Using The Force at Home

Sadly, my Jedi powers will probably be limited to the bastardized Wii version, but the technology behind the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is truly cutting edge. Vanity Fair has a unique preview of the game and the programming genius behind it.


Most video games today are little more than animated Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels. Moving to the left sends you to page 107, moving to the right to page 95. Each action has a programmed animation as a reaction.

If you ever played the old Dragon's Lair arcade game which relied on actual animated snippets glued together from a laser disc, you can see that while graphics have improved over the years, the basic skeleton of a video game has not changed much. The animation has grown more complex over the years, allowing for sophisticated three dimensional environments, but the core concept has remained the same.

LucasArts is now throwing that concept out the window, making a generational leap in creating virtual environments that react intuitively to each other. Using new state-of-the-artgaming engines, each action reacts virtually, within constraints set by the programmers.

When you play The Force Unleashed this summer, it will be the game itself reacting to your choices, instead of some prefabricated animation. This opens the door for complete virtual environments on a whole different level.