Star Wars video games have spent more than forty years trying on genres like someone who has been given an unlimited costume budget and no adult supervision.
There have been flight simulators, RPGs, real-time strategy games, racers, rail shooters, fighting games, platformers, MMOs, tactical games and educational software. This is part of what makes the history so interesting. Star Wars has never really been a genre. It is a setting developers repeatedly pour into whatever kind of game happens to make sense at the time.
But there is another pattern underneath that history. Some genres become part of Star Wars gaming for years and then simply vanish. Not because the fantasy stopped working, and not necessarily because the games were bad. The industry changes, hardware changes, publishers move on, and suddenly an entire way of playing Star Wars disappears for twenty years.
Then, occasionally, somebody remembers it.
A genre can disappear even when the idea still works
Infinite Frontiers recently made an interesting point in its piece about why fixed-camera horror is returning. A design language associated with older hardware does not automatically become useless because the industry moved away from it. Sometimes developers rediscover that an old limitation or structure was doing something valuable all along.
Star Wars has several versions of that story.
Consider the space combat simulator. During the 1990s, flying an X-wing was not a side activity inserted between lightsaber fights. It was enough to support an entire game. X-Wing arrived in 1993, TIE Fighter followed in 1994, and the series continued through X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. These were games about shields, power management, targeting systems and learning that an Imperial officer shouting about incoming A-wings should probably be taken seriously.
Then the genre largely disappeared from Star Wars. There were plenty of games with spacecraft afterwards, but dedicated cockpit-based space combat effectively went into hibernation until Star Wars: Squadrons in 2020.
Nothing about Star Wars had become unsuitable for flight simulation. The ships were still there. The fantasy was still there. What changed was the market around it.
Genres do not only survive because their ideas remain good. They survive because somebody still believes enough people want to buy them.
Strategy went from normal to unusual
Strategy followed a similar path.
At the turn of the millennium LucasArts was surprisingly willing to let Star Wars become something slower and more cerebral. Force Commander attempted fully 3D real-time strategy in 2000. Galactic Battlegrounds followed in 2001 with workers, resources and bases, while Empire at War in 2006 expanded the idea to fleets, planets and ground battles.
For a while, commanding Star Wars was almost as normal as shooting things in it.
Then dedicated strategy games more or less disappeared from major PC and console releases.
Infinite Frontiers has noted in its review of Space War Arena how difficult it can be to find satisfying real-time strategy experiences on modern consoles. Star Wars did not abandon RTS in isolation. The entire genre moved away from the centre of mainstream console gaming.
Now Star Wars Zero Company is bringing strategy back, but notably not by pretending it is still 2006. Instead of reviving the large-scale RTS, it narrows the camera to a small squad and turn-based tactical combat.
That may be the smarter kind of resurrection: bring back the fantasy, not necessarily the old interface.
The fighting game that became a curiosity
And then there is Masters of Teräs Käsi.
Released for PlayStation in 1997, it answered a question somebody clearly felt needed answering: what if Star Wars had its own Tekken?
The game put Luke, Vader, Han, Leia, Chewbacca and others into one-on-one 3D fights. It was a genuine fighting game rather than a duelling mode attached to something larger.
It was also basically the end of Star Wars as a dedicated fighting-game series.
That is slightly strange in retrospect. Few fictional universes offer a more obvious collection of visually distinctive characters with signature weapons, powers and fighting styles. Modern fighting games have built entire ecosystems around licensed characters, while Star Wars continues to appear as guest content elsewhere.
Yet the dedicated Star Wars fighter remains a 1997 historical curiosity.
Perhaps Teräs Käsi simply arrived too early and left too strong a smell in the room.
Not every forgotten genre is forgotten unfairly.
LucasArts mastered adventures, but Star Wars barely joined in
One of the stranger absences is the point-and-click adventure.
LucasArts became one of the defining names of the genre through Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Sam & Max and Grim Fandango. Infinite Frontiers’ retrospective on Sixth Sense Investigations quite reasonably treats LucasArts as one of the benchmarks against which other adventures were measured.
And yet Star Wars itself never received a major classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure.
Which feels almost perverse.
This is a universe filled with strange locations, suspicious cantina patrons, droids with inconvenient personality disorders, smugglers, locked doors and ancient ruins. You could probably build half a Monkey Island game without leaving Mos Eisley.
Instead, Star Wars absorbed adventure mechanics into other genres. KOTOR used dialogue, inventory and puzzles. Later action-adventures took over exploration.
Sometimes a forgotten genre is not something Star Wars abandoned.
Sometimes it is the road it somehow never took.
Racing disappeared, then suddenly came back
Racing is perhaps the clearest example because we are watching it return right now.
Episode I: Racer in 1999 took a short sequence from The Phantom Menace and correctly concluded that two enormous engines connected to a tiny cockpit by energy binders were enough material for an entire game. Racer Arcade followed, then Super Bombad Racing and Racer Revenge.
After that, Star Wars racing effectively vanished.
Infinite Frontiers has written about the strange durability of old-school racing design. Simon’s review of Speed Factor traces the game directly back to sprite-based arcade racers, while the site’s feature on the major genres of the 8-bit era shows how racing developers learned to suggest enormous speed on machines with very little actual power.
Racing has always been unusually good at remembering its ancestors.
Star Wars, however, waited more than two decades before making the genre important again.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer finally arrives this year, and the encouraging part is that Fuse Games does not appear to be treating 1999 as sacred scripture. Podracers return, but so do landspeeders, speeder bikes and skim speeders. There are different handling styles, builds, takedowns and a runs-based campaign.
That is exactly how an old genre should come back.
Not embalmed.
Evolved.
Some lost genres belong to their hardware
Not everything needs resurrection.
Rebel Assault was enormously impressive in 1993 because CD-ROM technology made pre-rendered backgrounds, video and voiced presentation feel spectacular. Today its heavily scripted rail-shooter structure is inseparable from the technological moment that produced it.
The same applies to parts of Star Wars’ educational catalogue, small handheld adaptations and strange licensed experiments. Some existed because a particular platform had certain limitations, or because the industry briefly believed every successful licence required a version in every possible genre.
This is where Infinite Frontiers’ feature on why retro games still influence modern design gets the distinction right: old games remain useful because of the ideas underneath them, not because every limitation deserves to be reproduced.
We do not need passwords because save memory was expensive.
And Star Wars probably does not desperately need another educational physics game starring droids.
Although I admit I would probably play it.
The complete history looks stranger than the greatest hits
When people remember Star Wars games, the same names tend to dominate: KOTOR, Battlefront, Jedi Knight, The Force Unleashed and Jedi: Fallen Order.
They deserve to.
But when you look across the complete history of Star Wars video games, the fascinating part is how often the licence completely changes what it thinks a Star Wars game should be.
A flight simulator says Star Wars is about machines, procedures and pilots. An RTS says it is about armies and logistics. A racer says it is about speed and reckless machinery. A tactical game says six people standing behind the correct pieces of cover can be more interesting than an entire galaxy.
Genres are not just containers for Star Wars stories. They decide which part of Star Wars matters.
That is why the return of Galactic Racer matters beyond nostalgia. It suggests Star Wars games may once again be willing to look back through their own history and ask a useful question:
What kind of game have we not made for a while?
There are worse ways to decide what comes next.
Star Wars has already spent forty years proving it can fit into almost any genre.
Perhaps the more interesting challenge now is remembering where it left them.
About the author: Søren Kamper is a writer and editor at Star Wars: Gaming, where he covers the history, design and development of Star Wars video games across more than four decades.
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