THE MAKING OF STAR WARS EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE

THE FIRST PREQUEL FILM REMAINS A MIXED BAG: THERE'S THE POD RACE AND DUEL OF THE FATES, BUT IT ALSO INTRODUCES JAR JAR BINKS. SO HOW DOES THE OFFICIAL GAME FOR THE FILM COMPARE?

- WORDS BY PAUL KAUTZ

The end of the Nineties was a difficult time for LucasArts: the company, which had created some of the most-beloved point-and-click adventures of all time, almost completely turned its back on the genre. The reason for this was the May 1999 release of Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars film since 1983's Return Of The Jedi. For LucasArts, this meant that the prestigious but not particularly successful adventure games would be a thing of the past - the company was transformed from a tailor shop for cult adventures to an assembly line for Star Wars games.

Ironically, the official game for the prequel was not developed in-house, but by Big Ape Productions, a small development studio founded in 1995 by LucasArts veterans Dean Sharpe and Mike Ebert. Shortly after the release of the studio's debut title Herc's Adventures in 1997, it was commissioned by LucasArts to develop The Phantom Menace. Sounds like a dream, and in some aspects it was - but it also brought with it a lot of difficulties, as Mike tells us, "From a design standpoint we had a lot of issues. We started building with very limited tools. I remember one of our designers plotting out background art on graph paper, because we had no way to import 3D art into the level-building tool. We could not make the game first-person action, as we could not compete with the Jedi Knight game being developed at that time. We also had to make the game run in software rendering at first because LucasArts did not want to commit to a dedicated 3D graphics card being required. We were also targeting PS2 development later on, but when the PS2 was delayed we had to make the game run on a PS1, which was a nightmare."