Star Wars (1991 video game)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Star Wars the video game arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in November 1991, more than fourteen years after the 1977 film that inspired it. That gap matters. By the time Luke Skywalker finally made it onto a home console in a dedicated NES adaptation, an entire generation had grown up with the franchise through other means. What kind of game did players actually get? How faithfully did it follow the film's story? And what happened when developers tried to squeeze that same experience onto the Game Boy, the Game Gear, and the Sega Master System? This documentary traces the game across its many versions, its strange design choices, and the reception that greeted each one.

• 2. Across Four Platforms

  ›

  Victor Musical Industries handled the Japanese release for the Family Computer on the 15th of November 1991, while JVC Musical Industries brought the North American NES edition out the same month. Europe had to wait until the 26th of March 1992. An official mail order Hint Book was available to players at launch, an unusual perk for the time.

  The portable versions followed on different schedules. NMS Software developed the Game Boy port, which Capcom published; it arrived less than a year after the NES original in 1992. The Game Gear port came from Tiertex and was published by U.S. Gold in 1993. Tiertex also handled a Master System version. Each platform brought its own quirks to the experience, and in some cases the differences were substantial enough to make the versions feel like related but distinct products.

• 3. Building the Crew

  ›

  The NES game opens on Tatooine and gives the player a specific task: pilot Luke Skywalker's landspeeder around the desert planet, collect R2-D2 from the Sandcrawler, retrieve Obi-Wan Kenobi from a cave, and pick up Han Solo from the Mos Eisley bar. Stormtroopers and Tusken Raiders fill the levels as enemies throughout this opening stretch.

  Once the crew is assembled, the player must navigate the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field in a first-person perspective to reach the Death Star. The shields needed for the Millennium Falcon to survive that passage must also be collected during the Tatooine levels, adding a resource-management dimension to the early stages. Arriving at the Death Star, the objectives shift: destroy the tractor beam generator, rescue Princess Leia from the detention block, and finally destroy the station itself with the rebel fighters.

• 4. Character Rules and Exceptions

  ›

  Each character on the roster carries different rules. Luke has numerous lives, making him the durable workhorse of the game, but Han Solo and Princess Leia each have only a single life, so losing either of them is a serious setback.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi has the power to resurrect Han or Leia up to five times, a backstop that takes on extra significance in the Game Gear and Master System versions. In those editions, players are actually required to kill and resurrect one of those characters in order to earn the final ten percent of completion points and unlock the ending. R2-D2 contributes a map of the Death Star hallways, while C-3PO supplies context about the current section of the game. Darth Vader, despite being the film's central villain, appears in the game only on the Game Over screen. As for Chewbacca, he turns up at the close of the Game Boy version; the NES version only mentions him in passing, though the game's instruction manual implies he takes the controls of the Millennium Falcon if Han Solo dies.

• 5. What the Game Gear Changed

  ›

  The Game Gear version diverged most noticeably from its NES counterpart. An exclusive level was added in which Leia delivers the stolen Death Star plans to R2-D2, a scene that directly connects the game to the film's opening moments. The Tatooine hub world present in the NES version disappears entirely in this edition. In its place, three side-scrolling levels replace it, with Luke traveling through the desert on foot rather than by landspeeder.

  Those changes made the Game Gear version a different enough experience that reviewers treated it on its own terms. Victor Lucas of The Electric Playground rated it 7 out of 10, praising its artistic design and noting it was one of the sharpest-looking games available for Sega's 8-bit portable. The title also finished as a runner-up for GamePro's 1993 Hand-Held Game of the Year award.

• 6. The Game Boy Edition

  ›

  Power Unlimited reviewed the Game Boy port and gave it 65 percent, and their summary laid out the tensions in the design plainly. They called the game incredibly versatile but barely manageable, faulting the graphics as too complicated for the hardware, the image as too dark, and the controls as insufficiently precise. They conceded that it could be played for a long time despite those problems.

  The version itself stands apart from the others in at least one concrete way: Chewbacca appears at the end of it, a moment the NES edition never reaches in the same form. The Game Boy port was developed by NMS Software and published by Capcom, making it the product of a different team than the one behind the NES and the Tiertex-developed portable editions.

• 7. Sequels and What Never Was

  ›

  Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back arrived in 1992 as a direct follow-up. The same year, Super Star Wars came to the Super Nintendo as a counterpart to the NES game rather than a sequel to it. An NES adaptation of Return of the Jedi was planned but never completed.

  Decades later, Limited Run Games brought the NES and Game Boy versions back in physical form. On the 28th of June 2019, both versions were re-released in limited quantities as unlicensed replica game cartridges, available in both standard and Collector's Edition sets. That release put physical copies of the 1991 NES game back into collectors' hands for the first time in years, closing a long gap between the original publication and any new opportunity to own the cartridge.