While the era of arcades was long past its prime by the time I started playing games, I still appreciate the elegant simplicity of many of those classics. Games like Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Galaga aren’t that complex ,but I’m drawn to replay them as I chase high scores. I was reminded of that grace of arcade games when I played Star Wars Outlaws, which includes some original ones as in-world minigames.
Players can find arcade cabinets for two different games-within-a-game near cantinas across Star Wars Outlaws‘ planets. One is titled Raven 6 and is a space shooter based on the look and feel of Atari’s classic Star Wars arcade game. The other is Racer, a time trial game where players must speed to the end of a level as quickly as possible without hitting any obstacles.
They aren’t that complex, but they don’t need to be. They’re refreshing breaks that Kay Vess can take in the middle of her galaxy-wide adventure. Although the bulk of Star Wars Outlaws draws from the gameplay trappings of modern classics like Uncharted and Red Dead Redemption, these arcade throwbacks were some of my favorite parts of the entire game.
Speaking to game director Thibaut Machin about the creation of these arcade games, it seems that developers at Ubisoft felt the same way. “When you look at this game, it’s so big, so epic,” Machin tells Digital Trends. “For us to be able to work on the experience from the start to the end and being able to control everything in between, it was so great.”
Now this is Racer
One of Machin’s primary tasks during the development of Star Wars Outlaws was to create all of the activities that populate its open world. The Sabacc card game is a prime example of this, but Raven 6 and Racer were my favorite open-world distractions. Machin says that Ubisoft and Lucasfilm thought arcade games were fitting because they’re from the same era as the original Star Wars film trilogy.
“At some point, we came up with the arcade game pitch, specifically because the era of those games matched,” Machin tells Digital Trends. “When the first arcade games were released, it was in the 1970s, and that’s the same era the Star Wars movies were released in as well. It was the right opportunity for us to have these iconic arcade games within Outlaws and refresh the gameplay by offering something a little more intuitive and playable.”
Machin was coy about the lore of these arcade cabinets, although Ubisoft and Lucasfilm did ideate on that. “The only thing I can probably say is that they are all manufactured by the same company, and that’s why they are spread across the galaxy like this,” Machin says. “There is someone manufacturing them and bringing them to the galaxy, but I can’t say much more than that. That’s maybe a story for later.”
The first arcade game Ubisoft worked on was Racer. Machin took design inspiration from runner mobile games (think Subway Surfers). The most difficult part of Racer’s development was getting the feel of its controls and difficulty curve just right. When the team saw people cheer when they achieved a new high score during playtests, they knew they had done something right.
“We didn’t want to punish them too much, so the challenge for that one was to make the difficulty curve the right level. You need to feel on your first run that you can be good at this game, but that it will require you to learn the track and the rhythm of the obstacles to get the highest score. That’s a difficult task. I used to be really good at it, and the team is much better than me at it now.”
Somehow, Atari’s Star Wars has returned
Racer is good fun, but my personal favorite of the two is Raven 6. It’s just one level where players shoot starships and asteroids coming toward them, but it’s satisfying fun. It’s also a meta-reference to a past Star Wars game. In 1983, Atari released a similar Star Wars arcade game. It was a space shooter with 3D vector graphics where players fought TIE Fighters and blew up the Death Star. The starship combat in Star Wars games like Outlaws is a lot more freeing and complex, but there’s an inherent simplicity to the design of Atari’s Star Wars that makes it just as enjoyable.
Its trailblazing 3D vector graphics also gave the game an iconic look, meaning I knew about it years before I even had the chance to check it out. Those who played it at release remember it fondly as well. When I got a tour of Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge at a Star Wars Outlaws preview event earlier this year, the Imagineer guiding the experience shouted out Atari’s Star Wars as an influential game from their youth. It’s fitting that Star Wars Outlaws, which is possibly the most ambitious Star Wars game ever made, pays tribute to one of the series’ first video games with Raven 6. While the similarities between Raven 6 and Atari’s Star Wars are undeniable, Machin revealed that the arcade classic wasn’t Ubisoft’s only inspiration for Raven 6.
“For the visual part, we’ve been working very closely with Lucasfilm for that. They had their own constraints,” Machin says. “More than the Atari Star Wars game, we were looking at the movies. There are a few ship interfaces that look a bit like our arcade games in the original trilogy, and then we worked with Lucasfilm to adjust a few visuals and colors.”
As for the gameplay, the team knew it wanted to keep things simple like those old-school arcade games do. That’s why the main goal is to achieve a high score and why the most important thing players can do to be good at Raven 6 is aim at the asteroids coming at them. By doing that, you’ll never break your combo you get from shooting all the other starships coming at you. It’s a straightforward, retro-inspired design, and that feels quite refreshing within this larger adventure.
A third Outlaws arcade game?
Even though Raven 6 and Racer‘s simplicity is part of what I like about them, it also makes me wish there were more of them. And there almost was.
“Back then, there were a few different types of arcade games. Racing games were one of them, shooting games were another. I wanted one per category, so what I asked the team for in the beginning was a racing game and a shooter game. We had a third in mind, but sadly, because of production constraints, that one was put aside,” Machin reveals.
With the action of Street Fighter, maze chasing of Pac-Man, platforming of Donkey Kong, and many more arcade genres left untapped, Ubisoft certainly has a lot to work with if it ever wants to add more arcade games to Star Wars Outlaws. That’s an idea Machin seemed surprisingly open to, which is why he wouldn’t go into more detail about what the third arcade game was, outside of the fact that it wouldn’t be like Raven 6 or Racer.
“I won’t say much, because there might be a chance,” Machin teased. “The feedback is pretty good so far on these games, so we might consider in the future adding a few more. But I won’t spoil anything. The only thing I can say is that we try to look at video game history to see what is missing. When we look at games from that era, what type of game is not represented yet? We might try to make one of those, so it won’t be another shooter or racer. We’ll probably try something new.”
I hope Ubisoft eventually does get around to that, because it struck gold with Raven 6 and Racer in Star Wars Outlaws. While I have my issues with some elements in Star Wars Outlaws, these arcade games represent what I like best about it: All the small elements in the world that have a lot more time and care put into them than you’d expect. They were refreshing for me as a player, and they were rewarding for Ubisoft to develop as well.
Although Star Wars Outlaws has all the trappings of a modern AAA game, it was at its strongest when it looked back and tried to recreate the magic of arcade games from the era in which the original Star Wars trilogy was released.