Star Wars Episode I: Racer came out on May 18, 1999, one day before The Phantom Menace opened in US theaters, and it has outlasted the movie's reputation by a distance. A lot of fans put Episode I at the bottom of their film rankings. The podracing game has had a much kinder run. Guinness's 2011 Gamer's Edition listed it as the best-selling sci-fi racing game ever, at 3.12 million copies. Two days from now, a studio whose creative director says his team plays it "all the time" ships the first standalone Star Wars racer since 2002.

Here is how a team of a couple dozen people turned one sequence from a movie that was still being made into the game that sequence is remembered for, and where you can still play it.

A podrace pitched as Ben Hur with jet engines

The idea started with a lesson from the team's previous game. Jon Knoles, the designer and project lead, told Retro Gamer (republished by GamesRadar in May 2020) that Shadows of the Empire had tried to do too much across too many modes, and the team agreed that "next time we should do one thing, and do it really well."

In the summer of 1997, as they finished the PC version of Shadows, a few of them were invited up the road to Skywalker Ranch to look at early concept art for the first prequel. Knoles remembers the podracer sketches as the moment they knew they had a game, and the way the scene was explained to them: "the Ben Hur chariot race with jet engines instead of horses." They built it on what they already had, in Knoles' words "our existing Shadows game engine."

The deadline was fixed from the start. Knoles called it "a very hard deadline" because the game had to come out with the movie, which meant the project got its pick of LucasArts specialists. Even so, he put the team at "something like 25-30 at peak," led by Knoles, lead programmer Eric Johnston, programmer Mark Blattel and producer Brett Tosti. Summer 1997 to May 1999 is under two years from pitch to shelf.

What the team actually built

The artists worked from photographs of the life-size podracers on the movie set, the smaller reference models ILM used for its CG versions, and Lucasfilm's concept sketches. Knoles told GamesRadar that the pods all started out looking alike, egg-shaped cockpits behind two engines, and the team watched them turn into distinct vehicles with alien pilots as the film evolved. Three people at LucasArts modeled every one of them for the N64.

The team also slipped in two pods of its own. Jim Rice and Clint Young each designed one, and their pilots are named Jin Reeso and Cy Yunga, which is the joke you think it is. Both were hidden behind cheat codes.

The track design came from scale problems. Knoles built the Boonta Eve course from the one top-down sketch Lucasfilm supplied and found that at full scale a single lap would take nearly 15 minutes, even at 400mph. He cut it down and widened it. Testers then kept asking for bigger jumps, so the designers started cutting holes in every track. Johnston summed up the programming brief in two words: "go fast."

One more piece of trivia from the same interview: the working title was Star Wars: Episode I Podracer. Knoles said another racing game's publisher had trademarked "pod" for interactive entertainment, so LucasArts settled on Racer because it was short.

How it landed in 1999

Critics liked it more than they loved it. The aggregate scores on GameRankings (via Wikipedia) came out at 75.78% on N64, 75.42% on Dreamcast and 73.79% on PC. Game Informer gave the PC version 9.25, GameSpot gave the N64 version 8.4, and IGN gave the PC version 8.

The skeptical take came from Next Generation, which called it fast, customizable and fun "but it's tough to shake the feeling that if it weren't for the Star Wars license, it wouldn't otherwise stand out." That view lost the argument with players. The game won Console Racing Game of the Year at the 3rd Interactive Achievement Awards, and the sales outran every other sci-fi racer, including Wipeout and F-Zero, per that Guinness entry. LucasArts spent $10 million marketing it, and the movie it shipped next to did the rest.

The reputation held. In 2015 PC Gamer ranked it the third-best Star Wars game ever made, and Game Informer still had it at 11 on its 2016 list. Knoles' own verdict, in the GamesRadar piece, was that critics "thought it was too simple or limited in scope" for a Star Wars game, and that the focus on speed is what made it polished.

The ports, and the sequel that stayed on PlayStation

Racer spread fast. The N64 and Windows versions launched together in May 1999. A Game Boy Color version from Nintendo R&D1 and Pax Softnica followed on December 6, the Mac version came in December 1999, and the Dreamcast version arrived on April 3, 2000. Hold on to that last one: it had slightly better visuals and a much steadier frame rate than the N64 original, and it comes back in 2020.

Sega took it into arcades in 2000 with Star Wars Racer Arcade, a four-track, four-pilot cabinet on Sega's Hikaru board. The proper sequel was Star Wars Racer Revenge, built by Rainbow Studios for the PS2 and released in February 2002. It scored a 73 on Metacritic and never came to PC. After Revenge, Star Wars racing went quiet for 24 years, apart from a podracing mode in Kinect Star Wars in 2012.

The 2020 remaster: a faithful re-release

Aspyr brought Racer back for Switch and PS4 on June 23, 2020, after a COVID delay from May, and for Xbox One on October 27. The scores landed lower than the original's: 70 on Metacritic for Switch, 63 for PS4, and a 68 average on OpenCritic with 61% of critics recommending it.

The reviews explain the gap. Leo Faria at WayTooManyGames gave it an 8.0 and reported that the port is built on the superior Dreamcast version. He praised "a vastly improved resolution and a buttery smooth framerate" but added that "this still looks like the same Dreamcast game originally released in the year 2000," and noted the pre-race taunt scenes shipped without sound. Stuart Gipp at Nintendo Life gave it 6/10: an unbroken 60fps, but textures "still as blurry as they were all those years ago," and no online multiplayer. Across the reviews, the common complaint was that it is a re-release more than a remaster, with no difficulty settings and local play only.

That is a fair description, and it is also why the port is still worth owning. It is the 1999 game at a smooth frame rate on hardware you already have, with the old cheat codes surfaced as a menu on Xbox.

Why Fuse Games keeps bringing it up

The studio behind Star Wars: Galactic Racer has been open about where podracing sits in its plans. Kieran Crimmins, Fuse Games' creative director, told PCGamesN in June that the team plays Episode I Racer and Racer Revenge constantly: "We play them all the time. Not only the games, but also the movie sequences." In the same interview he called podracing "the pinnacle of racing in Star Wars" and said you cannot make a Star Wars racer without it.

Founder and CEO Matt Webster was asked by The Game Business in February why there has been no Star Wars racer since 2002. He said he did not know, and then: "There aren't many white whales left, but this is one of them."

Galactic Racer is its own game, with more than podracing on the grid, but the people making it treat the 1999 game as the bar. That is about as clear a verdict on a 27-year-old racer as you will get.

Where to play Episode I: Racer today

You have three good options, and all of them are cheap.

Once you are in, pick your pilot with our best podracer and upgrade order guide, and if you want to see where it sits against everything else with a podracer in it, we ranked every Star Wars racing game. For the rest of that era, our best Star Wars games of the '90s has it alongside X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

Galactic Racer launches on Tuesday, October 6, on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. If you have an evening free before then, a few laps of the Boonta Eve Classic is the best warm-up there is, and our launch hub has everything on the new one.