There are lots of Star Wars games. Some are good, some are bad, some are okay. The most important thing is that they are numerous. Many. Mucho. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has only just faded from view, and Star Wars: Outlaws is fast approaching on the horizon. Star Wars has a prolific relationship with video games, one that is showing no signs of slowing down, and it feels like a lot of other movies could learn from how Star Wars has expanded its world.
I’m not really an IP lover. Aside from Spider-Man 2, all of my most anticipated upcoming games are fresh ideas like Goodbye Volcano High, Helskate, and Venba. On the triple-A scene, Starfield is up there with Spidey for me. New concepts are the lifeblood of our industry, and more vital than ever in a landscape of sequels and remakes. I’ll always tell people to seek out new experiences, and coming up to the halfway point of 2023 my game of the year is currently Paranormasight. Despite this, it’s hard not to look at what Star Wars is doing and see the potential.
Movie tie-in games used to be pretty common. As game development cycles have grown larger, games can no longer be developed at the pace of movies to release at the same time, and so the trend has faded from existence. What Star Wars is so clever at though is that these games do not follow the movies. There’s a mix in how Star Wars approaches the realm of video game adaptations, and it’s from this outside the box thinking that others can benefit.
There are some straight adaptations, with Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga retelling the nine main movies in brickified form. Then you have online multiplayer games like Battlefront that allow you to play as the classic heroes but without an adherence to recreating the plot. Mostly though, Star Wars games have given us original tales that expand the world. They don’t need to care about the canon, and that’s the secret other films haven’t always figured out. We don’t really want to play through movies, we want to experience the world.
We’re already seeing this with Marvel, probably in no small part due to Disney owning both and seeing the money it makes. While Marvel’s Avengers was too loyal to the Joss Whedon movie, the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy and the upcoming Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Panther games are all taking the general mythos of the characters rather than a scene for scene recreation of the movies. Indiana Jones, another Disney property, is also getting the treatment. Away from Disney, so is James Bond, who has enjoyed a mixed history in video games with a heavy reliance on adaptations.
The trick is to take a world we want to live in rather than just a story we want to experience. Cal Kestis does not exist in the movies. He was created entirely for the video games. But we go along for the ride anyway because we want to be a Jedi in that world. Not any Jedi in particular, just the idea of being a Jedi. And then with Outlaws, we’ve had our Jedi fantasy so often that being offered the chance to explore the galaxy with a fresh perspective now holds a welcome charm.
Cal Kestis, Darth Revan, Dash Rendar, and now Kay Vess are all original characters that we get to make our own, in whatever way we like. Movies like John Wick have a very obvious path into gaming, but I’d rather play as a fresh character than have a new tale jammed into Wick’s very tight and personal narrative. Shadow of Mordor understood this for Lord of the Rings too. As well as Marvel and DC, worlds like The Hunger Games, Transformers, Max Max, and Alien all have a higher potential than has currently been explored.
It doesn’t even need to be long running franchises, although for obvious marketing purposes they would naturally be the ones most likely to get the treatment. Who could say to a game inside the world of My Neighbor Totoro completely separate from the movie’s own story? A game in the world of A Quiet Place has been in development recently, so we may get to see this path walked more often.
The best thing for gaming is completely original concepts that push creative boundaries and take artistic risks. But executives mostly care about making money, and the Star Wars method feels like a solid attempt to do both. If we’re doomed to a future of recognisable brand IP, we can at least hope to get some original stories into the mix as well.