This is an expanded version of the Classic GI article that ran in issue #263 of Game Informer.

Every kid who grew up loving Star Wars dreamed about piloting an X-Wing or firing a blaster at a group of charging Stormtroopers. Many Star Wars games of the '80s and '90s put players in the cockpit, but the feeling of having your boots on the ground in George Lucas' legendary world remained elusive. All that changed 20 years ago on February 28, 1995, when a group of LucasArts developers combined their love for the sci-fi franchise with id Software's genre-defining first-person shooter formula.

LucasArts enjoyed its heyday in the '90s, when the studio put out legendary adventure games like Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis. The team also found its footing in the Star Wars franchise, including unforgettable space-flight games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Daron Stinnett, developer and director of Dark Forces, worked on flight simulators at Spectrum Holobyte before joining LucasArts. He points to X-Wing as the game that revitalized his passion for the franchise and the first-person perspective.

"In the mid to late '80s and '90s, I kind of lost touch with [Star Wars]," Stinnett says. "It honestly wasn't something that I thought about until I sat down in the cockpit and flew an X-Wing [in Star Wars: X-Wing]. I was so floored and it all came back. I just marveled at how amazing it was that 15 years earlier I had sat in a theater and watched someone fly an X-Wing in a big battle and here I was flying and being... in that X-Wing."

When the Dark Forces development team wasn't busy brainstorming ideas for the game, the creators were blasting one another into bloody pulps in Doom deathmatches. Stinnett says his initial inspiration to make a first-person Star Wars game came from Wolfenstein 3D, but Doom's marathon multiplayer sessions heavily influenced the design of Dark Forces.

In fact, so many developers were inspired by id Software's demonic PC blockbuster that for a period of time before the genre was labeled, first-person shooters were commonly referred to as "Doom clones." I asked Stinnett if being labeled a "Doom clone" by some in the '90s bothered him.

"It didn't, because the Doom gameplay and the way the worlds were built were defined by the technology at the time," he says. "There wasn't any other way to render worlds. If people called Dark Forces a "Doom clone," they might have because of the similar way the worlds are rendered. In fact, we did things a little differently and it enabled us to do a lot more than Doom could do."

Doom mods swapping out imps with Imperial soldiers were popular in the early '90s, but LucasArts was committed to make an authentic Star Wars experience.

The game stars Kyle Katarn, a politically agnostic mercenary hired by the Rebel Alliance who eventually becomes a devotee of the movement. Stinnett says the story, characters, and art style were all concocted by former LucasArts artist Justin Chin. The first mission tasks players with storming an Imperial base to steal the plans for the Death Star. Katarn's trusty blaster sways on screen as he drops in on a group of Imperial officers standing at their black and gray consoles with an array of colored buttons. A MIDI remix of John Williams' classic score sets the tone as red and green blaster fire is exchanged. The first mission of Dark Forces was a transformative experience for any fan of the series, and video games in general.

The Jedi Engine – inspired by id's Doom Engine and created by LucasArts – injected a new degree of level design into the first-person genre. Unlike Doom's sprawling labyrinths, the Jedi Engine allowed developers to stack rooms on top of each other to create more complex environments. But before the magic could happen, Stinnett needed people who understood how to create 3D spaces.

Dark Force's mercenary protagonist, Kyle Katarn

Unfortunately, LucasArts' designers were primarily skilled in creating 2D games or drawing sets for adventure games. Stinnett needed to look elsewhere for the people who would help build the Star Wars universe.

"I realized pretty quickly that architects are the people that know how to make environments," Stinnett says. "So I went to the University of Berkeley and connected with the architecture school over there and found a couple of guys who were also big gamers and convinced them to come work for LucasArts and join the Dark Forces team as architects and level designers."

One of those architecture students was Ingar Shu, who says his career path changed thanks to a chance meeting between his college professor and Stinnett as they were waiting in line for a movie. Stinnett talked with Shu's professor about needing designers who understood level design, and the teacher brought the potential opportunity to Shu. "I actually dropped out of college at that point to take a job at LucasArts," Shu says.

From there, Shu began offering his architectural design to help craft the world of Dark Forces. "The levels were designed as stories," Shu says. "They had a sort of scripts to them. Whether it was a boss or something, we outlined what would happen in a level to push the story forward."

Up next: A stellar hit and curious feedback from the creator of the universe...