Star Wars: Republic Commando is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, March 1, 2025. Below, we look at how its focus on military fiction was a sign of things to come to the Star Wars galaxy .
When you boot up Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first thing you see is the LucasArts logo, fuzzy like a jammed radio signal. It flickers with the audio of muttered orders, of droid speak. This is an idea taken from the original Clone Wars cartoons (starting in 2003), which also opens with a distorted broadcast, in that case of blaster fire and blaring lightsabers. In tandem, these aesthetic flourishes represent a turn away from the science fantasy mythicism of Star Wars proper and a turn toward a grittier, though still exaggerated, military fiction.
To be fair, it is not as if these impulses were not in Star Wars to begin with. Though A New Hope draws on the science fiction golden age idealism of Flash Gordan serials, it is a worn down future. Our heroes are would-be guerrilla militants, piloting buckets of bolts. Their fascist enemies reserve any futurist slickness. The fight of rebels is scrappy, hidden in trees and sequestered in backwater planets.
Still, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are not ordinary soldiers, but heroes (nomenclature used by a Star Wars video game contemporary to Republic Commando: Battlefront 2). The original trilogy, and to a large extent the prequels, take a similar position to war as The Lord of the Rings. Epic battles often take the forefront, and both franchises are undoubtedly concerned with war. But the heroes are not boots-on-the-ground infantry or even military commanders exactly, but kings and prodigal children. They save the world, while rebels and fascists alike die in the dirt.
Republic Commando represents something more mundane: the everyday life of a soldier at war. The game’s obvious principle inspiration, outside of Star Wars itself, is Halo. Like that FPS, Republic Commando goes to great pains to make its titular characters special boys, a cut above the ordinary clones who make up the rest of the Galactic Republic’s army. But also, the commandos can’t get up to anything too earth-shattering or else interfere with the films their game ties in with. In practical terms, the plot of Star Wars itself would not change if every one of the commandos died in a ditch. The effect is like a bit of propaganda: You are the heroes that preserve the republic, although in actuality, you are just more bodies to line the future Emperor’s checkbook.