Star Wars video games have an incredible legacy, as many of them aren't just considered fun diversions for franchise fanatics – they're up there with the all-time greats that gaming has to offer. But the 1999 adaptation of The Phantom Menace for PC and PS1 is not a game with such a legacy. In fact, it got a pretty dismal critical reception, in part because the developers were forbidden from competing with the games that fans do fondly remember today.
Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace released alongside the film in 1999 for PC and a few months later on PS1. Developer Big Ape Productions, which was founded by LucasArts veterans Dean Sharpe and Mike Ebert, had one well-reviewed but largely forgotten release called Herc's Adventures. But, ultimately, the developer had a pretty unfortunate legacy as the eventual creator of The Simpsons Wrestling and MTV Celebrity Deathmatch, both regarded as some of the worst games of their era.
But for The Phantom Menace game, you can lay at least some of the blame at publisher LucasArts, which didn't want Big Ape retreading any territory from the other Star Wars games being released around the time.
"From a design standpoint we had a lot of issues," Ebert, who served as a designer on the game, says in Retro Gamer issue #277. "We started building with very limited tools. I remember one of our designers plotting out background art on graph paper, because we had no way to import 3D art into the level-building tool. We could not make the game first-person action, as we could not compete with the Jedi Knight game being developed at that time." (That game was likely Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, which was released in 2002.)
The Phantom Menace game was developed first for PC but had to be made to "run in software rendering at first because LucasArts did not want to commit to a dedicated 3D graphics card being required. We were also targeting PS2 development later on, but when the PS2 was delayed we had to make the game run on a PS1, which was a nightmare."
Also not helping was the team's limited access to production materials from the movie. "Most everything we saw was blue screen shots," Ebert says. "We had an early script, but I remember having almost no idea what much of the movie looked like until very near the completion of the game." In fact, Ebert says, "a lot of times we just went with assumptions about the story – sometimes we were right, and sometimes we were wrong."
The one thing the team did see a decent amount of was the podracing scene. "Unfortunately we had to avoid that because there was a dedicated pod race game in the works by a different development team," Ebert says. That game would've been Episode 1: Racer, which launched the same day as The Phantom Menace game, and like Jedi Outcast is now among the best-remembered Star Wars games of its era.
Despite the restrictions preventing them from competing with contemporary Star Wars games, Ebert says there weren't many, if any, other constraints on development – aside from time, of course. "No one ever said, 'You can't do that!' There was very little oversight on what we did. They needed the game done before the movie, and we had to just make stuff as fast as we could, with the limited information we had."
Suffice to say this one is not in our list of the best Star Wars games.
