Have you already… played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. Several times a week, all year long, maybe forever.
And by that I mean exactly: “Do you already have the first level of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire Most of this 1997 game is a boring shooter, but the first mission was a then-amazing recreation of the Battle of Hoth almost two decades earlier Battlefront.
I played the first mission over and over again because I was thrilled to find myself among the AT-ATs and bring them down with cleverly used cables, accompanied by sounds and music familiar from the film. What followed was unremarkable, sometimes annoying third-person action centered around a character based on ’90s comics bad-boy excess – the whole thing was already dated minutes after release. But damn, that first level.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this level – along with the ones that appeared at the same time Heir To The Empire novels – quietly transformed the emerging nostalgia of everyone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s into a new commercial force, and indirectly led to the special editions of the films and then to those terrible prequels. The upcoming theatrical release of Force Awakens has awakened a similar mentality: a lot of people – now older – praying that the innocence of their youth can somehow be rekindled.
Shadows of the Empireor at least its first level, was the first time that star Wars Nostalgia was mixed with superior technology and repackaged for an audience that believed that George Lucas‘ Original trilogy, with its sci-fi mythos, was the pinnacle of pop culture. It’s all happened before – and it’ll all happen again. And Shadows of the Empire is, as well Battlefront after that, further proof that the AT-AT is a phenomenal industrial sci-fi design.
I can finally play Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire whenever I want