The release of Doom in 1993 changed the industry forever – and in its wake, developers scrambled to bring their own visions to life in first-person. Star Wars: Dark Forces is one such game, created in a genre completely different to nearly every other product developer LucasArts would release, but it nonetheless became one of the most interesting and inspired Doom-adjacent shooters of its day. Now, thanks to Nightdive Studios, Dark Forces has emerged from its DOS prison with a new remastered version for all modern platforms, complete with new high-res assets and a host of other improvements.
This makes it a good time to take a deep dive on what made Dark Forces an important release back in 1995 – and how it improved on the epoch-making Doom. From there, it’s onto the work of Nightdive itself in meticulously remastering the game for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
When Dark Forces was released in early 1995, it occupied an unusual place in LucasArts lineup – having mostly focused its efforts on point and click adventures, action games were still a rare breed for the company. In fact, despite their associate with Lucas Film, as of 1995, the studio had produced very few Star Wars related games.
