Forget Star Wars Movies, the Franchise’s Future Belongs to Video Games

Zero Company plays like the best XCOM game while loaded with Star Wars’ most resonant lore. As a new threat, a mindhive known as the Coil, emerges, Hawks and their crew encounter familiar faces that never feel like Easter eggs (I loved a stint playing as Anakin Skywalker as a way of learning Jedi operator techniques) while the game’s script makes dark moments on the timeline even grimmer through forcing player decisions. Since operators can die and missions go wrong, every action has stakes. Zero Company is comparable only to Andor in how it makes you feel the war of Star Wars.

As much as I love Rey, adore the genre experiment of The Mandalorian season 1, and root for any Star Wars theatrical event (even ones directed by Shawn Levy), no one has really succeeded in creating the ragtag spark between class-type characters in Star Wars the way George Lucas did in his original movie with Luke, Leia, and Han. The conversations and battle assists in Zero Company hark back to that era for me. I felt deep pain when my girl Jae had to fulfill her ore baroness duties on the mining planet Shu-Torun. I feared taking Kabbney Uppercut out on missions knowing he had a family back home, and that the Coil might bleed him dry if caught. There’s a style of play in Zero Company that considers the for-hire operators as meat shields for the mains, but even they were tugging at my heart strings thanks to some savvy voice over work.

Games make Star Wars’ possibilities endless

Image: Electronic Arts via Polygon

“Star Wars” has been a game property nearly as long as it has existed in film; Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600 arrived a year before Return of the Jedi hit theaters. Technological limitations kept it chasing Lucas’ movies for nearly 20 years. And for all the hours I sank into Rebel Assault and Dark Forces and Rogue Squadron or Battlefront, they all felt like Star Wars simulators rather than carving out uncharted sectors of space. To me, Star Wars didn’t fully bloom in its gaming potential until Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in 2003.

An RPG is the true test of a storytelling world’s richness — how deep can you go into this lore? And how long do you want to stay there? Bioware, building off the mechanics of Wizards of the Coast’s d20 system from the now-retired Star Wars Roleplaying Game, stress tested playable life beyond Skywalker. There were many games, many genres, to explore without feeling like “expanded universe.” This was the universe.

Recent games have followed the spirit of KOTOR in declaring, through intertwined narrative and play, that fresh stories can be told in the Star Wars universe and ones that take unique advantage of immersing the player. As much as Respawn’s Jedi games defied the “sole survivor” aura of Luke Skywalker, Cal Kestis’ journey from untrained padawan to underground Jedi warrior breathed life into the surface-level iconography of the Inquisitors and the exploits of the Empire outside of film canon. Cal is a damaged character, one experiencing past, present, and future all within his platforming escapades, and the loss suffered at the end of Survivor packs nearly as much punch as the end of Lucas’ Empire Strikes Back.

Image: Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts

Even the traditional Star Wars sim experiences have set out to explore something beyond the scope of the charted timeline and challenge players with the circumstances of the Rebels conflict with the Empire. The flight-sim-brained Star Wars: Squadrons dealt with the aftermath of the destruction of Alderaan; Star Wars Outlaws invented a new character through which the Outer Rim’s brutality could be channeled as players navigated its open-world maps. Star Wars: Galactic Racer, arriving on the heels of Zero Company (the fans are eating well) both embraces Lucas’ core love of speed and tells a story again set on the fringes of what we’ve seen before. Star Wars Episode I: Racer was exhilarating in 1999, but it also existed to bolster Phantom Menace. By all accounts, Fuse Games poured soul directly into the vehicle molds of Galactic Racer. Our review calls it a generational racing game.

As it enters its 50th year in existence, Star Wars is a struggling mega-franchise. The Mandalorian and Grogu, clearly aimed to enchant the young fans who snatched up Baby Yoda backpacks, bombed in theaters. The TV shows appear to be fizzling: Dave Filoni’s Ahsoka season 2 is in the can, ready to scratch an itch for Clone Wars and Rebels diehards, but no one expects surprises (or future seasons). Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter could be a huge win with Ryan Gosling in the cockpit, yet an IMAX re-release of Lucas’ original version of Star Wars set for the 2027 anniversary might steal the spotlight. Star Wars has never been a modern-day global phenomenon like Marvel (look at Chinese receipts), but years into the Disney era, it also feels strained and wayward. Except in games.

Why can’t Star Wars be a transmedia property instead of just one thing? Very few things are; while Dungeons & Dragons has never been more popular, and Baldur’s Gate 3 blew past every expectation to become a critically acclaimed mainstream blockbuster hit, 2023’s D&D movie Honor Among Thieves swung and missed with audiences, despite rocking hard. Magic: The Gathering is in a similar boat, with mainline and crossover sets igniting a new generation of fans, while Hasbro has never found a functional way into movies or TV with the property. While Star Wars started as a foundational SFF film franchise, to me, it’s grown beyond it — and its many corners demand hours and hours of play instead of two hours of tidy, linear fun.

I don’t know if we’ll get more Zero Company — reports on behind-the-scenes staff furloughs and other lawsuits spell trouble for BitReactor — but there is another. A few others: Jedi 3, the prequel saga Eclipse, and KOTOR’s spiritual successor, Fate of the Old Republic, are all in the works. The future of Star Wars, against recent odds, looks bright. Provided you own a controller.