This new Nintendo 64 port brings Star Wars: Dark Forces to N64

Star Wars: Dark Forces never made it to Nintendo 64. Three decades later, someone has decided to fix one of gaming’s stranger omissions. Dark Forces 64 brings LucasArts’ 1995 first-person shooter to Nintendo’s console, reworking the PC original for an N64 controller and hardware. It’s still Dark Forces at heart: Kyle Katarn, Imperial bases, Stormtroopers, key cards, switches, blasters and some surprisingly complicated levels. Only now it’s running on a machine better known for GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark and Turok. It makes a curious amount of sense.

Dark Forces arrives on Nintendo 64

Dark Forces 64 takes the original game and presents it as a native Nintendo 64 release. You’ll need an Expansion Pak, but from a player’s perspective there isn’t much technical homework involved. The main attraction is simple. Dark Forces can now be played with an N64 pad in hand.

Controls have been rearranged around Nintendo’s controller, covering movement, shooting, jumping, crouching, weapon selection and the game’s automap. Dark Forces originally expected a keyboard, so squeezing its list of commands onto an N64 controller needs some reshuffling. The finished setup uses the analogue stick, C buttons, shoulder buttons and face buttons to cover the main actions. More interesting is how naturally Dark Forces sits beside Nintendo 64 shooters from later in the decade.

This game arrived two years before GoldenEye 007. Its ideas came from a different branch of the FPS family tree, yet much of its design fits the console surprisingly well. Big levels, mission objectives, vertical spaces and lots of switches give it a slower pace than a simple corridor shooter. You spend plenty of time firing at Stormtroopers. You’ll spend a fair bit of time finding out where the next door went, too.

Before Kyle Katarn picked up a lightsaber

LucasArts released Star Wars: Dark Forces for MS-DOS and Macintosh in 1995, with a PlayStation version following in 1996. It became the first Star Wars game built around first-person shooting and introduced Kyle Katarn, a mercenary working for the Rebel Alliance.

The opening mission sends Katarn after the Death Star plans. From there, the story moves onto the Empire’s Dark Trooper project, sending him through mines, bases, detention facilities and industrial complexes across 14 missions. Later games turned Katarn into a lightsaber-wielding Jedi. None of it has happened here yet.

Dark Forces is very much a blaster game. Pistols, rifles, thermal detonators and heavier weapons make up the arsenal, with Imperial officers, Stormtroopers, droids and increasingly dangerous mechanical enemies filling its levels.

LucasArts created its own Jedi engine for the game. In 1995, several of its tricks stood out. Players could aim vertically, jump and crouch, and stages could stack rooms and paths at different heights. Those features gave Dark Forces maps a character quite different from many shooters released around the same period.

It still expects you to find your own way

Modern shooters tend to keep players moving from one clear objective to another. Dark Forces comes from an earlier school of level design. A mission might ask you to find access cards, activate machinery or reach some obscure corner of an Imperial facility. Corridors loop around each other. Lifts lead to new floors. Doors require switches sitting somewhere else entirely. The automap can become one of your most-used tools. It can be easy to lose your bearings.

For an N64 release, this style has an interesting parallel with games such as GoldenEye 007, where missions often involved more than reaching the end of a stage. Dark Forces goes further into exploration, with larger spaces and less interest in pointing players in the correct direction every few seconds.

Combat breaks up the searching. Enemies can appear above or below you, and later missions introduce heavier opposition alongside stronger weapons. There’s a pleasing rhythm to entering a new area, checking corners, clearing out Imperial troops and working out what the level expects next.

The Nintendo 64 port we never got

Dark Forces 64 isn’t trying to turn LucasArts’ shooter into a different game. There are no redesigned stages or modernised campaign ideas here. The point is seeing Dark Forces translated onto Nintendo 64 in a form suited to the console. That puts it in an unusual spot.

The original game predates most of the shooters people associate with Nintendo 64, yet playing it on the same hardware puts those games into a different context. GoldenEye 007 arrived in 1997, Turok in the same year and Perfect Dark in 2000. Dark Forces came first, bringing objectives, vertical environments and sizeable mission maps to PC players in early 1995. Now Kyle Katarn finally has an N64 version of his first adventure. Thirty-one years late, perhaps. Still, better late than never.