In 1995, LucasArts (the gaming division of LucasFilm) released Star Wars Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire, a game that was very much a product of its time. Not only did the title have way too many words in it, it also proudly featured the first official new live action Star Wars footage produced since 1983’s Return of the Jedi. That was enough to make my eleven-year-old self think that this was the coolest video game I had ever put into my computer’s CD drive.
Time hasn’t been as kind to it as little Alex’s hype meter was.
The standout filmed sequences were directed not by George Lucas, but by his friend Hal Barwood, who worked on a lot of famous LucasArts adventure titles after leaving the film industry. The game’s handful of cutscenes feature actors you haven’t seen in any of the movies standing against blue screens that were replaced with simple CG backdrops, animated in the style of the rest of the game’s artwork. Both Rebel Assault II and its predecessor came out at the height of the home “FMV” era, a period where full motion video sequences and “interactive movies” were all the rage as game studios scrambled to try and find stuff to fill up the vast amounts of storage space offered by new optical disc media.
