Star Wars Chess (1993): When the Galactic Civil War Was Resolved on 64 Squares
There are several reasonable ways to resolve a Galactic Civil War.
Blow up the Death Star. Defeat the Emperor. Convince enough planets that the Imperial government has become overly obsessed with super-powered weapons.
Or, according to the Star Wars Chess game, just put Darth Vader on D5 and hope Yoda doesn't take him.
Released for DOS and Windows in 1993, Star Wars Chess from The Software Toolworks lived up to its name: regular chess played by characters from the original trilogy, and when one piece was captured by another, the game was interrupted by a small animated Star Wars battle. The Sega CD version was released in 1994. The game was developed by The Software Toolworks, which independently released the original PC versions, while Mindscape produced the Sega CD version in several countries.
Sounds like something unusual.This was new.
But it was also a wonderful, specific product of computer gaming in the early 90s, when a familiar board game, a licensed universe, and a few floppies of animation could be perceived as a completely reasonable multimedia event.
In our a complete archive of all Star Wars games ever released Star Wars Chess refers to 1990-1999 era, along with X-Wing, Rebel Assault, theSuper Star Warstrilogy and all the other games that prove that the Lucasfilm galaxy can seemingly survive almost any genre.
Including chess.
Battle chess, but someone found a license for Star Wars.
The obvious predecessor is battle chess.
Interplay's 1988 game had already discovered that chess became much more interesting for children if captured pieces didn't just disappear, but instead killed each other in intricate little animations.
The rules remain the same - chess.
The reward was violence.
Star Wars Chess took this formula and replaced the medieval pieces with characters from the original trilogy.MobyGames describes it very simply: it's chess with Star Wars characters and captured pieces trigger Battle-style animated battles Chess.
In essence, this is the entire project document.
And, to be honest, nothing more was required.
Star Wars already had lightsabers, blasters, droids, bounty hunters, monsters, and in one scene from"New hope"Chewbacca becomes dangerously interested in a holographic board game.
Franchise and chess were waiting for each other.
Admittedly, they were probably expecting dejarik and not this.
But computers did everything possible in 1993.
Luke is the king. Vader is the queen. We need to discuss this.
The work of the Rebel group is distinguished by its magnificent literalness.
Luke Skywalker is the king. Leia is the queen. C-3PO is an elephant. Chewbacca is a horse. Yoda is a rook. And the pawns are R2-D2
Yes.
Eight R2-D2.
Somewhere within the ranks of the Rebel Alliance, logistics has reached incredible proportions.
Imperial side is even better.
Emperor Palpatine is king. Darth Vader is the queen. Boba Fett is an elephant. Tusken Raiders are horses. AT-ST walkers are rooks.Stormtroopers are pawns
The fact that Vader is a queen sounds funny until you remember what a queen actually does in chess.
She is the strongest piece on the board.
She moves almost anywhere.
She spends most of the game solving problems created by those around her.
Suddenly the casting department is showing itself to be quite savvy.
Meanwhile, the Emperor stands behind everyone else throughout the match, desperately trying not to get killed.
Also true.
Yoda's role as rook requires a little more imagination.
Apparently, 900 years of Jedi training ultimately prepares a person to move in a straight line.
The real game was to find out who killed who.
No one remembers Star Wars chess from analyzing the opening books.
They remember the capture animation.
Whenever one character picks up another, the normal playing field is interrupted by a short animation showing exactly how the winner deals with the loser.
And this is where the developers had fun.
The animation was specific to each character, often comical and sometimes unexpectedly evil. C-3PO typically survives through freak accidents rather than deliberate aggression. Luke, of course, uses his lightsaber. Boba Fett has his own arsenal.R2-D2 finds appropriate mechanical ways to cause problems.
One contemporary player review, preserved on MobyGames, describes dozens of different character combinations and highlights the humorous moment when C-3PO accidentally defeats enemies and Luke dispatches Boba Fett using decapitation and the Sarlacc.
This completely changed the psychology of chess.
As a rule, sacrificing part of the figure can be a strategically correct decision.
In Star Wars Chess, sacrificing a piece can also unlock an animation you've never seen before.
This is dangerous.
A perfectly respectable player might forego positional discipline because he urgently needed to figure out what would happen when R2-D2 captured Darth Vader.
Kasparov trained differently.
It was still chess.
Underneath the animation are the usual chess rules.
You can play against the computer or another person, choose different difficulty levels and, importantly, turn off the entertainment and use a regular 2D board instead.MobyGames cites one- and two-player support, while modern and later descriptions refer to standard chess modes under a Star Wars-themed design.
This simple board was surprisingly useful.
The character models look charming, but the chess position becomes more difficult to decipher when instead of pawns and rooks you see eight astromech droids, two Jedi Masters and a Wookiee standing next to each other.
At some point the player stops thinking:
“Knight to F3.”
And begins to think:
“Is Chewbacca a horse?”
The answer is yes.
For the most part.
The PC version was the original show.
Versions for DOS and Windows appeared in 1993.
The visual design was slightly different in different versions, but the essence of the game remained the same: animated frames, familiar music and recognizable characters.The Windows version especially benefited from the PC's multimedia environment, which was quickly becoming an advantage in the early 1990s.
This has historical significance.
1993 also saw the release of Star Wars: Rebel Assault, another game based on the idea that the personal computer could become a little more cinematic.
The two games could hardly be more different.
Rebel Assault wanted to amaze you with a spectacle worthy of a CD-ROM.
In the game Star Wars Chess, Yoda had to beat up a stormtrooper between two completely normal chess moves.
But they both belong to the same multimedia moment.
Sound cards became more widespread.
CD-ROM drives have become increasingly popular.
