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Our previous games had been on the Commodore 64 or the Apple II, and this was right in the era where the PC market became something. What was different about this was it was going to be for the PC. "That was a one-page pitch, typed out on a real typewriter, with, I think, an accompanying schedule and a milestone budget attached.
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"I did some technology research about how to pull off some more realistic-looking, but not yet 3D-oriented, graphics, and I pitched them a game called Air Wing," he says. He'd also developed a fascination with military history-and a bold new vision of his own.
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I wanted to work with them because they were doing some cutting-edge game technology the mission for Lucasfilm Games was that they weren't even supposed to think about making Star Wars games." Various outside entities, like Atari and Broderbund, had held the license for video games set in the galaxy far, far away since '82.īy March of 1988, Holland had completed work on a second Lucas game called Strike Fleet. "When I started working with Lucasfilm Games, I knew them, of course, because of George Lucas," Holland says, "but I didn't join them because they were the Star Wars company. That was his first step on the road to TIE Fighter. The team developing Pegasus for the Commodore 64 was called Lucasfilm Games, and its office was located inside Marin County's Skywalker Ranch, the famous Victorian-style house owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas. He'd been brought in as an independent contractor to write the Apple II port of a war sim called PHM Pegasus. But the game was about the construction, and doing some simulation of the experiments on board." Once Project: Space Station was out the door, Holland found himself working in a small skunkworks lab made up of about 10 employees and contractors. That was about the shuttle program of that era, and the early imaginings of the International Space Station that, years later, actually happened. "My first game along those lines was called Project: Space Station, which I did in 1985. "What really intrigued me was doing simulation games, or games that had some recreation of the real world," Holland says. But in hindsight he understands the connection.Īrt from the official TIE Fighter strategy guide (Image credit: Lucasfilm) Inspired by the golden age of the arcades, he started programming games of his own and eventually found work "in the early cartridge-based C64 and VIC-20 industry." The pivot from archaeology and anthropology to suddenly making computer games seemed like a total right turn, he admits. What really intrigued me was doing simulation games, or games that had some recreation of the real world Larry Holland Curious, he went out and bought a Commodore 64 and began teaching himself the assembly language.
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That's when I got very accidentally exposed to the current state of computers and computer software and computer games." Holland had dabbled in programming in high school in the mid-seventies, but the tech world had already entered a new age.
"At the time, I was in kind of an old-style rooming house in San Francisco, and one of my roommates there actually had an Atari 800. In 1981, Larry Holland wound up in the Bay Area, hoping to pursue a doctorate at UC Berkeley while working a job on the side. But the mag did declare TIE Fighter "the best space-combat simulation ever created," and more than 25 years later, few Star Wars fans would argue otherwise. PC Gamer magazine's writers named it the year's best action game, and it probably only lost out on the overall game of the year award for one reason: id Software's Doom.