, though. LucasArts’s solution is to go back a decade to a contemporary of Return of the Jedi, the pre-rendered movie approach of Dragon’s Lair. The arcade version of Dragon’s Lair was based on the laserdisc, after all, a previous, bulkier version of the same technology. The in-game footage in Rebel Assault of asteroids and ships and rocky canyons zooming past is a little muddy, but a complete transformation from Terminator 2 and its tiny videos just a couple of years earlier. Like Dragon’s Lair, though, the price is that interactivity is limited.
In the first training run flying through some canyons, for example, you have to move your ship around to follow your trainers and not crash into anything. But as you move within the very limited, invisible window provided, there is no real sense of piloting in a ship in the world at all. You can mess up and collide and take some damage, but the video carries on as if nothing happened. That is, until you fail and start again, and barely interact with exactly the same video once more. There are branching paths (“if you’re a real hotshot, follow me to the right!”) but it’s not much of a mitigation for an unsatisfying experience. It puts you right there in Star Wars, but you’re still mostly watching and the effects aren’t up to the movies.
There is another aspect of the CD-ROM’s capabilities that saves Rebel Assault from being a total drag, though: sound. First of all is some decent voice acting, including two possible voices for the player character’s side of comms since, if you go into the menus and change from the default, Rookie 1 can be female. The real star of the format, though, is the music. I am not a massive Star Wars fan. I watched The Force Awakens and the rather good The Last Jedi; I think as a child I saw a couple of the original trilogy rather than just absorbing it via osmosis, but I can’t be certain. What I am certain of is that hearing John Williams’s orchestral score, even in rather compressed form, gives me happy feelings and is the most delightful part of Rebel Assault by far. Even limited gameplay gains a feeling of daring and import when it’s set to that glorious soundtrack. At its heights, the idea of putting the player in Star Wars feels like a magical success, and Rebel Assault feels like not just a reach from 1993 into gaming past, but perhaps the coming future too.
PC chart, Edge 007, April 1994