With Star Wars celebrating its 30th birthday this year, we're going to be facing a Deathstar-sized onslaught of nostalgic features, analysing the very life out of the series and scraping about for the last few titbits of unmined trivia. Empire Magazine has characterised the coming frenzy, producing 30 different covers for its July edition, each featuring a different character from the six movies. Not quite as grand as Loaded's famous 100 covers stunt, but impressive all the same.
As for videogames and their place in the canon, there will be enough 'best Star Wars games EVER' round-ups to satisfy even the most demanding fan of nostalgic list features. But beneath the arguments over whether Knights of the Old Republic is a better game than Battlefront, I feel there's a more important question to be answered - have games ever really captured the essence of the movies? Have they addressed the underlying appeal, the elusive, indefatigable cool of Star Wars? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure anyone has really tried.
Because, despite the best efforts of the prequel trilogy, Star Wars is and always has been cool. Birthed in the seventies, the nostalgic epicentre of 21st century style irony, it is cool simply through chronology. It is also sometimes easy to forget that the original film (before it received its Episode IV moniker) was a product of the Hollywood auteur milieu in which upstart youngsters like Spielberg, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese attempted to re-mould the mainstream movie business on directorial rather than studio lines. In some ways, Star Wars is more an ideological stablemate of Taxi Driver or French Connection than of 2001 or Star Trek.
It was an enormously ambitious, unusual film at the time. Lots of critics credit Alien as the first movie to make sci-fi look grungy and downbeat - but Star Wars beat it by two years. The cantina - a back street bar, a weird twist on Edward Hopper Americana; the Millennium Falcon - a faded, rust bucket of a ship, held together by patched systems and regular droid intervention; Tatooine - a symbol of every outback dead end on our planet.
But these elements have eluded LucasArts and other studios charged with tackling the series. The squalor, the unease, the casual violence - it's just not there in the games. Okay, the Forces of Corruption add-on for real-time strategy title, Empires at War, was a step in the right direction, with players taking on the role of a crime lord seeking to usurp Jabba the Hutt's rule, but this was an add-on to an only slightly above average PC title. Maybe a Deus Ex-era Ion Storm could have done brought us a dirty, sexy Star Wars game, perhaps even Rockstar North (imagine a GTA title in a Star Wars environment). But LucasArts, possibly under contractual obligation, is now busy filling in plot details between the movies, adding unwanted layers upon the sketchy Jedi timeline.
There have, of course, been technical and game design reasons for this lack of willingness to engage with the 'human' drama of Star Wars. The early conversions tended to focus on the mechanical aspects of the movies - the space craft battles, the speeder bike chases - because these could be rendered more easily with limited graphics. Later games have stuck mostly to Jedi mythology, not just because this is ostensibly the central concept of the movies, but because the Jedi have a great melee weapon and long-distance attack potential provided by the Force. They're just useful videogame archetypes.
In the end, I think the real problem has been an under-use of Han Solo and Boba Fett. Luke and Darth may hold the Star Wars throughline in their grasp, but they weren't cool characters. Luke had precisely one moment of cool in each movie from the original trilogy: staring forlornly into the twin suns in Star Wars, willingly falling to his seeming death at the end of Empire Strikes Back and arriving at the last minute to join Han's Endor mission in Return of the Jedi (and he ruined that by regretting it for the next 20 minutes of the movie). Solo, although later emasculated by the syrupy sentimentalism of Return of the Jedi, was always edgy - always likeable, always real. Or real-ish.
Han's battle with Fett is the naturalistic mirror of the Skywalker/Vader arc. These are working men operating in a galaxy filled with monsters and magicians, just trying to make a living. We can relate to them in a basic way, and let's face it we can relate to little else in the movie series. So why have they appeared so little in the games? Is it really down to the fact that gamers just want to be Jedi fighters and starship commanders? Or have videogame designers, many of them massive Star Wars fans, simply failed to get to grips with the gritty underbelly of the films?
There have been some wonderful Star Wars games. No fan could have played X-Wing vs TIE Fighter or Knights of the Old Republic or a dozen others and not been moved, not felt like part of the Star Wars universe. But here's the thing - remember when the re-hashed Star Wars release sanitised the Gredo/Han showdown? That's what the videogame industry has done with the whole of the series.
