Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster – “It is shocking how good the game feels”

Atari CEO Wade Rosen is impressed.

By Rob Leane

Published: Wednesday, 28 February 2024 at 15:07 PM

Star Wars: Dark Forces Remastered launches today, and Atari CEO Wade Rosen seems pretty impressed with how well the 1995 LucasArts game is still playing. See what he told us in the video above!

This revamped version of Dark Forces, a Doom-like shooter where you play as Rebel hero Kyle Katarn in his mercenary years, has been handled by Nightdive Studios.

“The masters of the remaster,” in Rosen’s words, Nightdive is a Vancouver-based development team that Atari acquired in May 2023.

“I’ve actually known Nightdive longer than I’ve known the people at Atari,” Rosen told RadioTimes.com at the Gamescom conference in August 2023.

As Rosen recalled it: “I found them because I kept [seeing remasters of] all these games that I loved when I was younger. I’m like, ‘Who is this Nightdive that keeps putting out, like, every game?’”

Previous remasters from Nightdive include System Shock, Quake 2, Turok, Doom 64, Wizardry 8 and loads more.

Rosen continued: “We became friends, got to know each other well over those years, and then when the opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer.”

He added: “All the work we had done with them had turned out really well, and so it just felt like a perfect thing to bring the companies together and join forces.”

Speaking of forces, we asked Rosen if he was excited to see Star Wars: Dark Forces making a comeback with Nightdive’s remaster (which had just been announced at Gamescom).

“You know, I am,” Rosen told us, despite admitting that he “was always a little bit more X-Wing [and] TIE Fighter than Star Wars: Dark Forces”.

Rosen says it’s “interesting” to see the “little things about it” that people notice when playing the remaster.

“When I’m watching people play it, people comment like, ‘Oh, you can look up and you have full vision, and the entire field of view is available.’”

Dark Forces Remaster.
Nightdive / Atari / LucasArts

He explained: “When the game initially came out, you could only look straight. You couldn’t lift your head up because […] you couldn’t be assuming that all gamers had a mouse to play with at that point in time.

“So, it is shocking how good the game feels, given how much time has passed. I mean, when it came out, it was still a time where maybe people were only playing on keyboard.

“And yet it feels like a really awesome version of Doom set in the Star Wars universe. Like, who doesn’t want to play that?”

As for the future of Nightdive’s forays into the LucasArts archives, Rosen said: “Who knows? I mean, assuming that [Dark Forces] goes well, [I] would love to see them continuing to work on that series and other games from Lucas.”

For more from Rosen, check out what he told us about the “labour of love” that is the Atari 2600+ retro console.