Those wanting to enter and relive the "Phantom Menace" experience will be kept plenty busy - saving the universe is hard work - but those looking for new challenges can dispense with linear story lines and go off on their own quests. The game visits all the familiar film sites, from the desert planet of Tatooine and its seedy town center, Mos Espa, to the seat of galactic power on Coruscant (complete with Jedi Temple) to Queen Amidala's home world of Naboo. The catch, of course, is that the higher the level, the more menacing the opponents, with arch-villain Darth Maul and his double-headed lightsaber poised at level 12. If it's not battalions of battle droids (nasty but fragile), it's destroyer droids (nastier and less fragile) or Jabba the Hutt's thugs (just plain nasty). The action is in 3-D, and the characters can jump, climb, run, fight and use the Force to confront a panoply of obstacles. As the plot diversifies, so do the choices of possible roles, eventually including the two Jedis, the fabulously attired Queen Amidala and her defense commander, Captain Panaka. Gamers can jump in either Jedi's shoes to elude the trap, reach their escape ship and enter the next level. It begins and ends as the film does, with the opening crawl dissolving into the arrival of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn on a Trade Federation ship for what turns out to be an ambush. "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" comes closest to Sorenson's novelistic model.
"Playing a really great game should be the same as reading a really great novel: You come out the other end after a month knowing that you've experienced something and been affected by it." "What we're trying to do is create an extrapolation of the film, not some derivative work," he says. So we tried to make the games approachable for a very young audience while still having enough depth for older gamers to find them interesting and challenging. "The film's audience probably goes as low as 6 or 7, but your average PlayStation person is probably in their early 20s. Sorenson says he's optimistic that the games, which have been in the works for almost three years, will appeal to as broad an audience as the "Phantom Menace" movie. Obviously, it's a pretty unusual circumstance." It's one of the advantages to being part of the same company. "We were lucky because we got brought in before produc tion had even started on the film. "It's usually just not possible," says Jack Sorenson, president of LucasArts. After all, how many filmmakers have their own gaming and special-effects divisions? It's not a feat likely to be matched anytime soon. That's because this is more than just an example of good marketing - it's a gaming watershed, the first time that interactive games have been released simultaneously with their tie-in film.