ULTIMATE GUIDE: STAR WARS: DARK FORCES
DARON STINNETT, PROJECT LEADER ONE OF DARK FORCES, TAKES US THROUGH THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIRST STAR WARS FPS
HOW DID YOU START WORK AT LUCASARTS?
I was working at Spectrum Holobyte, running the Falcon project. A friend had left Spectrum and joined LucasArts and asked me to join him. I met them, and they said come on over, and you get to pick the project you want to build. That’s when the Dark Forces project began.
WHAT WERE THE GAMING INFLUENCES BEHIND DARK FORCES?
I wanted to do a Star Wars version of a 3D shooter like Wolfenstein – Doom hadn’t been released at this point. But it also went back to Spectrum Holobyte. We had a cockpit there with all the controls and a stereo system, and before I left, X-Wing came out. We immediately loaded it up into the cockpit, and that was where it really became exciting. Computers at the time couldn’t do a very good job of rendering landscapes, but they could do space pretty well because the landscape was stars. The immersion of it being Star Wars and flying an X-Wing in that cockpit greatly impacted me – that was the genesis of Dark Forces.
HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO DESIGN THE ENGINE FROM THE GROUND UP?
That was Ray Gresko, starting from scratch. 3D calculations were well-known and understood – the question was how to do it in real-time, given the hardware we had at the time. The other big challenge was no one at LucasArts had 3D design experience. Fortunately, while at a film screening at Skywalker Ranch, someone mentioned they knew the head of architecture at UC Berkeley. Two of their students left their program and joined LucasArts as 3D world designers.
WHY DID YOU DECIDED TO USE A NEW PLAYER CHARACTER, KYLE KATARN?
We originally considered using Luke Skywalker, but then we realised it would lock us into his story, which was ultimately constructed for a movie. We realised we needed a fresh character so we could write his story to wrap around the game that we knew we could build. It was always understood that what we were doing was outside the official canon, which was better as we weren’t restricted by what we could do.
WAS MULTIPLAYER EVER CONSIDERED?
We were pushing hard to get the game finished and launched. I remember the head of the studio asking me if we needed more time, which was crazy – game studios never asked you if you wanted more time! But we were ready to go, and while I think multiplayer would have been a great addition, it’s not easy to just add as a layer on top – you had to think about
