Indisputably an industry touchstone, Quake was one of many first-person shooters released during the genre's golden age of the 1990s. To further illustrate the era's creativity and innovation, I spoke with developers of other shooters to learn about their contributions—and in many cases, how id Software's work served as their foundation and influence.   

Point and Click

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, id Software released Doom. Office productivity ground to a halt. University networks buckled under the strain of students crowding terminals to trade rockets and fire BFG blasts. Those same students observed noticeable dents in their GPA the following semester (and, likely, for several semesters after that).

Developers at LucasArts were among those who voluntarily boarded the Doom express to Phobos and Deimos. "I was a huge Wolfenstein 3D fan, and when Doom came out we would play it constantly at LucasArts," said Justin Chin, a lead artist at the studio. "So, in that regard I felt that a Star Wars [first-person shooter] was absolutely the next step."

Chin wasn't alone. In September 1993, nearly three months before id Software uploaded Doom to—and subsequently crippled—University of Wisconsin's servers, Chin and a small team laid the foundation for Star Wars: Dark Forces, a first-person shooter touting the famous movie brand.

 Developing a Star Wars-themed game, FPS or otherwise, may have seemed obvious. According to Chin, it was a long time coming.   

"It may seem odd, but at the time LucasArts was a small game company that mostly specialized in adventure games, with Larry Hollands' company separately making flight sims," he said.

Justin Chin.

George Lucas founded Lucasfilm Games Group in May 1982 to serve as the videogame development arm of his computer division, itself a component of Lucasfilm Limited. The Games Group's maiden titles were made as part of a joint effort between Lucasfilm and Atari, which had chipped in to help fund the company's game division.

From there the upstarts turned their sights to the PC. Setting a mission statement to develop experimental and groundbreaking games, Lucasfilm Games Group created Habitat, a primordial online RPG for the Commodore 64. Habitat never went further than a beta test playable on the computer's Quantum Link online service. But the game's potential, and the talent of its team, were clear. From there, LGG's developers made their mark in the nascent adventure genre with Maniac Mansion. In 1990, as part of a Lucas-wide restructuring, Lucasfilm Games Group was rebranded LucasArts, and became one-third of the LucasArts Entertainment Company along with Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic.

Throughout the early 1990s, LucasArts developed a reputation as one of the two top names in adventure games alongside competitor Sierra On-Line. The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, the Dig, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Full Throttle became instant classics among players, as well as commercial successes for LucasArts.

While Chin and other developers appreciated adventure games, they wanted to play in the company's most famous sandbox. "It wasn't until the success of the Star Wars Nintendo games where Star Wars games really became a factor inside LucasArts. Believe me, plenty of us wanted to start earlier," Chin said.

Old Friends and New Faces

By the mid-1990s, developers interested in writing a first-person shooter had options. They could follow the path of companies like id Software, Apogee, and Epic Games by building game engines that would support their design ideas. Proprietary technology offered flexibility and custom features at the cost of time and money spent building feature sets from scratch. Companies short on resources or time could license game tech. Cutting a check for a princely sum got them a readymade technical framework, allowing teams to get down to the business of crafting levels and coming up with weapons.

When a small team of developers within LucasArts received consent to make a shooter rooted in Star Wars mythology in 1993, licensing engines had yet to become commonplace. Doom's release kicked off a flood of "Doom clones," many standing on the shoulders of id Software's id Tech 1 engine, but the seminal game's launch was still months away. Fortunately, LucasArts had no need to shy away from the costly enterprise of writing a proprietary engine. Adventure games were selling briskly, and the small team interested in writing a Star Wars-themed shooter was up to the challenge. "We had some brilliant engineers [in] Ray Gresko, Winston Wolff, and Daron Stinnett," Chin said.

Dark Forces protagonist Kyle Katarn takes aim at a Dark Trooper.

Gresko spearheaded programming efforts, mapping out plans for the in-house Jedi engine with assistance from Stinnett, the game's lead designer, and Wolff. Chin kept tabs on the engine's development while he busied himself setting an art direction and writing a story for the game. His idea was to devise a mission that set players against Dark Troopers, a brand-new squadron of Empire soldiers that informed the game's title, Star Wars: Dark Forces.

"As a kid, I thought the Stormtroopers were terrifying," Chin admitted. "As you mature, you learn that they couldn't shoot worth a damn. I still loved them, and that was the central element in my design for Dark Forces: An elite group."

