But Doom never gave me a feeling like Dark Forces did. On a rocky ledge hugging the face of a chalk-cliff, with a shrieking wind whipping through the canyons around me, I realized the path was becoming so narrow I had to look down to see where to take my next steps. I hit PgUp and the camera ratcheted down from eye-level and the cold sky above is replaced by the dull gray smear of the ledge and the bone-white expanse of the cliff. Then I saw them, so incredibly far away down on the floor of the canyon that they were just shimmering smears of white and brown pixels. A stormtrooper squad arrayed in formation behind an Imperial officer. I pulled a thermal detonator and followed its long arc all the way down to the ground, where it exploded in their midst and dropped the officer and two troopers immediately. Then I rained more down on the survivors heads.

Dark Forces evoked a sense of place more than any shooter I’d played at the time. It let me walk around inside the Star Wars universe in a way we’d never been able to before, and get into the kind of frenetic blaster duels we’d seen aboard the Death Star in the original movie. It was crudely done, but the iconography was so powerful that the illusions came together. If you walked into a giant room and there was a rectangular slab running along one wall with a blur or pixelated strip-lighting around it, and little alcoves cut into the wall of the next room, you knew you were in a cantina. If you were in a sewer and one of those eye-stalk monsters popped out, it was a Star Wars Sewer. And if you saw a bunch of little white-armored sprites standing stock-still behind an Imperial officer, like those cut-outs of Rebel troops at the end of A New Hope, you could pretend it was a squad of Imperial troops awaiting orders from their CO, and not just a bunch of simple enemies waiting for you enter their detection radius so they could start going through the motions of trying to kill you.