Dark Forces (1995) - Thoughts
You can force it but it will stay stung /
You can crush it as dry as a bone
_
Summer of 95 wasn’t a particularly great season in my life. I was a year recovered from having a cataract removed and had just finished my first year back in school. My parents weren’t mad on me having so much screen time at the time. But my eyes were particularly sensitive to sunlight at the time, and the school had a lot of issues with drugs being pushed in the classroom (Arklow, where I grew up, was notorious for drug sales at the time, even in the primary schools), so I spent a lot my time inside.
In 1995 I was still mainly glued to the Super Nintendo, while Bob was often on the PC playing X-Wing or TIE Fighter. I remember hovering over his shoulder watching climactic events in those games. We were both huge Star Wars fans. Our cousins who we saw almost every day were also massive Star Wars fans. We had the technology and means, yet somehow Dark Forces seems to pass us all by. Maybe it was the saving for the upcoming N64 that meant we never bought a copy. Maybe it was the saturation of other Star Wars titles at the time meant it was deemed surplus to requirements. Maybe it was just that Doom was a better game? Whatever the reason, I first dabbled in Dark Forces in 2023, after shelling out for a copy on GOG in 2017.
The phrase that comes to mind when playing Dark Forces is “time capsule”. It’s genuinely very authentic to where the spirit of Star Wars was in the pre-prequel era, and absolutely a snapshot of where gaming was in the mid-90s. No doubt I would have adored this game if I’d played it in its release window, even with its close-to-absurd difficulty level. Being put in the head of someone in the world of those three magical films, fighting as a good guy, standing up for something noble - that would have been a hell of a thing. Even today, it’s easy to be romantic about the game from a new player’s perspective.
Though production has always been the strong point of any Star Wars feature - the sounds, images, scenarios, characters, and imagination all excel. The failure is all too often in the execution. Even allowing for technological shortcomings and FPS being a genre still finding its feet, Dark Forces is let down by design directives that were clearly conscious decisions. Artificially making levels more difficult to extend the shelf life of the game just doesn’t serve the gamer at all. Forcing players to restart a level after x many deaths is something that was already dying out in gaming by this period.
It’s worth taking the perspective that games made in the 90s just had a much faster turnaround. Doom was made in 12 months. Quake was made in 18. The growth rate of technology at the time meant that a game staying in development for too long would be rapidly eclipsed by its peers, like Shadow Warrior in 1997, or Duke Nukem Forever in 2011. This clearly lead the industry toward an “output at all costs” mentality that still rings true today. GoldenEra - last year’s great documentary on the development of GoldenEye - gives some insight into just how bad crunch can be in making a game, and also how much of modern gaming was forged by small teams of men and women who were flying by the seat of their pants.
One of the big features of the game was fully-rendered cutscenes, but with half of Dark Forces’ cutscene running time playing out before the second mission (of fourteen), it’s clear neither the time nor budget to accommodate such a sweet ambition was there. That no effort was made to include a multiplayer mode is even more evidence of this.
Though there is plenty to laugh about and enjoy with Dark Forces; like how Rogue One basically couldn’t have happened because Kyle Katarn just tanks his way into an Imperial facility and picks up the plans for the Death Star like they were hors-d’oeuvres at a golf club lunch. How Katarn himself is basically Han Solo with Arnold Schwarznegger’s body, and that his character is as much of a Mary Sue as anyone with an original name on AO3. How George Lucas himself kept having to approve the design of the game’s Dark Troopers because he was worried they didn’t fit the Empire’s design principles well enough.
When I took my critical hat off and let myself sink into the game LucasArts created, I did smile and have fun and, at times, even lost myself a little bit (as well as just plain getting lost in the labyrinthine levels). To me, even with the multiple sequels it spawned, Dark Forces feels unique - a child of two worlds between Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, without ever reaching the quality of either. I may have missed the boat with Dark Forces in the summer of 28 years ago, but what good are time capsules for if not taking you back?