Happy Star Wars day everyone! With the upcoming release of Star Wars Battlefront 2, it's clear that the series is still pretty popular for gamers, especially with the ongoing continuation of the story on the big screen with The Last Jedi later this year. However, for us, the gaming franchise had its heyday back in the 1990s when it first appeared on the NES and the Super NES, the original PlayStation console and the N64, while also putting in big appearances on PC, Mac and at the arcades.

The Star Wars love-fest kicked off with its debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System in Star Wars, a side-scrolling platform shooter adaptation of the original film in 1992. It was a pretty tough game for any kid trying to take the fight to the Galactic Empire with 8-bits of firepower behind them. In fact, just getting off Tatooine and through the meteor shower (AKA the space shrapnel from the destruction of Alderon) was fairly challenging all by itself, but for a lot of us it was our first hands-on experience of the space adventure.

The franchise continued in 1992 on the NES with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back bringing the second film in the series to Nintendo's first console with similar gameplay to its predecessor. The Big N followed this up in 1993 with Super Star Wars, which was a supped-up version of the previous NES game, with improved graphics and animation to take it to the next level.

Meanwhile, PC gamers got their own fix of Star Wars action with the release of the first game in the seminal X-Wing series in 1993. The floppy disk title was a fairly serious combat flight simulator giving fans of the series a chance to experience the same kind of epic space battles that lit-up cinema screens when the films first came out more than a decade earlier.

The popularity of the game went on to spawn a number of follow-up titles starting out with TIE Fighter in 1994 and then X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter in '97 and X-Wing Alliance in 1999. Each of them evolved the series with improved graphics and playability as computing power developed throughout the decade.

Returning to the main movie tie-in, Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back brought the second side-scrolling shooter to the Super Nintendo in 1994. It was then followed up in 1995 with Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which closed out the series with an exclusive on the SNES, leaving the 8-bit world well and truly behind.

The first half of the decade also saw the introduction of Star Wars: Rebel Assault in 1993 through Dos and Mac, as well as the follow-up game in the series, Star Wars: Rebel Assault: The Hidden Empire in 1995 on Dos, PlayStation and Mac. The second of the two rail shooters went on to be the first Star Wars game to arrive on the fledgling Sony PlayStation console.

It was one of two Star Wars games released for the console during the 1990s, with the brilliant Star Wars: Dark Forces arriving on the PlayStation in 1998 following its earlier release on Dos and Mac in 1995. The first person shooter was a revelation of a game, taking things down to ground level and fighting directly against storm troopers and the rest of the Galactic Empire.

It was followed up in 1997 with the equally brilliant Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, which landed on Windows PC with a massive blast of a game. It progressed the series significantly, widening your range of movement with much larger landscapes and environments to move around in and opening things up to the outdoors in contrast to the corridor-based movements of Dark Forces.

The Nintendo 64 also saw a lot of action from Star Wars games with Shadows of the Empire spawning a brand new third person shooter adventure in 1996, which also arrived on Windows PC. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron also came out on the N64, arriving in 1999 following its earlier '98 Windows release, giving us a truly impressive flight shooter to get to enjoy.

The massive range of Star Wars gaming experiences in the 90s went even further in 1998 with the arrival of Star Wars: Supremacy in the UK on PC. It introduced real-time strategy into the mix, allowing you to control vast armies from a God like position of power set within the Star Wars universe.

If that wasn't enough wonder to take in, the franchise also landed in 1999 with the stunning Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, which showcased the full might of arcade gaming for the Star Wars franchise. It’s another rail shooter, which twisted and turned its way through the films in glorious 3D (at least as glorious as things got back then) with bonus boss battles against Boba Fett and Darth Vader. The game was Sega’s sequel to its earlier Star Wars Arcade, which touched down in arcades back in 1993 before going on be one of the launch titles for the doomed Sega 32X in 1994.

Modern day Star Wars games like Battlefront II have definitely got a lot to live up to with so much breadth and quality back in the 1990s. The decade may not have had any LEGO games to bring in a little cheer, but it was undoubtedly the era that George Lucas' vision really came alive for computer gamers.

About the author

Written by Gerard Harris, editor of the computer games section of Tuppence Magazine.