[I recently discovered that I had missed out a large number of #1 games earlier in the ’90s. Thanks for all offers to write about them so far, and please have a look at the list and let me know if you might be interested in taking one on! I’m planning to run one of these each week on Wednesdays. For Starwing I am joined again by Martin, who previously wrote about Beneath a Steel Sky and Theme Park]
This game was developed by Nintendo in conjunction with British company Argonaut Software, who impressed with their 1986 Amiga release Starglider. It was released in Japan and the US as Star Fox, but the title was changed to Starwing for European audiences due, apparently, to concerns that there might be confusion with something called StarVox and not, as one might assume, anything related to either the 1987 Spectrum/Commodore 64 release Starfox or the 1983 Atari 2600 release Star Fox (ranked 7th in a list of the worst Atari 2600 games!). Though Starwing, as a name for a space-based shooter, seems about as frightfully generic as one could get, a cursory google suggests that, by contrast, it stands in conflict with no other games, or anything else save for a “boutique management agency specializing in sports and entertainment” founded in 2011. It does, however, skirt somewhat close to being the same name as Star Wars: X-Wing, another video game that enjoyed success around this time.
The early nineties is a somewhat curious time for a sudden spate of success for Star Wars and Star Wars inspired games. 1991, the midpoint between the releases of Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, is the year furthest from the release of a Star Wars film since 1968, and, given their early 1993 releases, both Starwing and Star Wars: X-Wing must have begun production around this time. But, even then, in what must have been about the lowest ebb in the general mass appeal of Star Wars, the collective awareness of the franchise was still enormous. In 1993, I don’t think I’d seen a Star Wars film yet, but I’m sure I could have told you that Luke Skywalker is a Jedi who teams up with Obi Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia to fight Darth Vader, who is his father.
And while Starwing may not have the license to use things like the iconic music or, y’know, the name to scream “STAR WARS!” at you, the game is not exactly subtle about its influences on that particular front. There’s a cutscene that plays in the menu screen where an enormous triangular space craft slowly flies in from the top of the screen, gradually revealing the extent of its looming enormity. The gameplay involves piloting a small spaceship called an ‘Arwing’ to perform such tasks as flying down the corridors of an enormous space station in order to shoot at the weak point at its core and blow it up. More so than any of the games of this era that bore the actual name of the franchise, Starwing does an excellent job at translating the general feel of watching a Star Wars film to the medium of video games.
Which, in some ways, makes a lot of sense. From the beginning of the series, one of the core appeals of Star Wars, after all, was the technological marvel of its special effects, and Starwing exists, in part, for a similar purpose, to bring incredible 3D graphics to the SNES using the brand new Super FX chip. But while in 1977/1993, these technologies may have been new and exciting, nothing can stay that way forever. There needs to be some degree of substance behind the spectacle to generate a lasting appeal. And so, in Starwing, you are accompanied on your missions by wingmen who are ostensibly there to assist you, though in practice, what they do is fly in front of you, calling out for help from the enemy ships chasing them down and generally getting in the way. But in this way, their characters come across loud and clear; there’s Slippy, the bumbling comic relief, Falco, the brooding jerk, and Peppy, the… other one. OK, but still, two out of three ain’t bad. Now, none of them are exactly overflowing with hidden depths, but frankly, neither were Han Solo or Obi-Wan Kenobi. The point is, the easy camaraderie their dialogue displays brings across that feel of a ragtag band of misfits coming together to fight off an oppressive and overwhelming force against all odds.
And this aspect of the game is, very specifically, what Nintendo brought to the table here. The technology was all Argonaut, and left to their own devices, I’m sure they’d have put together a perfectly enjoyable, if unmemorable, shooter, but the character work produced by Nintendo added a touch of magic that turned it into a minor classic that spawned a handful of successful sequels over multiple console generations. For many companies, this would be the flagship franchise, the one that put them on the map. For Nintendo, it probably doesn’t even break the top five.
