Modems and early broadband just couldn’t sustain the game’s vision of massive multiplayer battles in space. TIE Fighter, which failed because it was released probably 10 years too early. LucasArts made several more entries into the space combat arena-the next was a multiplayer-focused title called X-Wing Vs. The player was still a cog in a vast machine-far vaster than the Rebellion-but the added intrigue of flying those secret missions for the Emperor made the player into not just a narrative focal point, but a star. It was a magical, transformative experience-even more so than X-Wing because of the greater plot focus on the person doing the flying. If X-Wing opened the door to flying in the Star Wars universe, TIE Fighter showed off what LucasArts’ game designers could do with some experience under their belts. It’s impossible to overstate what a big deal TIE Fighter was. ![]() TIE Fighter added Gouraud shading and more detailed models over X-Wing, and it also had a much longer campaign. Intel released the first generation of its Pentium chips only about a year before and P5-equipped computers were still prohibitively expensive for most consumers, so 386s and 486s remained the mainstream CPUs of the day. TIE Fighter was a game that you struggled to play well on a normal computer. The graphics improved as well, stressing machines of the day to the limits and beyond. However, this time around players had the advantage in numbers over the Rebels-you might be flying what’s essentially a disposable tin can, but you’ve got a lot of friends with you! Most TIE craft are unshielded, which added a whole new wrinkle to combat-a few shots from Rebel craft could reduce you to atoms. I know what I picked-shadowy Imperial society all the way! The bonus objectives allowed the player to advance in rank to eventually become one of the Emperor’s Hands (there was even a rank beyond that called the "Emperor’s Reach"), and your character also got a wicked tattoo that got progressively more and more wicked as your secret rank increased.įrom a gameplay perspective, TIE Fighter retained its predecessor’s punishing difficulty while also providing a few more bonuses to players. ![]() Players had to decide on what was more important: obeying the chain of command or gaining status in a secret shadowy Imperial society that carried out the Emperor’s orders? Usually they were relatively easy to accomplish-scan a particular cargo ship or ensure a particular group of enemies is destroyed-but sometime the bonus objectives actually conflicted with the mission’s main goals. ![]() ![]() The figure is, of course, a member of the Emperor’s inner circle, and the objectives are commands from the Emperor himself. TIE Fighter is perhaps most remembered for the "bonus" set of mission objectives assigned to the player by a shadowy figure who begins appearing shortly after the start of the game. The tone of the game’s mission briefings and cutscenes swerved between cloyingly loyalist and oddly subversive players got a humanized look at the Empire while at the same time getting to play witness to some terrible things going down. The Rebellion wasn’t a group of idealistic freedom fighters, but a band of thugs fighting against order and law. It’s not uncommon to hear folks even today proclaim TIE Fighter as the greatest space combat game of all time-and it’s easy to see why.įlying as an Imperial pilot, players got a taste of how things were on the other side of the curtain. X-Wing was notable because it was the first time players could immerse themselves in the Star Wars universe in the seat of a starfighter, but from a gameplay and storytelling perspective TIE Fighter went far beyond its predecessor. The summer after X-Wing’s release, LucasArts released a sequel, TIE Fighter.Īs the title might suggest, the game switches the narrative point-of-view from the Rebellion to the Empire, allowing players to live out their bad guy fantasies by flying the iconic hexagon-winged twin-ion-engined TIE Fighter-along with its variants (the TIE Interceptor, TIE Bomber, and TIE Advanced) and a few other semi-canonical craft like the Imperial Gunboat and the TIE Defender. With a bona fide hit on its hands, LucasArts iterated in what turned out to be the best possible way: by turning the plot upside down.
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