It wasn't until LucasArts desired a follow-up to its moderately successful Shadows of the Empire that Factor 5 first began work on the Star Wars series. The group started out making Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures on the Super NES and later created Ballblazer Champions for the PlayStation.
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Rogue Squadron lets you tackle planetary missions in a variety of classic Star Wars fighters.Īfter a flirtation with the European console market involving the classic shooter series Turrican, Factor 5 became involved with LucasArts through rather fortuitous circumstances (Eggebrecht owed one of the company's employees money). That grassroots effort netted them both a lawsuit from R-Type's creator and an offer to assume official conversion duties for the game. Before the budding developers could land a deal, the friends had to prove their development mettle, and so they began their careers by crafting a home-brewed clone of the arcade shooter R-Type. R-Type is the unlikely game that launched Factor 5.įactor 5 began to coalesce during the late 1980s as its founding members graduated from high school in Germany and discovered that game-making was their natural calling. We sat down for a few minutes with series director Julian Eggebrecht, producer Brett Tosti, sound director Rudolf Stember, and senior artist Bastian Hoppe to share their memories of working on one of the most prominent Star Wars series of games on the market. So we'd like to share a little bit of the history behind Factor 5 and the Rogue Squadron series with you. With the recent release of the third game in the series, Rebel Strike, we've had a bit of Rogue Squadron on the brain.
Over the last few years, Marin, California-based Factor 5 has enjoyed a close and enviable relationship with LucasArts that's afforded it the opportunity to create several action games based on the hallowed film series, under the banner of Rogue Squadron.
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That is, of course, unless the license you're working with is Star Wars.
You might think that, as a video game developer, being pigeonholed into making games based on the same license time and again would be a wearying experience. Eggebrecht: Rogue Squadron sold "about 100 times better" than expected.