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While the stories of Star Wars are most frequently thought of as fairy tales about noble heroism and ethical conflict, they're noble heroism and ethical conflict, they're equally studie on power, empire and most of all bureaucracy. They're about checklists and reports, milestones and returns on investments; yes, even trade embargoes. The same universe contaning the green-eyed initiate gazing longingly into the sandswept horizon for purpose and meaning also has the huddle of old white men in stiff teal and mauve fabrics berating each other about budget estimates and production quotas while standing spittle-distance apart on spotless black floors.
This whiplash-inducing gulf between the story-book and the downright corporate is the foundational premise of the LucasArts game Star Wars: Dark Forces. Dark Forces sets itself apart from its namesake by shifting the focus away from laser battles in space to the vast industrial complex required to build the ships and the turrets and the soldiers that make these battles possible
While the Star Wars films certainly slum, from time to time, in the back booths of illicit space bars and in the prison cells o smuggler dens, they aren't invested, as Dark Forces is, in the infinitely complex supply chain that supports the Empire (bureaucracy being a far more effective organizing tool than the Force, arguably). They do not make the statement, as Dark Forces adamantly does, that the ideal way to hamstring an overwhelming enemy is to interrupt and take apart it's operations: to perform guerrilla war, to bring it down from within, as has always been the quickest path to downfall for most, if not all, seemingly invincible world powers.
The game's events center on the dubiously heroic, Kyle Katarn - once an Imperial soldier, now a hired gun - as he secrets himself within enemy territory, gaining access to bases, research facilities, and mining plants. Katarn seems more plausibly cut from the Imperial stuff of his past than the rebellious fabrics of the present; his distressed motor cycle jacket and devil-may-care persona exude strong mid-life crisis dad energy and overcompensation. He interacts with the events of the original film trilogy only marginally. His biggest contribution is absconding with the Death Star plans in the game's prologue (an act eventually retconned by the release of the film Rogue One). The remainder of the missions have him on a path to sabotage the Empire's Dark Trooper program through acts of industrial sabotage.
You won't find Katarn hot-shotting it among the stars, crammed into an X-Wing cockpit on a noble suicide mission. Instead, the game's narrative thrusts him deep into the rust and guts of the Empire, where he shoulders his way into heavily defended mines, research labs, and ranscaked rebel outposts and quickly gets to work mowing down stormtroopers and setting explosive sequence charges. Katarn is a virus within the body of the Empire; he is a brutal tool for a brutal war. It's not as romantic as the Force, and there is no Obi Wan or Yoda there to teach Katarn about the ethics of his actions nor the morality of his cause.
There are vanishingly few indications in the text that Katarn cares more about the rebellion's goals than their bank routing number. Katarn has no interest in personal growth, making the game feel like a cynical take on the broader themes of the Star Wars films, if a more honest one. In the films, planets are evaporated, billions of lives are cut short, but the audience is rarely fully grounded in the impact of these events. They're happening far away, to someone else. Our heroes may lose a limb or a goofily named co-pilot or two, but they all make it to the end of the story. It's a space opera, after all; we're more interested in the high notes of the song than with counting the dead.
Borrowing as it does from the gory tactility of games like Doom and Wolfenstein, Dark Forces can't help but bring us face to face with death, and with the mechanisms of delivering it. Katarn's weapons are not the elegant sabers and pistols of the films but any heavy militarized hardware he can find, more often than not snatched from the smoking hands of some recently dispatched stormtrooper or Imperial Officer. They rattle out their ammunition in frightening bursts, feeling more like machine guns and gernade launchers taken from real-life conflicts than the medieval fantasy-inspired weaponry of the films. There are no prophecies or elite lineages attached to Katarn's arsenal: just pull the trigger and spray out bright-hot death, then duck around the new corner and continue.
It's refreshing to experience a version of Star Wars that isn't afraied to embrace the messy violence that has always been inherent to its story: one that attributes concreate political outcomes to the organized violence of resistance, rather than the detached religious mysticism that cominates the films' narratives. But this comes as no surprise, considering Dark Forces' focus on the Empire as a holistic bureaucracy, complete with industrial and urban centers, staffed by soldiers and mercenaries, whose bodies you must mow through to achieve your goals.
By grounding the Empire in practicality, in taking us from its Star Destroyer fleets down to its dusty backwater of mines and sewers and exposing use to its inner workings, the game does more than offer us some spinoff version of a functionally similar entity. It shows us a clearer picture of what that empire really looks like, and, more importantly, how to take it down.
It leads us down the logical path that so many real-life social movements find themselves on when dealing with what seemed like an insurmountable foe, coming to the same realization that Ursula K. Le Guin did when she said: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." A true rebellion inevitably comes to understand that industry, capital, and war exist on the same axis. Ignoring the glittering battles above and going after the machinery of war hidden smoldering below, as Katarn does, is often precisely what is necessary to stymie conflict, and to approach justice.