In the top 10 list of my favourite-ever video game moments – a list that changes radically every year or so – there are two absolute immovables. And they both involve Star Wars. The first time I sat in the beautifully elaborate arcade cabinet of Atari’s 1983 Star Wars game and experienced its thrilling depiction of the Death Star assault was a life-changing moment in an otherwise unremarkable holiday in Blackpool. Those crisp vector-based visuals, resonant voice samples (“Yahoooo”) and minimalist electronic version of the famous score? To a boy who watched the film practically every week on video it was a dream come true.
Much later, in 1996, I was a young writer for Edge magazine visiting Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for a feature on their Direct X graphics technology. After the interviews they took me to a new multiplayer gaming centre in the city; it was a roomful of pods, each housing a state of the art PC and flight controls. There we played X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, a breathtaking simulation of aerial combat, where we weaved between Star Destroyers, chatting over headsets, indulging in team-based space battles for hours. This experience convinced me that online multiplayer was the future and would change the industry forever.
