Many of the earliest Star Wars games put you in the pilot’s seat of the spacecraft from the original movie trilogy, but the first of these that could be considered a combat flight sim was 1993’s Star Wars: X-Wing, and it led to a long-running series. These popular titles were developed by Totally Games, but the opportunities presented by the second Star Wars trilogy persuaded its publisher LucasArts to create a combat flight sim of its own, as designer Tim Longo remembers. “The Star Wars prequel movies were coming out, and LucasArts wanted to do a PC-based flight sim in the style of X-Wing and TIE Fighter,” Tim notes. “Daron Stinnett, the project lead, was taking inspiration from hardcore flight sims like Falcon 3.0, but then the PlayStation 2 came out, and it did so well that LucasArts refocussed the project around it. On the mission side, we looked at Wing Commander, and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, but we found ways to simplify the missions to make them more console friendly.”
Further inspiration came from LucasArts contemporary Factor 5, which started making its own flight sim as Tim’s team began making theirs, which they had named . “ was built in tandem with by Factor 5,” Tim explains. “So it definitely influenced us. But we were focussing more was more first-person than third-person. We also tried to make some of our missions more open with more options, whereas was more about the big battles, so was a bit more tactical.”