The galaxy's favorite (and last, as of the original movie trilogy) Jedi seemed a natural fit for Dark Forces' lead character. "An FPS with Luke was a very short-lived idea," Chin explained. "At the time, we felt that extending the character universe with an entire game was tricky. Lucas licensing was just a small group at the time and didn't have the focus of extending the world of the main characters."

The team warmed to the notion of setting aside popular characters in favor of homespun heroes. "We wanted to tell other stories outside the films," Chin continued. "This had the added benefit of allowing us to design scenarios that were better suited for an FPS."

Standing in for Luke Skywalker was Kyle Katarn, a human who worked odd jobs for the Rebel Alliance. Led to believe that his father had been killed by Rebel soldiers, Katarn threw in with the Empire. After meeting Jan Ors, a double agent sent by the Rebels to infiltrate the Emperor's forces, Katarn learned that the Empire was responsible for his parents' death, leading him to defect and run missions for the Rebels as a mercenary.

Katarn's—and the player's—highest-paying mission is also his most dangerous: Blast through ranks of Stormtroopers and retrieve plans for the Death Star. With those plans, the Rebels hope to exploit a weakness in the fully armed and operational battle station, and destroy it.

Action with Context

One of the many reasons for id Software's success in the 1990s was its adherence to a winning formula. No matter how sprawling or compact a level, no matter how deadly the threats players faced, the general flow of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake remained constant: shoot everything that moved; find keys; shoot more things.

The Dark Forces team saw nothing wrong with that approach. At the same time, they wanted to do more than paint a Star Wars veneer over FPS tropes. "Since this was a FPS, we wanted to make sure that part was great, and it was a marriage between the two: Developing a proper character archetype that would fit the action, and making a great game that FPS fans would love were the most important things on our minds," Chin said.

Star Wars became a global phenomenon for more reasons than Luke Skywalker's cool Jedi skills and Han Solo's anti-hero attitude. Adventure came in many flavors, from Princess Leia showing up Han and Luke when they burst into the Death Star full of braggadocio to rescue her, to dogfights set against twinkling star fields, to tumbling into Sarlacc pits, to watching colored laser beams whiz back and forth in a shootout between Rebels and Stormtroopers.

"I want to play a Star Wars game like I watch any one of the films," Chin said. "There should be action, discovery, awe, and mythology. For an FPS, you make sure there's plenty of action. The one thing I wanted to have was a reason for the action. Most action stories in any medium are thin, but many have been able to pin a theme or thread of a story and most importantly, a character arc."

As he wrote mission briefings and in-game cutscenes, Chin devised and stuck to a simple rule of thumb. Every action sequence should be underscored by context. Motivation and context were communicated to players through the mission briefings, displayed at the start of each level. If players skipped them, in-game events should offer at least a glimpse of what's going on and why.

"Shooting things is fun, but shooting things for a reason, even in subtext, will make memorable experiences," Chin elaborated. "It's important to me that when someone plays a game I designed that they have things they can recall and retell like one might in any great visual storytelling medium. The difference with games is that they can express the story of what they accomplished instead of [through] an observed protagonist."

Chin's resolve to add context to every action carried over to the game's puzzles. In comparison to puzzle fare common in games like Doom—usually centered on throwing a switch to open a door, or shooting panels in the proper order, Chin and the team transplanted their experience concocting puzzles for LucasArts' point-and-click adventures into Dark Forces. In one level, players must maneuver elevators to certain positions between floors in order to progress.

The Dark Forces team brainstormed puzzles using a top-down approach. Before convening with Stinnett, Wolff, and Gresko, Chin nailed down overarching story progression—details such as the larger goal at play, and stakes such as a character's death or a setback in the Rebel Alliance's plans. "In the early days, plenty of missions amounted to a redress of red key, blue key, green key, but it's not difficult to provide some meaning to that simple goal," he explained. So, I would work backwards, start with the bigger picture of the entire game, then break that up into what types of levels might make sense to build that story arc. With that, I will know where each of the levels should start, and how they should end."

Kyle Katarn.

Each level in Dark Forces exhibits the classic three-act structure for storytelling. Likewise, each has different pacing to keep the player interested in the story as well as moment-to-moment actions such as shootouts and solving puzzles. After blocking out each section's pacing, Chin got even more granular, breaking down the level into tasks and sub-tasks.

"Like any storytelling, make sure you can frame the players expectations, such as 'rescue the defector from a detention center," he continued. "The player will expect a heavily guarded and secure place, probably lots of keys and battles. If you can provide any twist to that, even better. Understand what the player might expect, and keep ahead of them. Keep them on their toes."

