Great Game Stories, No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars)

Once upon a time, on a desert world with two suns, a farm boy dreamed of adventure and got rather more than he bargained for. This is the tale told by Star Wars, the little Game Boy cartridge Capcom released in 1992, which dares to squeeze the whole of the 1977 film onto a screen the size of a biscuit. It should not work at all. That it works even a little is its own kind of magic.

A whole galaxy squeezed into four shades of grey. George Lucas, eat your heart out.

The Characters

Our hero is Luke Skywalker, a restless young man blessed with the most precious gift a video game can offer: many lives. Where his companions each get a single fragile chance, Luke may fall and rise again and again, which is rather convenient for a boy about to pick a fight with an entire Empire. He is the spine of the whole adventure, the one the player steers through sand and steel alike.

At his side gathers a fellowship of the faithful. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the old hermit of the wastes, carries a strange and gentle magic: he can raise a fallen friend from the dead, up to five times, like a wizard who keeps spare heroes tucked in his sleeve. Han Solo the smuggler and Princess Leia may each take Luke's place at the controls, bringing their own strengths, though both walk a tightrope with only one life to lose. Choose to play as them and every step carries a delicious extra dread.

Two loyal droids round out the party, and cleverly, each one is a tool as much as a friend. R2-D2 unrolls a map of the enemy fortress whenever the corridors grow into a maze, and prim golden C-3PO leans in to explain what on earth is happening and what must be done next. Chewbacca, the loyal Wookiee, waits patiently in the wings for a single shining moment at the very end of the tale.

And the villain? Darth Vader, dark lord of the Sith, is treated by this cartridge as something almost too dangerous to show. He appears in exactly one place in the entire game: the Game Over screen. To look upon his mask is to know you have already failed. It is a small, sly touch, turning the story's greatest terror into the face of defeat itself.

The World

The story opens on Tatooine, a sun-baked hub of sand and danger that serves as the adventure's beating heart. Luke tears across the dunes in his landspeeder, the one machine that can make a Game Boy feel genuinely quick, weaving past lumbering Tusken Raiders, scuttling Jawas and the ever-present stormtroopers of the Empire, who seem to sprout from the sand itself.

Scattered through these desert levels are pieces of shielding, quiet little treasures that Luke must gather so that his getaway ship can survive what is coming. There is a rusting Sandcrawler to raid, a lonely hermit's cave up in the hills, and the wretched hive of the Mos Eisley spaceport, whose famous cantina here is blessedly free of any musical interruption. Every corner of the desert hides either a friend to recruit or a fragment to collect.

Beyond the sand lies the cold black void. The tale then lifts off into a first-person view of space, where the Millennium Falcon must thread a churning, deadly asteroid field, and finally into the metal belly of the Death Star itself, the moon-sized fortress at the dark centre of the whole story. Three worlds, then: the open desert, the perilous stars, and the iron labyrinth, each demanding a different kind of courage.

The Adventure

The quest unfolds like a proper fairy tale of gathering, the sort where the hero cannot win alone and must first assemble his companions. Luke sets out across Tatooine to find them one by one: R2-D2 hidden away aboard the crawling Sandcrawler, wise old Obi-Wan waiting in his cave, and the roguish Han Solo lurking in the Mos Eisley bar with a blaster and an attitude. Only once the whole band is assembled, and enough precious shielding has been gathered from the dunes, may the journey leave the planet behind.

Then comes the flight, and the game changes shape entirely. Guiding the Falcon through a hail of tumbling rock in tense first-person, our heroes reach the Death Star and slip inside its guts. Deep in those grey corridors two great deeds await. First they must silence the tractor beam that holds their ship captive, the invisible chain binding them to the enemy. Then they must find and free Princess Leia, locked away in the detention block at the fortress's heart, the captive whose rescue turns a daring raid into a rebellion.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

With the princess freed and the tractor beam dead, only one task remains, the grandest of them all. Luke joins the rebel fighters and turns their guns on the Death Star itself, and the great steel moon is undone in a blossom of fire, exactly as the old legend demands. The little grey screen delivers, in its humble way, the destruction of a planet-killer.

Here the cartridge grants its one sweet reward. Chewbacca, who has waited the whole adventure long, finally strides into view for a closing cameo, the loyal Wookiee taking his bow at last. It is only honest to admit that Darth Vader never gets his lightsaber duel in this telling; he haunts only the Game Over screen, the face of failure rather than a final foe to be beaten. The instruction manual even whispers a lovely detail: should Han Solo perish along the way, it is Chewie who flies the Millennium Falcon home in his place. A small tale, then, but a complete and satisfying one, with the farm boy victorious, the princess free and a faraway star reduced to sparks.

Want to see the actual cartridge that pulled off this impossible trick? Wander into the Game Boy Museum and browse the shelves at your leisure. Every grey plastic time capsule in there has a story just like this one, waiting patiently to be told.