Star Wars Games

Since the early 1980s LucasArts have been producing Star Wars games for fans around the world...

Star Wars games first started appearing in 1982 when LucasArts was founded, as part of Lucasfilm Limited, the movie production company founded by George Lucas. The first games were produced in cooperation with Atari.

Star Wars action games first started appearing in the 1990s for Nintendo consoles but these were actually developed outside LucasArts. The first genuine LucasArts development was X-Wing, a combat simulator which grew into a series of successful games. The early games followed in the tradition of flight simulators, which put the player in the cockpit of an X-Wing or a Tie Fighter.

Another early Star Wars game was Rebel Assault, released for CD-ROM drives in the early 1990s. Despite the relative simplicity, success came largely due to its incorporation of real footage from the movies, quite a novelty at the time.

In 2003 LucasArts created Star Wars Galaxies, an MMORPG game. Following its success the Jump to Lightspeed expansion was released in 2004.

The top selling Star Wars: Battlefront followed in 2004 based on the Battlefield series of games. This was followed by Star Wars: Battlefront II.

Revenge of the Sith, an action game based on the movie, was released in 2005, followed by Republic Commando.

The strategy game Empire at War came in 2006, followed by Lego Star Wars II which was a sequel to the original video game.

The most successful release to date came in 2008 with the Force Unleashed.

Popular current Star Wars games produced by LucasArts include...

• The Force Unleashed
• Clone Wars  
• Battlefront

LucasArts continue to produce almost exclusively Star Wars games but as a result have been hugely successful in the video game marketplace.