Star Wars Outlaws pays its respects to a 1980s arcade legend

This story is part of Save State, a bi-weekly column focused on the evolving nature of retro gaming.

While the era of arcades was long past its prime by the time I started playing games, I still appreciate the elegant simplicity of many of those classics. Games like Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Galaga aren’t that complex ,but I’m drawn to replay them as I chase high scores. I was reminded of that grace of arcade games when I played Star Wars Outlaws, which includes some original ones as in-world minigames.

Players can find arcade cabinets for two different games-within-a-game near cantinas across Star Wars Outlaws‘ planets. One is titled Raven 6 and is a space shooter based on the look and feel of Atari’s classic Star Wars arcade game. The other is Racer, a time trial game where players must speed to the end of a level as quickly as possible without hitting any obstacles.

They aren’t that complex, but they don’t need to be. They’re refreshing breaks that Kay Vess can take in the middle of her galaxy-wide adventure. Although the bulk of Star Wars Outlaws draws from the gameplay trappings of modern classics like Uncharted and Red Dead Redemption, these arcade throwbacks were some of my favorite parts of the entire game.

Speaking to game director Thibaut Machin about the creation of these arcade games, it seems that developers at Ubisoft felt the same way. “When you look at this game, it’s so big, so epic,” Machin tells Digital Trends. “For us to be able to work on the experience from the start to the end and being able to control everything in between, it was so great.”

Now this is Racer

One of Machin’s primary tasks during the development of Star Wars Outlaws was to create all of the activities that populate its open world. The Sabacc card game is a prime example of this, but Raven 6 and Racer were my favorite open-world distractions. Machin says that Ubisoft and Lucasfilm thought arcade games were fitting because they’re from the same era as the original Star Wars