Guest column by Søren Ahrensborg Kamper · Star Wars: Gaming
The most obvious thing to do with a famous license is also one of the least interesting: rebuild the movie and ask the player to walk through it. That approach can work, but it treats interactivity like a very expensive guided tour. The upcoming Star Wars: The Experience is literally designed to let fans step inside familiar places. Games can do something stranger. They can give us a job there.
That is the trick the best Star Wars games have understood for more than thirty years. They do not begin by asking how to reproduce the trench run, the cantina or a lightsaber duel with more polygons. They ask what the player is supposed to be doing from moment to moment. A pilot manages power. A mercenary clears a corridor. A Jedi chooses who to trust. A commander moves fleets. A scoundrel looks at a bad situation and wonders whether there is money in making it slightly worse. The license supplies the galaxy. The game supplies the verbs.
X-Wing Made the Cockpit the Fantasy
Star Wars: X-Wing arrived in 1993 and did something almost embarrassingly sensible: it decided that flying an X-wing was already enough. You were not Luke Skywalker with a checklist of famous movie moments. You were a Rebel pilot. That meant throttle control, shield management, weapon energy, target priorities, escort duty and the occasional realization that the thing currently shooting at you was much larger than your entire career.
That difference matters. The movies make starfighters exciting by cutting between faces, explosions, radio chatter and John Williams. X-Wing made them exciting by giving the cockpit responsibilities. The fantasy became procedural. Pull power from the engines, reinforce the shields, identify the right target, keep your wingman alive. The Death Star works as a climax because by then you have learned how to be useful inside the Rebellion, not simply because you recognize the trench.
Dark Forces Let Star Wars Become an FPS
Two years later, Dark Forces was equally happy to let another genre take control. Kyle Katarn is not a Jedi in the original game. He is a mercenary with a blaster, explosives and the occupational hazard of discovering that Imperial military installations have apparently never heard of workplace safety. The important thing is that Star Wars bends around the first-person shooter instead of constantly asking the shooter to stop and admire the license.
That choice is why the game still feels historically interesting. Modern players can now revisit it through Dark Forces Remaster, but the original design already understood the point: a licensed world gets larger when it can support people who are not reenacting the central myth. Stormtroopers, elevators, detention blocks and Imperial machinery become useful because they are good FPS material. The galaxy is no longer just a story. It is a place that can contain a job.
KOTOR Stopped Treating Canon Like a Fence
Knights of the Old Republic pushed that freedom much further in 2003 by moving thousands of years away from the films and committing to the language of a BioWare RPG. Party members argue. Dialogue choices matter. Equipment matters. Morality becomes something the player performs rather than something a screenplay tells them about. Even the lightsaber arrives as part of character progression instead of a souvenir handed over because the box says Star Wars.
This is where licensed games become genuinely interesting. A familiar universe can provide enormous amounts of recognition without dictating the structure. Tatooine can still be Tatooine, but the player is not there to recreate Luke looking at the twin suns. The planet is a quest space full of factions, companions, problems and decisions. Our own chronological archive of Star Wars games makes the pattern obvious: the series keeps surviving by changing what the player is asked to be.
Empire at War and LEGO Star Wars Changed the Scale
Empire at War made the player a commander in 2006, and suddenly individual heroics were no longer the only meaningful scale. Fleets, planets, production and positioning became the vocabulary. Darth Vader could still appear, but he was now one useful piece inside a strategic system. That is not less Star Wars than swinging a lightsaber. It is simply a different answer to the question: what would it mean to participate in this universe?
LEGO Star Wars found another answer by refusing to treat canon as fragile. The games smash the films into pieces, rebuild scenes for jokes and make failure funny enough that a child can keep going. That same philosophy still sits comfortably beside the more open-ended physical play celebrated in LEGO Star Wars SMART Play. The genius of LEGO Star Wars is not that it reproduces Star Wars accurately. It understands that LEGO and Star Wars must both survive the collision.
The Modern Games Are Still Asking the Same Question
Star Wars Outlaws works from the opposite end of the social ladder. Kay Vess is not trying to become the most important person in the galaxy. She is trying to survive the underworld, make contacts, take risks and build enough momentum to escape a life that keeps sending invoices. The appeal of the underworld of Star Wars Outlaws is that the license becomes infrastructure: cantinas, syndicates, speeders and Imperial patrols are the conditions of the job rather than references waiting for applause.
That appetite for specific roles is still visible in 2026. Zero Company gives the player a squad to build and command inside a turn-based tactics game. Galactic Racer, arriving October 6, is even more blunt about its priorities: no prophecy, no chosen one, just racing, rivalry and the unpleasant discovery that somebody else is better on the brakes. Neither idea needs Star Wars to become a universal genre. It needs Star Wars to become flexible enough to host one.
A World Is More Useful Than a Script
The safest licensed game is the one that keeps pointing at the thing you already love. Here is the ship. Here is the quote. Here is the scene. Recognition is comforting, and there is nothing wrong with comfort. A self-contained, familiar Star Wars adventure can be a pleasure precisely because it knows the audience already speaks the language, something the recent Mandalorian and Grogu review captures from the film side of the franchise.
But games have another option. They can stop treating the license as a script and start treating it as a world with enough room for professions, routines, systems and stupid little responsibilities. X-Wing made us pilots. Dark Forces made us mercenaries. KOTOR made us participants in our own moral mess. Empire at War made us commanders. LEGO made us vandals with excellent timing. Outlaws made us scoundrels. The current games are still looking for new occupations.
That is why the strongest licensed games often feel less like adaptations and more like temporary employment in a fictional universe. For a few hours, the galaxy does not need us to watch it. It needs us to clock in.
About the Author: Søren Ahrensborg Kamper has written about Star Wars games, their history and the communities around them since 2009. He is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming.
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