A long time ago in an arcade far, far away.

When I was flipping channels the other day, I noticed that Spike TV was having a Star Wars marathon.  I found this funny, because I had just finished playing Star Wars: Battlefront on my Xbox.  Remember, FarmerDave was old enough to drive when the first Star Wars movie came out, and I actually went to the theater on opening night and watched the movie in all of its big-screen, surround sound glory.  I enjoyed the movie so much that my friends and I made a weekly pilgrimage to go see the movie every week for the 16 weeks that the movie was in the theater.

A few years later, we would repeat the same scenario for the other two Star Wars movies: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  We were the true Star Wars geeks of the time; we even went to the drive-in theater and watched all three movies in one night!  After the films left theaters, we were left with little to do on a Friday night.  Our backup plan was always to go to the arcade, which we did, preparing for a night of shooting bad guys and driving tanks.

 When we walked in the door of the arcade, something just did not seem right.  The lights were on; the games were in “attract mode”, but only a few people were playing.  Suddenly, there was a cheer from a distant corner of the arcade.  We searched for the source of the uproar, and found 20 people huddled around one game.

So what did we do? I mean we had the entire arcade to ourselves; we could have played any game we wanted.  Instead, we acted like sheep, and walked to the corner to see what the excitement was all about.  After squeezing our way through the crowd, we discovered the source of the chaos: a Star Wars videogame!

 When we were finally able to see the screen clearly, we noticed that it looked a lot like a multi-color version of Battlezone.  We had to wait until the arcade was almost closed before we actually got our first shot playing the Star Wars videogame, and we didn’t have enough time or quarters to get to the point where we could blow up the Death Star.

Since that time in the mid-1980’s there have been over 80 different titles released of Star Wars games running on every conceivable platform.  From full-size arcade games to flash versions that you can run in your web browser, learning games to Lego versions, Star Wars has infiltrated nearly every aspect of the gaming world and I think will continue to do so for years to come.

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