Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire arrived on the Nintendo 64 on the 2nd of December 1996, three months after the console launched in North America. It put players in control of a character most Star Wars fans had never heard of: Dash Rendar, a mercenary who hews close enough to Han Solo that his ship, the Outrider, was built to resemble the Millennium Falcon. That choice was deliberate. The developers decided early on that using one of the main movie characters as the playable hero would limit what they could do with the game and the story. A minor figure from the tie-in novel gave them room to move.

  The game sold more than one million copies by 1997 and finished as the third-best-selling Nintendo 64 title for the year. Critics were divided. The opening level, a recreation of the Battle of Hoth, drew almost universal praise. Much of what followed did not. The question that haunted the game from the moment reviewers got their hands on it was simple: could a game this ambitious, across this many genres, actually hold together? The answer was thornier than the sales figures suggest.

• 2. The Multimedia Project

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  Work on the Shadows of the Empire project began in late 1994, rooted in an idea to build a side story that would fit between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi without touching the main trilogy's plot. The project was not just a game. It was a multimedia undertaking, and the game's score reflects that ambition directly.

  Composer Joel McNeely wrote a full soundtrack for the multimedia project, recorded with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Those recordings fed into both the Nintendo 64 and Windows versions of the game. On the cartridge, storage limits forced the team to sample the music down to 16-bit at 11 kHz in mono. After discussion with Nintendo, the cartridge space was expanded from 8 MB to 12 MB, giving the developers room for roughly 15 minutes of music. That constraint made the result notable: the game stands apart among Nintendo 64 releases for relying on a digitized orchestral soundtrack rather than the synthesized music used in titles like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.

  The story's premise threads through Star Wars continuity carefully. Prince Xizor, believing the Emperor will allow him to replace Darth Vader if Luke Skywalker is killed, orders Jabba the Hutt to arrange Skywalker's death. That commission drives the middle of the game. The player is not fighting the Empire so much as navigating a power struggle within it, with Dash Rendar as the instrument of disruption.

• 3. Hardware Before It Existed

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  Jon Knoles, the game's senior artist and animator, is credited with the original idea of placing a new story between the two films. He and the rest of the team faced a technical obstacle that had no precedent: the Nintendo 64 hardware had not been finalized when development began. Silicon Graphics, which had designed the console's architecture, approximated its performance using an SGI Onyx supercomputer equipped with the RealityEngine2 graphics subsystem and the Performer 3D API.

  Two LucasArts developers already had deep experience with the SGI platform. That background proved critical. The team spent approximately 18 months prototyping on the Onyx before actual Nintendo 64 hardware cards became available for SGI Indy workstations. When those cards arrived, the team ported the game to the real console in three days and shifted ongoing development to the Indy, while continuing to run large environmental pre-calculations on the Onyx.

  The controller situation was equally improvised. To test the game before the Nintendo 64 controller existed in its final form, the team received a modified SNES controller fitted with a primitive analog joystick and Z trigger, designed by Konami. Under a strict nondisclosure agreement, the core team was forbidden from discussing the hardware or the project with anyone outside the group. The prototype controller was concealed inside a cardboard box, which team members would reach into to test the game without exposing it to view.

  During development, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's senior marketing director, visited and suggested making Dash Rendar more animated. He proposed that Rendar should become restless when the player leaves him idle, and should carry his weapons with more life. The team also filmed motion capture sessions at Industrial Light and Magic, LucasArts's sister company, but the recorded animations proved unusable and had to be rebuilt by hand using keyframes in Alias Power Animator.

• 4. Two Versions, Two Experiences

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  The Windows version, released on the 17th of September 1997, was a different game in meaningful ways. The greater storage capacity of a PC allowed LucasArts to add full motion video cinematic sequences and additional speech clips that the cartridge could not hold. According to Jon Knoles, the development team could have converted those FMV sequences into animated cutscenes rendered in the game engine for the Nintendo 64, but doing so would have substantially delayed the release. They used still images for the console's cutscenes instead.

