Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is an arcade-style shooting game available to play on the Nintendo 64 and PC. Released in 1998 by Factor 5 and LucasArts, the game serves as the first entry of the Rogue Squadron series, which later expanded with three sequels on various consoles.
In Rogue Squadron, players pilot several Rebel Alliance ships as Luke Skywalker, who commands an elite group of X-wing pilots of the same name as the game's title. The game takes place primarily in-between the events of the films Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Throughout 16 different levels, players utilize different Rebel ships, such as the X-wing, Y-wing, A-wing, V-wing, and Snowspeeder to defeat both aerial and land-based forces of the Galactic Empire. The levels contain various objectives that the player must successfully complete to move on in the game. Examples of these objectives include destroying enemy units or buildings and escorting friendly forces.
A player's performance during each level is represented by bronze, silver, and gold medals awarded at the end. These scores are based on certain criteria such as how fast the player completed the level, how many enemies the player destroyed, the player's accuracy, and how many friendly units the player saved. Incentives such as extra missions and additional usable ships encourage replaying missions to achieve higher scores. For example, the Millennium Falcon unlocks after achieving bronze medals in each level, while a special mission allowing the player to perform the Death Star trench run from A New Hope unlocks after achieving silver medals on each level. The developers also included several secrets which players can unlock by entering codes. One example, the Naboo Starfighter featured in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, appeared in the game, but developers kept this a secret for six months until the release of the film, when Factor 5 then eventually released the code to access the ship.
Rogue Squadron notably made use of Nintendo's Expansion Pack add-on to achieve a higher resolution display. Thanks to the Expansion Pack, Rogue Squadron's resolution was boosted from 320 x 240 to 640 x 480. Both critics and fans gave Rogue Squadron a positive reception. It sold over one million copies in the United States alone, and it became the second best-selling game behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when it released in December 1998.