The revolutionary new video game from LucasArts has a compelling, movie-like story line, involving a secret apprentice to Darth Vader and the formation of the Rebel Alliance. Images courtesy of LucasArts. View exclusive images from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. And don’t miss our exclusive video of the game itself.

To visit the San Francisco offices of LucasArts, the video-game arm of George Lucas’s entertainment empire, is to glimpse first-hand the dividends that his six-episode Star Wars saga has generated over the last 30 years. The $350 million state-of-the-technological-art Presidio campus that the company shares with its moviemaking brethren, Lucasfilm and visual-effects house Industrial Light & Magic, boasts a commissary with panoramic views of the city (including, on a clear day, the Golden Gate Bridge); an employee gift shop stocked with Skywalker Ranch olive oil, Star Wars merchandise, and other Lucasfilm swag; and a plush 350-seat theater where employees can test-drive video games on a full-size movie screen or watch the latest film releases after work.

In many cases, the employees themselves are byproducts of the influence of Star Wars: writers, designers, animators, and artists who, as kids and teens, were wowed by the movies and decided that they, too, wanted to create science-fiction and fantasy characters and visuals that were as fully formed and plausible as those that Lucas had put on movie screens. But instead of lining up behind the crowds jockeying to get into film school, these future storytellers chose as their canvas the much younger and more interactive medium of video games, a medium that increasingly overlaps with filmmaking—artistically, technically, and in terms of storytelling technique—but that also has its own rules, philosophies, and cultural touchstones. On the Presidio campus there stands a bronze statue of Eadweard Muybridge, whose series of consecutive photos taken at a horse farm in 1878—known today as “The Horse in Motion”—is a motion-picture prototype. The Muybridge of the video-game industry is arguably Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari and the creator in the mid-70s of Pong, the first successful, if primitive, home video game: a digitally generated ball was knocked between two digitally generated paddles until one of the players was declared the winner or fell asleep from boredom. Along those same lines, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are the equivalent of silent-film stars, and, for a number of LucasArts executives, the Citizen Kane of 3-D video games is Nintendo’s Super Mario 64. Released in 1996 for what was then the groundbreaking Nintendo 64 game console, and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who has created some of the most enduring characters and games in the history of the industry, Super Mario 64 was not only the first true 3-D video game, according to LucasArts vice president of product development Peter Hirschmann, but also the game that established a number of conventions—“such as how you navigate a 3-D space and how a camera moves in 3-D space,” Hirschmann says—which game designers still use today.

But when it comes to mimicking real-life conventions—the laws of physics, the squishy dynamics of biology, the unpredictability of human behavior—video games are still struggling with their technical limitations. Take an action as simple, or at least in gaming as commonplace, as throwing a villain through a wooden door. No matter what combination of moves or punches the hero uses, the bad guy usually breaks through the door in the same stiff and unconvincing way—usually uttering the same stilted grunt or scream—each and every time the gamer plays through this point in the game. That’s because, in essence, most video games are composed of a series of brief, inter-related animations that are cued by the gamer. Some games provide multiple animations for a particular action, to give the illusion of spontaneity, but that is an expensive proposition.