I feel like I’m absolutely losing my mind.
I have a sort-of-vague memory of replaying either Star Wars: Dark Forces or Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II about two years ago. I remember firing up this game (whichever of the two it was) and meandering around some old-school FPS corridor layouts for maybe an hour or so before putting down the game and feeling like it hadn’t aged as well as I’d hoped it might.
I mean, Wolfenstein 3D is still really, really fun all these years later. You’d think a series that builds on what Wolfenstein and Doom were doing in the early-to-mid-1990s, then added the Star Wars license, would also be fun to revisit, right? It wasn’t.
The thing is, this whole scenario might not have happened at all.
So, this all started because I have Nintendo Switch physical editions of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (games #3 and #4 in this same series) on the way. I thought it would be fun to revisit the previous games in the series before I commit to replaying these decades-old Star Wars games. It should be easy, right? All I need to do is redownload my digital copy of Dark Forces or Jedi Knight and get to work.
But it looks like neither of these actually exists, at least not on the consoles I remember playing them on. I can’t redownload something that never existed in the first place, right?
To be fair, Dark Forces does exist on PS3 (as a PSOne Classic). Jedi Knight doesn’t seem to, though, and that’s the one my brain is telling me I played. Still, there’s a slight chance that I played Dark Forces on PS3, and that’s what I’m remembering.
Or maybe it was actually Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy that I played. The thing is, I checked my digital game library and I don’t own either of these games digitally (though I will have my physical copies any day now).
Brains are weird. Memories are often fake. Nostalgia is a powerful force. All of these things are true, meaning its very likely I’m just misremembering some weird detail about something that might not even be Star Wars-related at all. Or maybe I’m remembering a dream I had several years ago and not an actual event.
I don’t know. This is very strange, and I’d like to get to the bottom of it. I just don’t think I ever will. This is one mystery that will likely go unsolved until the end of time.
The good news, I suppose, is that I’ll probably forget it ever happened anyway.
