There’s a lot of things that came out of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace that I’m sure we’d all sooner forget. Jar Jar Binks. Ewan McGregor’s Jedi rat tail. An over reliance on bad CGI.
Yet, as the years have gone on, I think there’s a lot we’ve come to appreciate from what was mostly a jumped up fireworks display/toy advert. Darth Maul was awesome, Duel of Fates is some of John William’s best work, and the podracing set piece spawned one of the best Star Wars games of all time.
I’m sure we all fondly remember Star Wars Episode I Racer, the high speed racing game that was released in 1999 for various consoles, including the N64 and Dreamcast.
Now, in my head I always thought it was called Star Wars: Podracing, but as it turns out LucasArts learned that another company owned the trademark for games with the name “Pod” in the title and had to change it. Weird, that.
Anyway, Episode I Racer expanded on the podracing made famous in Phantom Menace, offering multiple tracks and ships to race in over a number of planets. The F-Zero style gameplay was a great fit and resulted in one of the most popular Star Wars games ever.
While we’ve yet to see an official remake, someone by the name of RobJin on YouTube has actually put together a gorgeous remake of (at least parts of) the game in Unreal Engine 4. Check it out in action below.
I’m not entirely sure how long this is gonna be allowed to stay up, given the number of Disney owned assets it’s using, but if you head over to RobJin’s channel you can currently download a rough version of the game for free.
It’s basically just the one track right now, but as a quick (and very, very good looking) blast of nostalgia, you could do a lot worse.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.