Star Wars: Episode I Racer Roars Back Onto Pcs And It's Still One Of The Best Racing Games Ever

Saying ‘It’s the best thing to come out of The Phantom Menace’ is putting it lightly.

- Hayden Dingman

 

There are a few games I remember exactly where I was when I first played them. Star Wars: Episode I Racer is one of them. It was an N64 demo kiosk at a Toys ‘R’ Us in New Jersey. I stood there craning my neck up at the tiny CRT screen enraptured for probably 30 minutes as my family wandered around the store. I distinctly remember getting stuck on the Malastare level—there’s a jump in the middle (Google tells me it’s called the “Sketto Leap”) that I could not hit fast enough to fly over.

Nearly 20 years later and Star Wars: Episode I Racer is available once again. It recently surprise-launched on GOG.com for $10 (go.pcworld.com/gogm), and it turns out I still can’t nail that jump to save my life. I had a great time trying, though.

USE THE FORCE

For the uninitiated, or perhaps for the people too young to have played Star Wars: Episode I Racer, the game adapted one of the most polarizing aspects of the first prequel film: The podracing. LucasArts spun an entire racing game out of that 15-minute sequence, imagining an alternate reality where Anakin Skywalker disregarded the pull of The Force in order to pursue his dreams as a pro-circuit podracer.

Probably would’ve worked out better for him, eh?

The first level of the game is a short-form adaptation of the film’s Tatooine course, and then it’s off across the galaxy far, far away for something like 25 different tracks—some icy, some industrial, some underwater, some featuring zero-gravity sections and floating rocks.