Over the last four years, Paul Johnson has been working tirelessly on an animated tribute to the 1994 space-sim Star Wars: Tie Fighter. The result is a beautifully animated short film that follows a squadron of Tie Fighters as they lay the smack down on the rebels in a space battle.
Check it out (via Johnson's YouTube account):
Kotaku has a detailed rundown of the animated film that was inspired by the classic LucasArts title. Johnson had to use a lot of old reference material from the game to construct his vision, while staying consistent with the imagery from the original Star Wars trilogy.
In the video's description, Johnson also mentioned that this project was done over the course of four years on the weekends:
Apologies in advance for not living up to Venus Wars standards. Drawn and animated by yours truly over 4 years’ worth of weekends, with music by the living guitar solo Zak Rahman and sound design by up and coming audio technician Joseph Leyva. Fans of Lucasarts’ seminal 1994 TIE Fighter game may notice a few familiar sights and sounds. That “incoming missile” noise gives me horrible flashbacks to this day…
The short is obviously a lot more high-impact than LucasArts' popular-but-dated title. I mean, if you really need a look at what the old game looked like you can check out a quick clip below.
However, you can definitely tell that Johnson drew a lot of inspiration from Tie Fighter's original intro cinematic, which was quite spectacular way back in the day.
In fact, you can check out the intro cinematic below, which is what usually got a lot of people pumped whenever it was running on demo machines at places like Circuit City, CompUSA and Best Buy. Check out the classic Star Wars title in action courtesy of YouTuber MickTheMage. It's worth a watch.
Man that brings back horrible – oops, I mean, grand - memories.
The game was hard until you unlocked the Tie Advanced and Tie Defender, which made a lot of missions a heck of a lot easier.
Fans who have been itching for a new Star Wars title can look forward to Star Wars: Battlefront, which is set to release this holiday season. EA and DICE will be unveiling Star Wars: Battlefront this April. And while you wait for the big reveal, feel free to put Johnson's short flick on repeat.
