Where's Han? Star Wars' Reluctance to Embrace Its Most Iconic Era

I’ve been waiting for a Han Solo game my entire life. It makes sense: a fan-favorite character, a swashbuckling bounty hunter with plenty of adventures and hijinks all around the galaxy. It could essentially be Grand Theft Auto in space, and players could pimp out the Millennium Falcon to their liking!

Seems like a perfect fit. So why hasn’t there been a single video game with Han Solo as the primary character, other than 2003′s Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon on Game Boy Advance?

How did we get to this point? I blame it all on two titles: Star Wars Galaxies and Knights of the Old Republic. When both games came out in summer 2003, it changed everything. KotOR was one of the first hugely successful, big-budget Star Wars video games not based at all on the era of the original film trilogy. It took place long before that, when Jedi abounded. Along with this came Galaxies, an MMO taking place in the era of Episodes IV, V, and VI. It was a gargantuan commercial flop.

The success of KotOR and the failure of Galaxies has pushed LucasArts away from games based on the original movie trilogy. There have been a few exceptions, but by and large, it seems video games have unfortunately become the exclusive realm of Star Wars‘ Expanded Universe. Maybe this is great news for fans of the hundreds of Star Wars tie-in novels that have been written, but for the rest of us fans, it’s a shame. It may be a long time before Han Solo finally gets his own game.

The upcoming Star Wars 1313 shows some promise, though. While it’s not connected to any of the films, the developers maintain that players will NOT be able to use a lightsaber. In our lightsaber-obsessed Star Wars gaming community, that’s great news to me. The seedy Coruscant underworld setting looks much darker than previous SW games, and the developers claim it deals with “mature themes.” We’ll see what that means, though; it’s always a gamble when franchises seek to hard-boil themselves. In an effort to appear more grown-up, many franchises lose their heart and soul–just look at Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within or Max Payne 3. Hopefully Star Wars 1313 bucks the trend.

The Secret of Monkey Island and the life & death of point-and-click

The point-and-click adventure genre occupies a strange place in game history, living and dying with LucasArts' non-Star Wars endeavors in the 1990s. The complete non-action nature of these graphic adventures seems counterintuitive in today's game development mentality, where combat is thrown into every title whether it benefits the experience or not--I'm looking at you, Tomb Raider.

I've recently been playing through Tim Schafer's body of work. His games during this period are sort of a microcosm of the point-and-click genre as a whole, bookended by 1990's The Secret of Monkey Island and 1998's Grim Fandango. Both are widely considered classics: there were certainly graphic adventures before, but The Secret of Monkey Island kick-started the genre's mainstream success. And Grim Fandango is perhaps the genre's apex, met with a landslide of critical praise but an utter commercial failure, contributing to the end of the graphic adventure era.

I just finished The Secret of Monkey Island. With limited technology and some monotonous mazes, it'd be easy to overlook in the modern day. But what shines through today is what always stands out in Schafer's games: the writing. Monkey Island's dialogue satirizes both video game convention and clichés of pirate mythology; the game takes inspiration from Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride, thirteen years before Johnny Depp's flick.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the writing is combat. "But what does writing have to do with pirate swordfights?" you may ask. Well, being a point-and-click game, Monkey Island doesn't feature swordplay in the traditional sense. Instead, protagonist Guybrush Threepwood must engage in verbal battles with his swashbuckling opponents, trading insults until one of them is overwhelmed. The rapport is hilarious and completely matches the mood of the rest of the game.

I mentioned too many modern games shoehorn combat into the gameplay even when it doesn't fit. Monkey Island pulls it off because it works in the context of the genre. Instead of stabbing, Guybrush declares "You fight like a dairy farmer!" Swoosh, swipe! To which his opponent retorts, "How appropriate. You fight like a cow." Parry! Whiff!

Tomb Raider is a fantastic puzzle game with horrendous gunplay thrown in to make it more commercially viable. "You control a hot woman solving puzzles!" doesn't appeal nearly as much to the average American as "you control a hot woman gripping long, hard shafts and causing massive explosions! ...oh and there are puzzles."

But perhaps if Lara Croft could learn a lesson from Guybrush Threepwood, her games would benefit exponentially, and her tomb raiding adventures could get a step closer to the "games as art" realm we all dream of.

And Tomb Raider is one example in a list of thousands. Point-and-clicking is dead in 2011, but maybe today's game developers could take a few pages from their books and we'd all be a little happier.