Now THIS is Star Wars, bay beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Star Wars at its best, for me, is when creators explore the nooks and crannies of this mythic universe and just kind of dig into the cool things and interesting implications that will never have time to be elaborated upon properly in a big movie or tv show. The prequel era is the best period of time for this shit because there is such a breadth of production design around especially Phantom Menace but all three of those movies really, and so so so much of it exists really only in mini-documentaries in DVD extras or in those books you see in Barnes and Noble but never purchase that show you a diagram of what the inside of a Sarlacc looks like or whatever. Those books don’t terribly interest me, but people writing books about shit that simply doesn’t matter but might be a cool idea certainly does. OR A VIDEO GAME MAYBE.

ABOUT PODRACING.

I do genuinely think that this is a sick fucking racing game, with a really solid track variety, a good sense of stats mattering, elegant controls, great audio-visual style, and a wonderful cast of sick fucks to play as. But what makes this one of my very favorite pieces of Star Wars media is how well it uses that framework to characterize the world of Star Wars, entirely through the trappings of a racing game, just by fleshing out the concept of podracing as it’s presented in that one movie.

We only ever see one podrace in the movie but we’re told a little bit about it: that’s it a sport renowned for its speed and brutality, that most podracers simply die during races sooner or later, that it’s actually illegal because of this and is only put on in the essentially lawless Outer Rim, where the fingers of the major governments (regardless of which is in power at the moment, they’re always based in the center of the galaxy) can’t quite enforce their order; when we do see Republic representatives in this game they’re openly corrupt.

All of this is reflected an amplified by the content. Rather than your winnings being in credits, Star Wars’ common currency that is represented in every other Star Wars game, even ones set thousands of years prior to the events of the films, you’re paid in truguts, a currency specific to the locality on Tattooine where your parts shop and garage and junk yard are located. This is established in the movie and it makes sense that it’s true here: Hutt Cartels run this place – theirs is the money that’s good here. You see the stories of many of the planets you visit woven into the tracks you race on. Over the course of the three times you visit Mon Gazza, you get a full tour of its ecology, from the standard city racetrack said to be where unskilled rookie racers go to die in the overconfidence, to badlands outside of the populated urban areas, to the hellish tunnels and valleys of the spice mines, darting between the treads of the gigantic excavation vehicles. Another series of tracks takes place on the moon Oovo IV, where a Republic Maximum Security prison is located, and the warden hosts illegal races in makeshift courses that trace the perimeters of the facility and the inner workings of the infrastructure that keep things running; the final track is a special course only hosted occasionally because it relies on meteor showers breaching the thin atmospheric shields of the land surrounding the prison as an exciting natural danger to threaten racers. This corruption, this callous abuse of power and flaunting of wealthmaking for the galaxy’s imprisoned while acting like this race they can’t see is for their entertainment, that’s worldbuilding dude!

These vibes are supported in play also. Pods go fast, like, really fast, they’re extremely fragile, prone to overheating and explosion, and very few of them actually maneuver well. The sport is designed around the spectacle of death, and you WILL die, a lot. You’ll die to narrow gaps in cliffs, to tricky u-shaped turns, to big jumps you just couldn’t hit enough speed on – you might even die from hitting your own boost too long and oops one of your twin engines just exploded. In one particularly memorable course called simply The Abyss, it’s all too easy to drive off the incredibly narrow driveway and just kind of...fall. You even have a delay before you explode and respawn, unique to the falling deaths in this game, to emphasize that you’re meant to be falling forever, that if this weren’t an arcadey video game your little guy would be experiencing a really awful way to go. In a perhaps necessary video game convenience (one the less popular sequel to this game would avert though), you DO immediately respawn upon death though, and get right back into the race, but it would really get me thinking about the way they talk about podracing in the movie, about how dangerous it is. Every time I’d crash I’d think about how damn, Ebe Endacott just ended right there, very unceremonious.

Podracing seems like a bad deal too! It’s hard to get ahead and stay ahead. Races only pay out once, period, and your parts are ALWAYS degrading, much much faster if you’re crashing a lot, which adds a nice challenge to what sort of becomes a contiguous campaign mode in the game, balancing your maintenance with winning the various cups and the brutal bonus invitationals they unlock. But it’s just always, like, what are you gonna do with that money? Spend it on your pod I guess. Race more, and more dangerously. The better your stats get, ironically, the harder it is not to crash due to how wickedly fast you can become and how incredibly sensitive your controls can be, and the faster you are the more fragile your pod is on collision with non-wall stuff like asteroids or small rock formations. If you want the wins later on though these are risks you need to take. That’s what it is to be a podracer, according to the game – you go as fast as you can as hard as you can, you flash as brightly as possible for as long as possible before you’re snuffed out. But everybody does bite it sooner or later.

This is one of my personal favorite pieces of Star Wars media because of how much is here to be squeezed from it. Part of it is because of the absurd amount of detail in the production design of the movie, which leaks its way into all of the movie’s supplementary material, including this game, and part of it is because everything about this game is ambient; there’s no direct storytelling, you’re going entirely off of the patter of the arena announcers, the visuals of the tracks, the stats of your vehicles, stuff like that. It makes it so you do have to do your own homework but there’s a lot of freedom for interpretation in a way that feels almost antithetical to what Star Wars wants to be most of the time since wikis became a thing. Of course it’s also just a real banger in the High Octane Sci-Fi Racer genre but I think all of these elements together make it something pretty special within the brand. I don’t know if we’ll ever see something like this again from Star Wars. But it’s cool that this stuff is still floating around.