Dark Forces: Canon Once, A Legend Forever

Carolyn Petit

You probaby know the story of how the Death Star plans were secured: how Jyn Eros, Cassian Andor, Chirrut Emwe, Baze Malbus, and others faced certain death in the Rebellion's most desperate hour, giving their lives so that others might taste freedom. But it wasn't always so. Legends exist in a state of flux, and once upon a time, it wasn't the ragtag crew of Rogue One who delievered this sliver of hope unto the galaxy. It was me. Maybe, also, it was you. And certainly, it was Kyle Katarn, the hero of LucasArts' remarkable 1995 shooter Star Wars: Dark Forces.

While Rogue One ends with the retrieval of the Death Star plans, in Dark Forces, this task is only the beginning, making for a swashbuckling start to Kyles's adventure that grounds his arc in the players's existing knowledge of Star Wars lore and immediately establishes Kyle as someone who can get things done. It's a breezy, speedy start that earns your trust from what's to come. The interiors of the secret Imperial base Kyle infiltrates are unmistakably Star Wars, a testament both to the remarkably distinctive visual iconography of the films, and to the commitment the team that worked on Dark Forces had not just to getting it right, but to adding flourishes of their own to really bring the Star Wars universe to life. A holographic image of the Death Star made up a number of floating, rotating green dots in the heart of the secret base still impresses today, as does the sight of a TIE fighter swooping out of a hangar aboard the Super Star Destroyer The Executor.

However, Dark Forces wasn't content to merely replicate the familiar. By the time we reach the end of Kyle Katarns's first adventure, we feel we've experienced something that doesn't just mesh neatly with Star Wars as we already know it from the films (though it certainly does that, as you rescue defecting Imperial officer Cris Madine and run afoul of both Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt); it expands our notions of what the Star Wars universe might encompass.

A mission set on the smuggler's moon of Nar Shaddaa was a revelation at the time, letting us explore a wretched hive of scum and villainy that was altogether different from Mos Eisley: a grimy city plastered with graffiti and flashy advertisements; a place of dark, twisty back alleys in which you really don't want to run into a gran with a chip on his shoulder and a thermal detonator in his pocket. Dark Forces also gave us our first real look at the Imperial stronghold planet of Coruscant, during a thrilling mission in which Kyle must track open a vault that feels as impenetrable in its own way as the one Ethan Hunt and his crew crack in the iconic sequence from Mission: Impossible. The vault is located in the heart of the Imperial Security Operations building, a structure of ostentatious black and gold marble peppered with busts of Emperor Palpatine; a place that feels appropriately bland and suffocating in its crude, fascist elegance.

Though some may have referred to Dark Forces as a "Doom clone" around the time of its release, time has shown that this was always a reductive, off-the-mark descriptor. Dark Forces succeeds not just as a Star Wars experience but also as one of the most distrinctive and thrilling early first-person shooters. It has a fantastic assortment of weapons that goes beyond the immediately obvious assortment of pew-pew blasters. My personal favorite, the Stouker concussion rifle, fires an arcing shot that lands in an explosion of blue flame, an immensely satisfying way to take out clusters of stormtroopers.

But it's the inventiveness of Dark Forces' intricate level design that really shines. Each level rewards thorough exploration, being peppered with secret areas that just may contain the health, shields, and ammo you need to scrape by against the overwhelming odds you're facing. Most notable, though, is the remarkable use of vertical space, the way almost all of the game's locations feel multi-tiered, and require you to pay close attention to where you've been and where you're going. Sure, it's possible to get lost sometimes, but then again, shouldn't these places be tricky to navigate? You're an infiltrator, a saboteur, crawling and clambering your way through the churning mechanical insides of some of the Empire's most well-protected facilities. Being required to engage with the complexity of these spaces lends them to a tactility they wouldn't possess if everything was neatly signposted.

Kyle Katarn and his quest to stop the Empire's fearsome Dark Trooper plan from coming to fruition may have been banished from the official timeline by the gods of Star Wars canon, but I don't think that makes him or his accomplishments here any less real. The Star Wars universe has always been permeable, a place where we could live out our own adventures and tell our own stories, be it with action figures or video games or just in our own imagination. Jyn Erso and the crew of Rogue One may be the official story of how the Death Star plans were acquired, and it's a great story, but it'll never be the only story. You and I, we have our parts to play in the legend, too.