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Learning form the Filth of Star Wars: Dark Forces


Edward Evans-Thirlwell


Making you wallow in the excrement of Anoat City just as Star Wars: Dark Forces' story is taking off suggests the contempt bestowed, then and now, on video games by the owners of the cinematic fictions like Star Wars. But it also reveals how video game level design might open fissures in those universes, piercing the greeble of movie props and sets in search of the social and industrial machinations these superficially elaborate objects purport to emerge from. Not just a set of tunnels but a cycling, hydraulic machine that devours its own waste endlessly, it can be read, against LucasArts' intention, as a critique of the modes of production and iteration that give us experiences like Dark Forces.


Beyond the bridges and rubbled houses of the city itself, four gates arranged around a cross-shaped area provide access to a labyrinth of filth. Scaly, right-angled waterfalls sluice past the bright bars of guardpost viewing slots and down into a putrid, pitch-black lake. It's a dreadful place to starge a firefight (especially if you forget how to activate your headlamp), with enemies that prey upon the disorientation and panic induced by the flow's tug and the impossibility of backtracking once you've begun your descent. There are Imperial probe droids, glossy shells fading into the black, and waspish drones of the kind Luke Skywalker sparred with, their hissing a nipping a temptation to empty your blaster rifle in the hope of a lucky shot. There are the cephalopod creatures the Falcon's crew fought in the Death Star's trash compactor, breaking through the scum at close quarters to fill the view with molten, toothy pixels.


The sewer might confuse and repluse but it also presents as a place of mathematically precise equilibrium, the tide of effluence neither rising nor falling until you being meddling with control panels and opening values. To make it through the level you must throw the switch gates in order, entering each branch of the network to activate other switches, flood or drain chambers, and eventually expose a platforming route to the secret lab where your quarry, a fugitive crimelord, awaits. Doing this means being fed through this apparatus of disposal repeatedly, sinking to its bowel and resurfacing by means of a hydraulic elevator and a series of narrow channels. It is hard to resist the feeling of being slowly digested, chewed and regurgitated like cud, until you finally unblock the system and are unceremoniously shat out. Your reward: a sprite of a conceited-looking man in a chair, and another lead in the hunt for the mysterious Dark Troopers.


This treatment of the player as refuse, circling the bowl, reflects the lowness of her status within the grand designs of Star Wars. While made with craft and care, Dark Forces is a knee-jerk of a game, the half-appreciative, half-vengeful corporate response to the Death Star Doom modes of a year or two before.


LucasArts had intended Dark Forces to feature Luke Skywalker, but the team decided expectations around the character would impose too many constraints. Luke's substitute, a reformed Imperial soldier with a grudge, seems rather less touched by destiny. Kyle Katarn has a tragic past, losing his parents to a Rebel atrocity that is eventually exposed for the Empire's work, and later games and books would endow him with a place on the Jedi Council. At the time of Dark Forces, however, he is simply a mercenary, hired by the Rebellion for tasks too mucky for even the Rebellion to bother with. To become him is to become an errand boy for the ever-accumulating Star Wars canon, beating new paths for license holders and marketing strategists to widen and transform into roads.


That's providing of course, you keep your head down and adhere to the grubbier corners of worlds the movies don't bother with. Later levels in Dark Forces include a prison, a factory, and a mining facility that, like the sewer, reduces Katarn to an object thrust and thrusting itself through a colossal machine, where enormous drills plunge at every intersection and stormtroopers waddle out of a haze of red sand.


As in the sewer, there is a curious equilibrium in play: the drills burrow forever but never remove any material from the level. To note what you might call a basic technical constraint or designers's compromise may seem obtuse, but the utility of this with regard to the wider enterprise of Star Wars is exactly the impression of huge, extractive labor without end. Luke, Han, and Leia spend some time in the gutters of the Star Wars universe, but spaces like this one define Katarn in Dark Forces. They are the reason his game exists.

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