Q&A PETER WARD
The coder behind the SNES game talks Jawa shrieks and unintended difficulty
How did you get involved with Super Star Wars?
We had to win the contract by proving we were capable of doing it! For this, we completed two levels as a demo, the ‘trench’ level and the 3D landspeeder scene. Lucasarts was apparently impressed enough from this to award us the contract.
What problems did you face in squeezing the game onto a cartridge?
The first Star Wars was an eight-megabit cartridge only. Fitting everything was indeed a huge challenge. All sprite sets first went through a lossy reduction phase, in which similar characters were eliminated. We then compressed all assets using an LZ type compression, which allowed for extremely fast decompression. Pretty much every byte on the cart was used!
How did you go about creating the bombastic sound and music?
Paul Webb created all the music and sound effects, and did a remarkable job. It was all MIDI based. So he started by assembling a collection of digital instruments, and went from there. Lucasarts provided us with the original score on paper. I also helped with some sound effects. I had all the movies on Laserdisc at the time, and would ask Paul to ‘rip’ a few sounds from the movie. Things like the Jawa’s ‘utinni’ yell when hit were sampled this way, among others.
Did you encounter any problems with the Star Wars IP holders regarding the original characters?
No. Mostly because artists at Lucasarts did most of the artwork for us.
SSW is noted for its difficulty, was it always your intention to make a hard game?
Not at all. I think what happens often is that our testing staff become so good at the game that we are constantly making adjustments to keep it challenging for them. But for average players, this ends up being too hard. What we should have done was have focus group testing with average players, and then adjust difficulty based on their gameplay. Regrettably, we did not do this, and released a game that was too difficult to play.
What’s your favourite part about the game? There are many. From climbing the Sandcrawler, to seeing the cool (and huge) Banthas. For me, I think I like how the trench battle turned out (perhaps this won us the contract). Yes, we could have done more with it, but for a 16-bit system, I think it came off looking pretty close to the movie, and what people remembered from it.
Do you have any standout memories of working on Super Star Wars?
I am a big Star Wars fan, so it was a lot of fun to work on. I really cared about everything I put into it, and tried my hardest to deliver the very best I could do. Given the development time, and size of content required, I think I am happy with what was finally delivered. As the programmer, it was always very exciting to receive new assets (be it new worlds or new animated characters) and bring them to life in the game. Doing the iconic Star Wars intro was fun, and I tried to get it as close as possible. Overall, the entire project remains one of my most fondest memories in game development.