There’s a bit in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor where you end up raiding a crashed Lucrehulk’s command sphere. You know, one of those big Trade Federation ships in Episode I. It’s a great time — and you get to fight a bunch of B1 Battle Droids which is always a highlight. Before long, you make it to the command deck and you’re greeted by familiar shiny corridors. It’s just like you remember it from The Phantom Menace and, if you’re me, you’re hit by a sudden surreal wave of deja vu.
See, I’ve done this before, run down these familiar corridors while swinging a lightsaber. It took me a moment to place it; I’ve seen Star Wars Episode I countless times, but this was a feeling of actually having navigated this place, actively, and not passively. Then I realized that I’d done it twenty-odd years ago back in the video game based on The Phantom Menace. It took me ages to beat the game as I forged through the corridors of the Trade Federation battleship time and time again. In my memory, the game from 1999 looked just like this one does in 2023.
Of course, that’s not at all how it looked in 1999. I’m sure it’s hardly how it played too, as game design has come a very long way over the years. That’s to say nothing of the graphics, looking back at the old game, those corridors are far less shiny and the view much smaller. It was all that much more crude and nowhere near as detailed as contemporary games are.
Yet the basics are there: lightsabers, force powers, battle droids, and those corridors. There’s a very familiar feel to all of it, one that’s been lodged in the back of my brain for over two decades. It’s a memory of having been somewhere, of having done something. Like revisiting somewhere you’d been years before, or how you can navigate your childhood home in your mind. The only thing is I haven’t actually been aboard a Trade Federation ship. I’ve only ever done it in video games.
That memory is still there, though. I Part of what makes video games such an interesting medium is their experiential nature of them. When you do something in the game you’re actually doing it, albeit mediated by a controller. You’re the one fighting battle droids, you’re the one saving the galaxy. Journalist Tom Bissel says that experiences and memories he has from video games are “not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as real memories” (Extra Lives, p182); the memories are all firsthand and personal. So yeah, I have been here before, and it’s good to be back
Essays, Not Rants! 