Unsurprisingly, despite being a pretty mediocre game, Star Wars Episode III has just topped the multiformat charts for the third week in a row. Of course, everyone is aware of the marketing power wielded by this bloated movie series, and that so much of the content is there purely to sell merchandise. But I felt this installment was even more explicit than the rest in its employment of videogame staples.
Warning: Episode III spoilers ahead
General Grievous, for example, is a classic end of level character - ostensibly powerful, but with a key weakness that the player must identify and exploit. In this case, Obi Wan has to lop off each of his four arms to progress to the next level. In the clash between the wookies and the separatist troops, we've got a standard RTS duel between differently skilled factions - one organic, one highly technological.
The climactic lightsaber duel is pure beat 'em up, taking place in a limited arena (lumps of metal floating above fatal lava) and more-or-less on a 2D plane. Earlier, we even get a classic Mortal Kombat finishing move when Anakin uses dual sabers in a scissor movement to decapitate Count Dooku. There's also a chase scene (Grievous vs Kenobi) so that a simple racing game can be constructed (indeed, THQ Wireless has created a mobile title based around this sequence), and all the stilted dialogue and character-led plot-twists could easily have come via a standard Japanese RPG.
Of course, most modern blockbusters can be segmented into game genres in this way, but George Lucas seems to have turned the process into a particularly shameless artform, often signposting to developers where one game genre ends and another begins. Alternatively, he may be just stealing ideas from videogame design - which would be a fitting way of acknowledging the importance of videogames in maintaining the Star Wars brand, especially in the long gap between the two trilogies. Honestly, without the likes of the Super Star Wars series on SNES, and the X Wing and Tie-Fighter sims on PC, as well as countless other conversions, additions and spin-offs, would the welcome for Phantom Menace have been quite so grand?
From action figures to Star Wars Galaxies, interactivity is the Force that pumps blood around the Star Wars body. The generation that got into Star Wars to begin with is the same generation that discovered videogames. And when Atari built its Star Wars arcade machine, here were the two key brands of that generation merging. From that point on, videogames and Star Wars have fed into each other, the former bulking out latter. The Star Wars movies were probably never strong or adult enough in themselves to maintain the mass appeal of the brand as the core audience grew older. But the games have created a universe in which Star Wars can be properly explored by the fans.
A while ago I wrote a blog predicting that DVD releases of big brand blockbusters would soon come with interactive scenes so we could do away with the daft pretense that these movies stand as 'art' in their own right, and just get down to the videogame action. Episode III seems to be another large stride in that direction.
