Though it sometimes feels as if there is a new “Star Wars” installment every couple of months, there was a time when all that fans of George Lucas’s sci-fi universe had were three movies and a lot of imagination. The 16-year gap between the end of that trilogy, 1983’s “Return of the Jedi,” and the start of the divisive prequels, 1999’s “The Phantom Menace,” was a vast creative void — one that video games helped fill. Developers at LucasArts, the subsidiary of Lucasfilm known for its adventure titles Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, saw themselves as the standard-bearers of the “Star Wars” franchise for many years, said Jon Knoles, a longtime LucasArts designer. Unlike most games based on movies, its “Star Wars” games were not bogged down by market pressure or rushed to match a film’s release. “We had all kinds of creative freedom,” said Knoles, who worked on more than a dozen “Star Wars” games in the 1990s and early 2000s, first as a background artist, then as a lead animator and finally as a writer and director.

---

Persons: George Lucas’s, ”, Jon Knoles, “, Knoles Organizations: LucasArts, Lucasfilm, Wars