A New Hope

How BioWare grabbed the biggest licence on the planet and etched its name in Star Wars history

- Alex Kane

When LucasArts hired Mike Gallo in January of 1999, the Star Wars saga was on the verge of seismic change. The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars film since 1983’s Return Of The Jedi, was months from release, bringing a whole galaxy of licensed merchandise – action figures, comics, Lego sets, Pez dispensers, videogames – right along with it. The movie, billed as Episode I of the Star Wars saga, would deal with the time period 32 years prior to George Lucas’s original 1977 opus, showing the fabled Jedi Knights at the height of their influence. It promised audiences a nine-year-old hot-rodder incarnation of Darth Vader, a fresh-faced Obi-Wan Kenobi, and worlds both new and familiar.

Gallo’s first role at LucasArts, the videogame studio Lucas had founded in 1982 as part of an agreement with Atari, involved finishing the game adaptation of The Phantom Menace. As its producer, Gallo guided a team of developers working on the PC version of the 3D action-adventure game and then later led an onsite team tasked with porting it to the Sony PlayStation. The Episode I game launched in North America on the same day as a second Phantom Menace tie-in, the fast-paced Episode I: Racer, ushering in an age of renewed interest in Star Wars gaming. Unfortunately, critics panned the Phantom Menace game.

Earlier efforts like Shadows Of The Empire and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, both developed in-house by LucasArts, had shown the enormous potential behind the license. But for the next several years, Star Wars games tended to rely less on narrative and more on design gimmicks, with releases pegged to events such as The Phantom Menace. The reputation of Star Wars console titles, in particular, suffered accordingly.