30 Years Later, Star Wars Just Made One Forgotten Gaming Classic Important Again

In 1995, Star Wars fans were getting live-action footage of Rebel pilots for the first time in over a decade. While 1999’s , the score from Rebel Assault II used the actual John Williams recordings from the films.

On top of this, all the cutscenes were filmed with real actors, all wearing costumes that had been taken out of the Lucasfilm archives. As with the original game, the player is controlling a faux-Luke Skywalker-ish pilot named “Rookie One,” who in this game was played by actor Jamison Jones. This means that the “faceless” character from the original game became a more fleshed-out character in the second game, joined by another character from the first game, Ru Murleen, who is this time played in person by Julie Eccles. (Eccles also played the voice of Jan Ors in the original Dark Forces game, and had a small role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as Indiana’s secretary.)

Today, the cutscenes with Rookie One and Ru Murleen might seem clunky to the point of almost looking like a fan film, but at the time, four whole years before the release of a new Star Wars movie, they were groundbreaking. For the first time since 1983, fans had new footage of Rebel pilots at work, new views of the various beloved starfighters, plus, a plotline that revealed that the Empire had cloaking technology. (The “hidden” part of the game’s subtitle, The Hidden Empire refers to a fleet of experimental Phantom TIE Fighters.) This too interestingly connects to Skeleton Crew since a huge plot point of that show is all about a massive piece of Old Republic tech that essentially, cloaks an entire planet.

Of course, as of 2025, the events of Rebel Assault II are entirely non-canonical, but, that’s okay because they were pretty much non-canon at the time. Because the first game presented an alternate chronology in which Rookie One blew up the Death Star (and not Luke) the games were already presenting an entirely different timeline, one in which nobody named Skywalker was needed to move the story forward. This was an interesting choice at the time, since again, Rebel Assault II represented a rare moment in which a Lucasfilm production was filming new footage with original costumes and props from what was, back then, the only Star Wars trilogy in existence.

The overall cinematic effect and immersive soundscape of Rebel Assault II set the stage for the slightly more robust N64 games that were soon to follow; Shadows of the Empire in 1996 and Rogue Squadron in 1998. The latter game was, in many ways, a total improvement on the basic gaming premise of Rebel Assault — create a game that gave players the thrill of flying Star Wars starfighters but without the stress of a full-on flight simulator. Today, the gameplay experience of Rebel Assault II will be closer to the feeling of novelty, whereas Rogue Squadron actually holds up as an incredible game. But, without Rebel Assault II, it’s hard to imagine Star Wars games, or Star Wars in general, moving forward. It was a blockbuster game for a simpler time. But when it came out, thirty years ago, it was the most powerful Force in the galaxy.

Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire is playable on Steam. But it should be noted that it is very glitchy on a Macbook Air. Best to play it on a PC or a more powerful Mac.