I gotta say, I’ve been in a rut lately. Having fairly average to unremarkable days, barely inspired to watch, play or even read new stuff. Suddenly, I got inspired by an idea that a friend suggested to me. Thus I started dabbling in emulating old computers. Stuff like PCem and such.
Compared to console emulation, which are meant to just emulate games running on specific hardware, emulating an old Macintosh or Windows PC has a lot more going for it. Adjusting CPU and RAM sizes, installing software and making sure it works, seeing if your PC is even beefy enough to smoothly emulate a virtual machine… Despite all those headaches, I find it fun to mess around with. Turns out tinkering with stuff is neat.
Throughout this journey I’ve started amassing a large amount of game show and trivia games for the period. Mostly licensed titles like Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud, to more off beat games like Radio Active: The Music Trivia Game (hosted by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame!), and Outburst, a game I wrote about all the way back in 2014. There was one that seemed to elude me, despite having a MobyGames page and a proper link on the Wayback Machine.
Star Wars Jeopardy! is a fan made Jeopardy!-like game made by Arnaldo “Arnie” Carvalho, a Star Wars fan. This particular fan game was released around 1999 on his own personal website, reviewgames.com, of which he made a Mobygames entry for the game back when the site was still fairly new. I had been made aware of it thanks to friend of the site Bobinator, who had suggested all this Windows PC emulation chicanery in the first place, and thought it would be a funny thing to put aside the UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and The $100,000 Pyramid.
While the link to the homepage on Mobygames had been updated to use an Internet Archive Wayback Machine version of the homepage, the game itself wasn’t readily available at said page. The Wayback Machine link would lead to a 404 Error page. Carvalho, realizing at the time this is the age of 14.4K dial-up still being the norm in some regions, had also split the game between two sets of files: One big file with the installer and all the CAB files needed in a zip file, and a separate zip file for the installer and each CAB installer file individually. Only a partial number of these CAB files were preserved, plus the separate zip also resulted in a 404, so there went that idea.
My journey eventually leads to looking through multiple cached versions of the author’s website, as per the Wayback Machine link on Mobygames. Going to a cached version of his website, using the Flash Player-driven menu to check the downloads page, see if it’s a new version of the site or a cached version from an older page, then check and see if the download worked. Nope. 404s every time.
By 2006, Carvalho pivots his content from games to being a Star Wars fansite, rebranding the site as “Star Wars Action News,” complete with a podcast. Back when podcasts where still a new thing, when there was the threat for it to be called “netcast” instead by goobers like Leo Laporte that thankfully didn’t stick. Carvalho mentioned the game on Episode 23 of the aforementioned podcast. And that’s about as much digging I felt comfortable doing, as this was about finding the game more than someone’s biography here.
Said website contains a link to said game. At this point, all past links were 404 pages. I was giving up hope. I was worried this was gonna be Lost Software, something that can be seen but not played. Lord knows there’s countless pieces of software that have since been lost, digital detritus that has been swept away and buried, remembered only by a scant few. I had worried about that happening here.
One of those Wayback Machine pages had archived the full zip file, swj.zip. I was ecstatic.
After a bit of adjusting to get it to be recognized, it worked perfectly on a Pentium virtual machine through PCem. The graphics are simple, and while it’s called Star Wars Jeopardy!, doesn’t fall into the typical “Answer/Question” format the show brings, opting for questions taken from the 1997 Star Wars edition of Trivial Pursuit. And they’re multiple choice rather than open ended questions one can type.
I’d say I feel disappointed, but I’m not. I clearly understand what Carvalho wanted to do: To make a trivia fangame for his favorite series, since there wasn’t very many trivia-themed Star Wars games at the time unless you somehow stumbled upon something someone made in DOS. There were trivia games for Star Trek, one of them with John De Lancie as Q hosting, but not the other big Star named franchise. He wanted to fill in a gap that was solely lacking.
Nowadays there’s an absolute abundance of Star Wars trivia games, both physical and digital, but back in 1999, before the fever for The Phantom Menace and the ensured legacy of Star Wars to follow, this was a nice little treat. And I’m glad that it’s now properly preserved. Who knew a silly little game one made over 27 years ago and used a fairly new website to promote it would send me down this silly journey, all for a game that while not outstanding, is at least somewhat charming.
Star Wars Jeopardy! can now sit comfortably alongside the four other Jeopardy! games I’ve installed on the same virtual machine: A GameTek version from 1994, The Graphix Zone/Sony Imagesoft FMV-heavy one from 1996, and the three editions developed by Artech Studios and published by Hasbro Interactive/Infogrames, where they start as a straightforward adaptation and evolve to a more abstract video game adaptation. If only I could find more Jeopardy! games for Windows, official or not…
Star Wars Jeopardy! is now available here, on the Internet Archive. It requires a Windows 98-era computer to work, though Carvalho said on his website it worked on Windows XP, suggesting that “If you run into any install errors just hit ignore and it keeps going.” It works flawlessly on a period-appropriate Windows 98 virtual machine, and I recommend playing it that way. I do not recommend playing it on newer machines, as while the installer worked on my Windows 10 machine, I could not get the game to properly install.
Y’know, scouring through this has me looking back at past memories of playing stuff like Pictionary, Outburst, You Don’t Know Jack and many others, as well as games I heard about but never got to play ‘til now. I’m gonna look more into these trivia/game show games from the ‘90s Windows era, they’re neat to look at.
This is me teasing a possible post about this in the near future. Interested? Consider supporting my Patreon. Just $1/month will get you early access. If you can’t, I always appreciate shares and comments.
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