From the Archives: A Shadows of the Empire Retrospective

Remember back when people cared about Star Wars enough to get excited about a new game? Relive the follies of youth with this retrospective from our friends at GameSetWatch.

The biggest problem I have with the well-oiled PR machine that mere mortals call games journalism is that gamers only tend to look forward. Games exist in three stages: preview blowouts, quickie review, and a blurb at the end of the year. Very rarely does the gaming press, especially in this age of rapidly diminishing page counts on the tiny handful of paper magazines left, take the time to sit back and look at a game. Leave it to the forward thinking writers at Game Developer to publish postmortem articles looking back  at the creation process behind the game that helped justify the rough opening salvo of Nintendo 64 software to many a young nerd, Shadows of the Empire.

Feel free to spend what’s left of your lazy weekend browsing the juicy technical details such as the MIDI composition and the conversion from NTSC to PAL. Alternately, if you are like me, feel free to despair over the nonstop encroachment of technology, including the fact that a computer with 256 megabytes of RAM would set you back $140,000 dollars and a corner of a room a mere 15 years ago. And if you feel the need to dust off this classic after this excellent read, be sure to down an AT-AT for the late designer Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, who unfortunately passed away early last year from pancreatic cancer.

[Thanks are in order to 1up's Retronaut's blog for the link!]