ScummVM's public testing for the Rebel Assault games is live

The ScummVM team has officially opened public testing for Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Star Wars: Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire. As previously reported during the initial engine implementation this spring, daily builds are now ready for widespread user testing.

I love both of these games. I use ScummVM a lot, so having them running properly on modern hardware is great news. The underlying tech is fascinating. According to the ScummVM news release, although a rail shooter game, Rebel Assault uses the SCUMM engine more commonly used for point-and-click adventure games. It actually shares a large portion of its code with Full Throttle.

ScummVM originally launched in 2001 just to run LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. Over two decades later, the open-source project supports hundreds of titles across dozens of engines. Adding a rail shooter to a platform built for adventure games is an interesting technical achievement.

The CD-ROM showcase

Released in November 1993, the first game was LucasArts' first CD-ROM exclusive. It served as a technical showcase for the emerging format. The jump to CD-ROM was a massive shift for PC gaming. Before this, LucasArts distributed games on multiple floppy disks. Rebel Assault proved that consumers would buy CD drives just to play Star Wars.

The developers squeezed full-motion video, 3D rendered space battles, and digitized orchestral music onto a single disc. You play as Rookie One, flying through 15 stages set during the Galactic Civil War. The campaign culminates in the famous trench run to destroy the Death Star.

The 1995 sequel expanded on this foundation by utilizing the INSANE engine. It picked up after the Battle of Endor, sending Rookie One to investigate a secret Imperial stealth fighter in the Dreighton Nebula. It also made history as the first project to feature newly filmed live-action Star Wars footage since 1983.

Fixing the floating cursor

Despite their commercial success, both titles were heavily criticized for their controls. Movement and aiming were bound to a shared floating cursor. Dodging asteroids with a 1990s mouse was a miserable experience.

ScummVM's reimplementation directly targets this issue. The team incorporated overhauled control sensitivity and modern input mapping to resolve those complaints. The core gameplay remains intact, but you can actually steer the ship now. Playing it today on a modern monitor highlights how much the FMV relied on CRT scanlines to blend the pixels, but the smoother controls make the visual artifacts easier to forgive.

DOS, Mac, 3DO, and Sega CD support

The testing period covers multiple versions of the first game. ScummVM supports the DOS, Macintosh, 3DO, and Sega CD releases. For Rebel Assault II, the multi-language DOS and Windows releases are supported. This includes English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese. The PlayStation port of the sequel remains under active development.