The making of TIE Fighter: How being the bad guys changed Star Wars forever.
"I call myself an accidental entrepreneur," says Larry Holland. That's Holland's casual way of saying he never really planned on designing some of the most popular PC games of the '80s and '90s, or aspired to meet Steven Spielberg and learn the director was a fan. His childhood dream, starting around fifth grade, was to become an archaeologist.
"When I started working with Lucasfilm Games, I knew them, of course, because of George Lucas," Holland says,"but I didn't join them because they were the Star Wars company. I wanted to work with them because they were doing some cutting-edge game technology; the mission for Lucasfilm Games was that they weren't even supposed to think about making Star Wars games.
"When I was making these World War II sims, really what I was trying to do is create a time machine," Holland says.
"I went over to Lucas knowing that the companies were quite similar, in that they were niche products for male audiences," she says."But the people who worked at Lucas were a really different breed... They were way more interested in Dungeons & Dragons; they were. There were some business people in there, but there were just some really passionate game-oriented creatives." Before long, she and Larry hit it off and began dating.
To master X-Wing is to master this system. The game boasted LucasArts' patented iMUSE audio system, which could smoothly change music tracks to match the action, and 3D polygonal graphics—rudimentary today but impressive for the time. X-Wing's manual highly recommended an extraof expanded memory, which tells you something about the tech it was running on.
You can see Holland's"realistic" approach to making a Star Wars game even in X-Wing's manual, which is written as though you're a real rookie pilot joining the Rebellion. It describes one mode, called Historical Combat, as"recreations of actual encounters with Imperial Forces." 3D computer graphics were improving by leaps and bounds in the '90s, which also meant an increase in costs and personnel. Battlehawks had cost Lucasfilm about $62,000, whereas X-Wing's budget was in the ballpark of half a million.
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