One of the earliest Star Wars games ever, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, featured a wireframe run through the Death Star, and many more would attempt to replicate that climactic moment in the years to follow. In the 80s and 90s, game developers treated recreating the Trench Run as a kind of holy grail. Elsewhere, Star Wars miniatures games recreating its space battles have enjoyed great popularity with the tabletop community. Old-school fans may recall the lengthy debates over the Super Star Destroyer and the “five mile fallacy” or paging through old technical manuals. Jedi get all the attention but Star Wars has a rich tradition of games, novels, and toys that tap into the fandom’s love of the setting’s starships.
Close your eyes and you can probably imagine Red Squadron rising toward the Death Star or Admiral Ackbar yelling “It’s a trap!” as waves of TIE Interceptors crash toward the Rebel fleet, or Anakin offering a grinning “This is where the fun begins” as he weaves through a Separatist Fleet in his Jedi Starfighter. After all, great space combat is one of Star Wars’ birthrights. With Star Wars increasingly willing to embrace the old Expanded Universe though, there’s plenty of room to bolster one of the most underserved areas of the Star Wars fandom. Aside from a handful of great moments, like Mandalorian Season 3’s battle with a gang of space pirates, starfighters like Captain Teva’s X-wing are mostly around to play traffic cop. With smaller budgets owing to the franchise’s pivot to streaming, and without the spectacle of the big screen, there’s simply less incentive to feature truly memorable space battles. Top Gun: Maverick makes a Rogue Squadron movie or television series seem more obvious than ever, but in recent years, starfighters have increasingly taken a backseat to lightsabers, bounty hunters, and grim and gritty political drama. Top Gun: Maverick makes a Rogue Squadron movie more obvious than ever Replace Tom Cruise’s F-18 with an X-wing and it’s not hard to imagine Maverick as a Star Wars film, with a veteran Wedge Antilles as its star. It took the excitement of the original’s flight sequences and pushed them to Mach 5, with twisting dogfights resembling A New Hope’s Trench Run. Maverick was billed as a sequel to Tony Scott’s paean to fighter jets and beach volleyball, but it bore far more in common with George Lucas’ space opera than real-life fighter combat.
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