Looking Up (and Down)

For players more interested in action than in the continued survival of the galaxy, Dark Forces had no shortage of weapons to play with and enemies to destroy. Whereas Doom kept things simple by offering a suite of 10 weapons each with a single mode of fire, destructive tools in Dark Forces came equipped with secondary attacks, inviting players to use weapons in different ways depending on their environment or the types of enemies antagonizing them. Power-ups such as ice cleats for traction in slippery zones and the head lamp to light up dark areas added wrinkles to what would otherwise have amounted to Star Wars-themed shooting galleries.

Dark Forces' technical underpinnings proved more versatile to Doom's in certain ways. Written chiefly by John Carmack, id Tech 1 engine added multiple floors that players could traverse by climbing stairs, raising platforms, and riding lifts. Lighting options ranged from pitch darkness to brightly lit, allowing designers to craft moody atmosphere. There were limits, however. Doom levels existed on a single plane; no floor could be placed directly overtop or underneath another. Similarly, players could not aim up or down. To fire at a monster above or below them, players faced the monster and pressed fire.

Dark Forces suffered no such limitations. “The engine technology that allowed level designers to stack floors was a big part of how we were able to build a world that fit into the Star Wars universe,” said Chin. “So, the benefits were two-fold: gameplay, and spatial/visual reality.”

Gresko, Wolff, and Stinnett programmed several movement-related features into the Jedi engine. Not only could floors be stacked and players aim freely using their mouse or keyboard, they could jump, crouch, and swim. Technically, Doom let players jump, but the action happened by default if players sprinted over gaps or pits that weren't too wide.

"Adding [the ability to] look up and down was definitely the next step for us," Chin said. "That was the obvious next technical standard that FPS games needed to go; the players were ready to make that transition."

The player battles a rancor in Dark Forces.

Like the game's action and puzzle sequences, the Jedi engine's technical marvels catered to function as well as form. “All that was adding tools to the player's ability to solve various challenges," Chin explained. "We also had to make sure those elements paid off for the player throughout the levels. Some levels had more jumping, others more crouching, and that added to the character of the missions.”

Star Wars: Dark Forces jumped through hyperspace and landed on store shelves in February 1995, over a year after Doom's release and several months following Doom II. Although the game arrived at a time when competition was fierce in the increasingly crowded FPS genre, Dark Forces stood out by offering exactly what a multitude of players wanted.

“Dark Forces did what all us gamers wanted,” said Rob Smith, former editor-in-chief of PC Games, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. “It put the first-person shooter [template] in the Star Wars universe. Really, that’s all it had to do.”

Despite satisfying that basic fantasy, Dark Forces did more than substitute zombies for Stormtroopers and Bobby Prince's catchy Doom soundtrack for the Imperial March. Its levels were intricate and huge, its stock of weapons diverse and fun, its story more remarkable.

Even so, Chin readily admitted that Dark Forces iterated on rather than advanced the FPS precepts of the day. That was by design. “As much as everyone on the team wanted to make their mark in the FPS world, we also wanted to not screw it up," he admitted.

Between investing in proprietary technology and being willing to let the team change up the core tenets of the shooter genre, LucasArts had made a huge investment in Dark Forces. Chin believes that commitment paid off.

"At its core, we all wanted to make a fun FPS Star Wars game," he continued. "If any reviewer said it was just Star Wars slapped onto Wolfenstein or Doom, then we failed horribly. With that said, I believe we advanced the FPS [genre] in a small way to show that you can create a world with an FPS and that people felt like they were playing in a Star Wars film. That's a huge achievement in my eyes.”

Darth Vader looms over the story in Dark Forces.

Not a Jedi Yet

For as well as Dark Forces performed at retail, it's only natural that some aspects of its DNA feel dated more than 10 years after its release.

"I found Dark Forces’ additions to the Doom template simultaneously the coolest and the most frustrating bits of its design," wrote PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon when he revisited the game in February 2016. "I appreciated some of the puzzles I had to solve to make my way through Imperial strongholds, and not always knowing where to go in its layered and complex levels. But I spent more of my Dark Forces playthrough appreciating what it pulled off in 1995 than I did really having fun. The shooting doesn’t have Doom’s oomph, and I ground my teeth in frustration while trying to navigate the sewers early on, and while trying to make one particular series of jumps between rising and falling platforms later on. If you’ve played Dark Forces, you know the one."