  When paired with a 3D acceleration card, the Windows version ran at 640 x 480 pixels. The Nintendo 64 version ran at 320 x 240, using hardware-based blending and anti-aliasing to reduce the visible gap between the two. The Windows version also carried many full music tracks from the McNeely soundtrack, while the console was limited to the sampled and compressed set that fit in 12 MB.

  A reviewer for Next Generation argued that the cartridge format was simply wrong for a game of this type. The limited storage produced issues, including a lack of fluidity in the sewer water and the frequent looping of the music, that he felt could have been resolved easily with a CD-based release. Years later, compatibility problems with 64-bit Windows led to a re-release through GOG on the 3rd of May 2016. On the 26th of July 2019, Limited Run Games issued the Nintendo 64 version physically again, in both a standard and a Collector's Edition, in limited quantities.

• 5. Voice, Genre, and the Hoth Problem

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  John Cygan voiced Dash Rendar, a role he reprised in Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance. Tom Kane voiced Leebo, Dash's droid co-pilot. Bob Bergen, the official audio double for Mark Hamill, voiced Luke Skywalker. Nick Tate voiced Prince Xizor, the game's primary antagonist.

  The game covers significant tonal ground across its ten levels. Players defend the Rebel base on Hoth in a snowspeeder, fight in 360-degree space battles controlling the Outrider's turret, chase enemy swoop bikes at high speed, and battle a dianoga in a sewer beneath Xizor's palace on Coruscant. The game was originally planned to have 19 levels. Nintendo Power reported a reduction to 12 before launch; the final release contains 10.

  That opening Hoth level became the defining point of comparison for every review. Critics described it as a watershed moment for movie-to-game adaptations. The month before the game's review appeared in Electronic Gaming Monthly, the magazine's lead editorial singled out the Hoth level as anticipating a new era in which film studios might begin designing movies with game adaptations in mind. The praise was nearly universal, and it made everything that followed harder to defend.

  The third-person shooter sections, which form the core of the game, drew the harshest criticism. Doug Perry of IGN described persistent disappointment with the controls and the camera, and concluded that LucasArts could have made a substantially better game. GameSpot's John Broady pointed to control, camera angles, and the save feature as the specific barriers to the game reaching what he saw as its potential. Sushi-X of Electronic Gaming Monthly condensed the divide into a single line, calling the game "a poor first-person shooter on top of an awesome Hoth battle sequence".

  Not every critic agreed. Shawn Smith of Electronic Gaming Monthly argued that every gameplay style in the game was executed well, and called it the best Star Wars game he had played on either console or PC. Nintendo Power praised the game's variety, labeling it "a monster action game that combines the best of hyper TIE fighter and stalking Dark Forces genres", while warning that the difficulty is extreme on anything above the easiest setting. EGM named the game a runner-up for Nintendo 64 Game of the Year, behind Super Mario 64, noting that only eight Nintendo 64 games were released in the US in 1996.

• 6. The Ending and Its Secret

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  The game's final chapter sends Dash into Xizor's Skyhook space station above Coruscant to destroy its core. In the closing sequence, Xizor is killed in the blast, and Dash is presumably killed alongside him. A short scene before the credits shows Luke and Leia on Tatooine, mourning his death.

  Players who finished the game on medium difficulty or higher saw something extra. An additional scene follows the mourning sequence, revealing that Dash and Leebo had jumped to hyperspace before the explosion reached them. Leebo questions why Dash wants people to believe they died. Dash's answer is the game's final spoken line: "It's good to be remembered as a martyr without actually being dead, wouldn't you say?"

  That line captures something about Dash Rendar that the developers built into him from the beginning. He was chosen precisely because he was minor enough to be expendable, flexible enough to be resurrected, and close enough to Han Solo to feel familiar without carrying Solo's narrative obligations. The Outrider, his ship, was even designed to echo the Millennium Falcon. With more than one million copies sold and a role reprised in X-Wing Alliance, Dash Rendar outlasted the mixed reviews that greeted his debut.