A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Why did Star Wars video games give a "Very Special Thanks" to George Lucas in the credits? George Lucas is the (now-retired) founder and CEO of Lucasfilm Ltd., the parent company of LucasArts Games, which was originally named Lucasfilm Games. Lucas also created the  Star Wars  movie and television franchise in the 1970s, starting with  Star Wars,  aka  Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,  in 1977. All of the  Star Wars  video games, whether they were published directly by Lucas Arts or by entities such as Atari (whose  Star Wars: The Arcade Game  was a personal favorite of mine when it was introduced in 1983) owed their existence to the films. Without Lucas’s space fantasy set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the programmers, game designers, graphics artists, salespeople, and composers might not have even gone into the video game industry in the first place. So it is natural that many of those individuals who playe...

© 2003 BioWare and LucasArts Someone on Quora asks: Why doesn't Disney consider 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' canon? Lucasfilm (not its parent, The Walt Disney Company) did not make Bioware/LucasArts’ 2003 video game  Knights of the Old Republic  or any of its sequels canon for the same reason the company never made  X-Wing, TIE Fighter,  or  Star Wars: The Arcade Game  canon: as far as canon is concerned, the movies and directly-derived materials (novelizations, comic book adaptations, and for a long time, the Radio Dramas) were the only materials accepted by franchise creator George Lucas as the “official story.” Period. This was true in 2005, when it seemed as though no more  Star Wars  films would ever be made, although Lucas later amended his position on canon to include  Star Wars: The Clone Wars,  a television series he created and assigned Catherine Winder and Dave Filoni to develop for Time-Warner owned Car...

If you're a reader of Bantam Spectra's long-running Star Wars: X-Wing novels by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Alliston, you know the books were not only inspired by George Lucas' original Star Wars Trilogy and the subsequent Expanded Universe novels by Timothy Zahn and other authors, but also by Star Wars: X-Wing , a best-selling series of PC games from Lucasarts Games. Designed by Lawrence Holland ( Strike Fleet ) and Edward Kilham, Star Wars: X-Wing first appeared in 3.5-inch floppy disk format for DOS-based IBM PCs and compatible machines which used the Intel 386 processor. I couldn't afford it back then -- a brand new 5-disc set with manual and a copy of The Farlander Papers cost about $50 back in 1993 -- but my then-neighbor Geno Betancourt had a brand-new copy. Geno, knowing I love Star Wars and PC games, loaned me his Star Wars: X-Wing software and the manual -- he was both working and studying long hours back then, and he wasn't playing the g...

Pros:  True to the Star Wars universe, great sound and graphics, interesting premise. Cons:  It can be overwhelming. Too much info to digest at once until you master Rebellion . Since 1977, Star Wars has inspired video games and computer simulations. And why not? Its storyline and visual effects-heavy battle scenes are ready made video game material. Want to fly an X-wing fighter or its nemesis, the Imperial TIE fighter? You can, if you have a PC and the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter CD-ROM game. Want to be a Jedi Knight? There are several LucasArts Entertainment titles that will allow you to wield your trusty lightsaber, face Sith Lords and assorted baddies, and join the ranks of the Jedi Order in either the Prequel or Classic Trilogy eras. In short, there is a Star Wars game for almost every computer game category in the marketplace. (There is even a Monopoly variant released as a joint effort between Hasbro Interactive -- now Infogrames -- and LucasArts!)...