Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

My struggles with Star Wars games and flight sims of all kinds have been well documented, so another Star Wars flying game doesn’t immediately present the most appealing prospect. However! You may also have noticed from the type of fast transport games I prefer — the kind where you drive a car more or less fixed to the ground — that I am the kind of heathen who almost always chooses to drive from an external view. That is also the view offered of your craft in Rogue Squadron by default, and pretty well sums up what it is going for. Compared to X-Wing and TIE Fighter, there is very little depth in story or gameplay to Rogue Squadron. And that is exactly what makes it so appealing, and was key to its success. Well, that and a perfect bit of timing.

1999 was peak Star Wars as hype built for the prequel films (and before anyone had seen The Phantom Menace). This is the first of no fewer than three Star Wars games I’ll be covering for the year. As part of the build-up, the original films had also recently been also back in cinemas, and they form the backdrop for Rogue Squadron. The developers themselves cite the even-higher-than-normal appetite for more Star Wars as a big reason for much-higher-than-expected sales. Their game puts you in charge not of some nameless rookie, but of Luke Skywalker himself, leading a squadron into missions between the stories of the movies.

At the start, missions are planet-bound but you get a reasonable freedom to move around in three dimensions and a pretty effective radar system. It feels like the game helps you avoid the scenery, but it doesn’t completely do it for you, so swoops of last-minute evasive action continues to feel pretty epic. And even someone with my poor spatial navigation skills has a shot at taking on and beating some TIE fighters in a dogfight. The missions go on to have a bit more variety, but that’s the key point right there.

It’s fast, fun, and looks impressive as long as you assume that you happen to be fighting on a slightly misty day on all occasions. In some respects, it’s the game that Rebel Assault might have been if technology had allowed. There’s also more than a hint of Starwing to it, which has a nice bit of circularity to it given the influence that Argonaut and Nintendo took from Star Wars there, and that it’s a Nintendo console that Rogue Squadron did best on.

The other closing of a circle which I love even more goes further back than that. In 1987, a small team in Germany made a home computer game called The Great Giana Sisters, which was a remarkably obvious imitation of Super Mario Bros.. Nintendo leaned on them to withdraw it from sale and they did so. A few years later, several of the same key people at Rainbow Arts were responsible for Turrican, a shooter-platformer which kept its level of influence from Metroid to more lawyer-friendly levels. It also stretched the Commodore 64’s limited hardware impressively to give massive spaces to explore and some over-the-top combat. It was a game I loved as a child. 

By the time of its sequel, key Turrican developers had spun off as Factor 5, and the same Factor 5 are co-developers of Rogue Squadron, again stretching what could be achieved on their hardware of choice. Factor 5 were now working closely with LucasArts, before going on to get even closer to Nintendo in the Gamecube era. We are not just talking about a loose chain of companies, either. Personally there through it all was composer Chris Hülsbeck: from ripping off Nintendo to working on one of their system’s most successful games of 1999, in just over a decade.

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Top of the charts for week ending 30 January 1999:

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Top of the charts for week ending 6 February 1999:

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