Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (1996)
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is a 1996 shooter video game made by LucasArts and Nintendo.
The gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi gets its own hero here. You play Dash Rendar, a mercenary pilot hired to keep Luke Skywalker alive while a new rival, the crime lord Prince Xizor, schemes to take Vader's place beside the Emperor. The game moves through speeder-bike runs, on-foot shooting, and space dogfights, spanning ground and sky across a single campaign. It was the centerpiece of a big multimedia push, with a tie-in novel and comics telling the same story from other angles. Fast, varied, and built to feel like a lost Star Wars chapter.
Quick answers
What is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire about?
The gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi gets its own hero here. You play Dash Rendar, a mercenary pilot hired to keep Luke Skywalker alive while a new rival, the crime lord Prince Xizor, schemes to take Vader's place beside the Emperor. The game moves through speeder-bike runs, on-foot shooting, and space dogfights, spanning ground and sky across a single campaign. It was the centerpiece of a big multimedia push, with a tie-in novel and comics telling the same story from other angles. Fast, varied, and built to feel like a lost Star Wars chapter.
When was Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire released?
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was released on 1 December 1996.
Who made Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was made by LucasArts, Nintendo and Disney Interactive.
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Explore Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire guides
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire in our writing
- Companion guide: LucasArts: The SCUMM Adventures & the Star Wars Empire
A few thoughts on Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
That push included a novel: Star Wars - Shadows of the Empire tells this same Xizor plot in prose, with room for the characters the game rushes past. For the films it slots between, The Empire Strikes Back sets it all up.
Fill the gap between Empire and Jedi
Shadows drops into the exact stretch the films skip, after Han is frozen in carbonite and before Jabba's palace. If you want the rest of that story, these are the pieces that bracket it: the movies on either side, and the era's own novel, all circling the same rescue and the same rising threat behind Vader's shoulder.
Read the Star Wars Expanded Universe
Dash Rendar was one thread in a huge cross-media rollout, and the old Expanded Universe kept the galaxy going for decades in print. Start with the Thrawn Trilogy that launched the modern novel line, then follow the threads outward through later crises and the wider timeline these books map across.
Play the scoundrel, not the Jedi
You are not the Chosen One here. Dash is a mercenary pilot for hire, closer to Han Solo than Luke, and that grey-area appeal runs through plenty of games about hired guns and outlaws who answer only to themselves. These put you in the boots of the rogue rather than the legend.