After voicing his dislike of some of the game's more frustrating puzzles, Fenlon concluded his analysis by reminding readers that, in hindsight, the best was yet to come for LucasArts' budding series. "I'd recommend playing with a guide on-hand for the most obtuse bits, but Dark Forces is still worth a run through to get to Jedi Knight, where the series really finds its way."

Taking the lead as director on Dark Forces II, Chin—aided by designer and writer Peter Chan—was conscious of the first game's shortcomings and set out to remedy them. One aspect of its design in particular had been tabled in 1993, but was now ripe for the picking.

“Being a Jedi in the first game was another quick thought, and we even experimented with what that combat might feel like,” explained Chin. “In the early days of production, we canned the idea, because we didn't have the bandwidth to make it great and we wanted to make a great shooter first. What that allowed us to do was focus at the job at making shooting fun.”

Dark Forces 2 let players engage in light saber duels.

Dark Forces lead designer Daron Stinnett had cut lightsabers and other Jedi trappings from the game out of a conscious effort to develop conservatively. As much as he, Chin, and the others enjoyed Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, playing first-person shooters was a different beast from building one. “If we could make this first game great, we knew that being a Jedi in the next one was the way we needed to go," Chin finished. "We had the Star Wars trilogy to help us in that regard: Luke never used the lightsaber in a fight in [Episode IV], even though he had one hanging on his belt the entire time.”

Mind Tricks

Empire Strikes Back was considered superior to its predecessor in virtually every way upon its release in 1983. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II likewise matched and exceeded the pedigree of its original. As id Software had done with Quake, Jedi Knight traded pixels for polygons, a move owing to its developers once again getting swept away by id's latest shooter.

 “What I loved about Quake was its speed and intensity,” said Chin. “The tech advanced the player mechanic into an art form. The speed in which one could react to what's on the screen and using WASD [keyboard controls] and the mouse to pinpoint accuracy. It pushed how players interact with their control systems and what we expect in the experience.”

LucasArts' Sith engine was engineered to power Jedi Knight, a fully 3D first-person shooter, with plans to get extra mileage out of the tech by applying it to other in-house 3D games such as adventure-game designer Tim Schafer's Grim Fandango. To ensure that Sith met the needs of Jedi Knight's team, the engine's programmers were made a part of the development team. At any time, level designers could confer with programmers to work together on technical needs.

Jedi Knight's chief conceit was an uneven split between first- and third-person views. Reprising their role as Kyle Katarn, players still brandished blasters and other firearms in first person. As soon as they got their hands on a lightsaber, the camera pulled back so players could see their newly appointed Jedi warrior performing thrusts and parries.

Dark Forces 2 switched to third-person perspective when players equipped a light saber, giving them a better view of battles.

“In the end, we felt it was better that way in order to provide the peripheral vision needed to add layers to the sword fighting game mechanic,” Chin explained of the team’s decision to alternate between perspectives. “I always thought of it as if you're using the Force to give the player more situational awareness. It was controversial at first, because we might get flak from the FPS purist.”

Over time, the developers shed their fear of criticism. The third-person view complemented swordplay, making it the right decision. “In general, that's the advice I'd give any designer,” Chin said. “Know your gameplay genre, live it, but know when to break the rules and do it often, and build what makes sense for your style of game. You can't please everyone, and by trying to do so, you're likely to not please anyone. If you only used the saber, you got a bonus. So, hell yeah—be a Jedi. It's the name of the game; we wanted that to stand out.”

Jedi Knight's lightsaber combat was well-received when the game launched in September 1997. Critics lauded the sequel's graphics, more refined puzzles, engaging storyline, the addition of a multiplayer mode—no doubt a product of the development team's ongoing obsession with Quake's deathmatch mode—and the tightness of its controls, especially those mapped to lightsaber combat and a deep arsenal of light and dark Jedi powers.

"With a gradual accumulation of Force power, achingly huge levels, some incredible theme levels and spot effects, deathmatch, a spankingly true 3D engine, and wall-to-wall Star Wars-iness, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is everything we want," wrote David McCandles in his review for Computer & Video Games. "No, it's not Quake. It's Dark Forces, in a brilliant little genre of its own."

"I do know that the experience wasn't solely based on graphics tech, because we purposely under-tuned it to reach a wider market, and plus we knew we wanted to push scale over texture memory, [such as with] pre-baked shadows," Chin said. "It was a game about being a Jedi and the Star Wars experience, and I think we achieved that quite well. To that end, we showed that story can be a part of the FPS genre, if you wanted it."

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