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By the mid '90s, we PC gamers thought we had it all, and perhaps we did. Gaming on a console was almost unthinkable when the holy glow of your monitor brought the divine action of Doom, the coy humour of the Monkey Island adventures, the grim strategy of UFO: Enemy Unknown and the quick-fire tactics of Command & Conquer. We had sports games aplenty and simulators coming out of our ears, games that let us pilot planes, tanks, helicopters, even submarines. We were starting to play these games together through the internet and dedicated graphics cards were just around the corner. It was a glorious, glorious time to be a gamer.We also had all the best Star Wars games, hands down, and anyone who tried to argue for that Super Star Wars nonsense was laughed out the room and was about as welcome as a fart on a date. We had Dark Forces which, y'know, was pretty neat (it wasn't even PC first-person shooters at their finest, but we liked it, we let it hang with our crowd) and we had X-Wing. And X-Wing was cool.
No, I'm lying. X-Wing was much more than just cool. It was quick, sleek, deadly and impossibly exciting. It was the embodiment of Star Wars, everything that the original trilogy stood for, distilled and bottled and presented to you as an elixir of pure excitement. It was all that action, all those battles against the odds, all those attempts to grasp victory with the sweaty, desperate hands of a brash young freedom fighter, and more than any other Star Wars game before it (and perhaps since), it was able to give you your own place in George Lucas' universe. When you settled into the cockpit of your starfighter, you were taking your first step into a larger world.
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