The Millennium Falcon has one of the great entrances in movie history, and one of the least reassuring maintenance records. In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo tries to outrun the Imperial fleet in a ship whose hyperdrive decided to take the afternoon off. Chewbacca works on the machinery. Han works on his temper. The villains have Star Destroyers; our heroes have a freighter that needs another visit to the garage. Somehow, that makes the chase better.
The Falcon isn’t exciting despite its mechanical problems. Its mechanical problems are part of the excitement. You believe in this ship because someone has to keep it alive. When Bruce Majors wrote in Splice Today about the scuffed, oil-stained machinery of Star Wars, he identified one of the franchise’s most durable pleasures: this is a future that’s visibly used. But a dirty spaceship is only a prop until somebody has to do something about the dirt, the damage or the failing engine.
The history of Star Wars games, mapped across four decades in Star Wars: Gaming’s complete games archive, covers everything from arcade shooters to role-playing adventures. But two old LucasArts games are unexpectedly good interpreters of the movies. TIE Fighter, released in 1994, and Star Wars: Episode I Racer, released in 1999, hardly seem like natural companions. One puts you inside the military machinery of the Galactic Empire; the other straps you behind two powerful engines and points you toward a finish line. Yet both understand that operating a machine means making compromises. They let the galaxy develop a resistance to our wishes.
In TIE Fighter, the cockpit’s an argument with a power supply. You adjust the recharge rate of your laser cannons, trading the ability to replenish firepower against the engine power that determines your speed. In craft equipped with shields, their recharge rate joins the negotiation. The ordinary TIE fighter, notoriously, has no shields at all. The Empire may have conquered half the galaxy, but it hasn’t purchased adequate protection for the person doing the flying.
The result is a kind of practical anxiety that no cinematic dogfight can reproduce. You spot a target and want more speed. Faster travel means letting another system recharge more slowly. You close in, reconsider, and shift power again. None of this requires a simulation of worn bearings or an itemized maintenance bill. The ship is a set of limited resources, and you’re responsible for keeping those resources useful at precisely the wrong moment.
This is a curious way to make the Empire feel real. Its warships look enormous and its officers speak as though the entire universe has been properly filed. Inside your fighter, however, there’s no such thing as unlimited capability. Missions demand that you protect vulnerable craft, identify targets, and arrive where you are needed. You are not simply performing the fantasy of Imperial power. You’re doing a job within it, one decision about scarce power at a time.
Episode I Racer takes the same principle out of the cockpit instruments and into the workshop. The podrace in The Phantom Menace is magnificent movie spectacle: engines screaming across the desert, crowds roaring, a young Anakin gambling his life on a machine assembled from enthusiasm and questionable parts. Nicky Smith’s recollection of seeing the film in 1999 captures how indelible that sequence could be. The game asks an awkward follow-up question. What happens to the machine after the cheering stops?
Its tournament mode offers an answer in the form of Watto’s shop, a junkyard, and pit droids. Prize money buys components to improve acceleration, turning, cooling, and other aspects of performance. If the new parts are too expensive, the junkyard sells used ones at a discount, although they may already be damaged. The droids repair parts between races. Suddenly Tatooine has an economy more convincing than 100 establishing shots: somebody sells the equipment, somebody buys it, and somebody else has to make it work again.
The best joke is that Racer also makes you repair an engine while the race is still happening. Damage or overheating can put a motor in danger, and holding the repair control slows the podracer down. You can preserve the machinery or preserve your position, but you can’t always do both. For a few seconds, the world's fastest sport becomes the world's least convenient roadside breakdown. The decision has weight because the game makes you pay for it in the one currency a racing driver hates spending: time.
Neither game should be mistaken for a serious engineering simulation. TIE Fighter simplifies electrical systems into manageable meters; Racer lets you conduct heroic emergency repairs with a button press. Real mechanics would probably have questions. As Noah Berlatsky argued in Splice Today, much of Star Wars’ appeal owes a debt to the artists who created its grimy run-down future. The games take that production-design achievement one step further. They make the invisible labor that cinema can acknowledge in a quick shot of Chewbacca holding a tool into a decision that belongs to the player.
There’s a limit to this approach. Too much maintenance becomes administration. Nobody bought a Star Wars game because they dreamed of completing an expense report for an interstellar shipping company. These games succeed when the inconvenience changes an exciting choice rather than interrupting it. Power management matters because a battle is unfolding. A damaged engine matters because the next bend is arriving much too quickly.
Star Wars has always been full of people who live underneath the grand story: pilots, repair crews, smugglers, traders, droids, and whatever unfortunate employee has to explain to Darth Vader why something isn’t ready. The films give them faces and textures. Games can give us a little of their responsibility. The Falcon’s most convincing feature was never its spectacular jump to lightspeed. It was the possibility that, this time, the jump might not happen—and somebody would have to fix it.
—Søren Ahrensborg Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, documenting the history of Star Wars video games and explores the culture behind them.