Personal computers running Windows were increasingly marketed as entertainment devices rather than as tatty spreadsheet gadgets.
And Star Wars has proven extremely useful whenever someone needs to demonstrate that a computer can now make sounds.
Then Sega CD made the battles more cinematic.
A Sega CD edition was released in 1994.
It retains the basic chess game, but the presentation of captures has changed. Instead of the in-game approach used in the PC version, Sega CD was able to present confrontations as separate cutscenes, giving the battles a more cinematic feel. The console version also received its own introductory video.
We had to make compromises.
The resolution was lower and the pace of the game could feel slow.But the Sega CD was the console on which Star Wars Chess made sense.
This console existed in part to convince people that adding a CD drive to the Mega Drive/Genesis opened the door to a glamorous multimedia future.
Here comes Darth Vader playing chess.
The future is confirmed.
The Sega CD version was published by Mindscape in the US and UK, and in Brazil by Tec Toy in late 1994.
Critics did not feel the Force.
The reviews were not particularly flattering.
MobyGames currently records anaverage critic rating of 47%across the game versions it tracks.A more famous example is the case of Star Wars Chess, which was ranked the 49th worst game of all time in 1996 by Computer Gaming World, andVideoGames included the Sega CD version in the top ten worst games of 1994.
The criticism is quite understandable.
As a serious chess program, Star Wars Chess was not particularly accomplished.
This animation innovation had a second problem: after watching the animation, you no longer saw anything.
Turn them off and you're left with a fairly ordinary computer chess game.
If left on, each grab would slow down the match and cause the two licensed characters to perform a short comedy skit.
The feature that made the game a success ends up being the obstacle that separates you from the game.
This was a fairly common problem in the multimedia era.
Sometimes there are loading periods in the future.
But calling the game “The Worst Game Ever” is perhaps an exaggeration.
Star Wars Chess is not the best chess program.
It's hard to look at this now and see one of the greatest gaming disasters in history.
The game is running.
The rules are simple, like chess.
The characters are recognizable.
Animation has personality.
All this is easy to understand in about ten seconds.
This already puts it above a surprisingly large number of licensed games.
More importantly, people remember it fondly.Retrospective discussions are full of players admitting that they spent more time deliberately preparing captures than trying to win, and some even believe that this is what helped them learn to play chess.
Perhaps this is his true legacy.
For a child who was not interested in elephants, rows, ranks or Sicilian defenses, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader became a reason to learn what these figures were for.
R2-D2 then killed someone.
Received education.
It also captured a very different era of Star Wars.
There is another reason why Star Wars chess should remain in the archives.
Look at how carelessly this license is used.
There are no concerns regarding canon.
There is no detailed explanation as to why there are eight identical R2-D2 robots.
It is not explained in any of the game's lore articles when Darth Vader became legally entitled to the title of queen.
The initial premise essentially suggests that the The Empire and the Rebels have reached an uneasy truce and decided to settle their differences with using chess.
That's all.
Nobody needs a six-issue comic explaining the tournament.
This is a toy.
And the Star Wars games of the 1990s were often surprisingly useful as toys.
In the future, LucasArts may release X-Wing, a serious space battle simulator.
Another publisher could release animated chess based on Star Wars.
A few years later, someone will create a fighting game.
Jabba would eventually organize car fights to the death.
The galaxy was flexible.
Why Star Wars chess should remain archived
Because the history of Star Wars video games is not only about masterpieces.
These are also strange ideas that could only arise at one specific moment.
Star Wars Chess belongs to an era when animated chess was a recognizable genre of computer games, multimedia PCs were exciting, and the ability to see familiar movie characters talking and moving on a home computer was a novelty in itself.
By taking Battle Chess and adding elements from the original trilogy, they created something that was neither an important chess simulator nor an important Star Wars story.
But it was unforgettable.
Sometimes that's enough.
Watching the Emperor strut across the chessboard, Vader serving as queen, Yoda ruling the fortress, and countless numbers of R2-D2 bravely marching towards the enemy is pure pleasure.
This is ridiculous.
But it understands something important about licensed games.
You don't always need to recreate the Battle of Hoth.
Sometimes it’s enough just to ask:
What will happen if Chewbacca takes Boba Fett in Episode 5?
And then spend the next 30 seconds figuring it out.
Frequently asked questions
What is Star Wars Chess?
Star Wars Chess is a computer chess game developed by The Software Toolworks.It replaces traditional chess pieces with Star Wars characters, and features animated battle scenes when one piece is captured by another.
When was Star Wars Chess released?
Versions for DOS and Windows were released in 1993. The Sega CD version appeared in 1994.
Who developed Star Wars Chess?
The game was developed by Software Toolworks. It released the original PC versions, and Mindscape released the Sega CD versions in some regions.
On what platforms was Star Wars Chess released?
It was released for DOS, Windows 16-bit and Sega CD.
Which Star Wars characters are chess pieces?
Luke and the Emperor are kings, Leia and Darth Vader are queens, and the rest are played by characters such as Yoda, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, Tusken Raiders, AT-STs and stormtroopers.
Is Darth Vader really a queen?
Yes. Vader personifies the Imperial Queen, making him the most mobile and powerful regular piece on this side of the board.
Is Star Wars Chess based on Battle Chess?
Its main feature is very similar: regular chess is interrupted by animated battles when capturing pieces. MobyGames directly compares this game to Battle Chess.
Star Wars Chess was well received?
Overall, no. Critical reception was mixed, some of it poor, and Computer Gaming World later ranked it the 49th worst game of all time.
Is Star Wars Chess worth playing today?
As a serious chess program, there are much better options. But as a curious early '90s Star Wars game, with unique capture animations and wonderfully odd casting decisions, it certainly is.