Marcel Winatschek

In a Better Universe, Nintendo Owns the Force

When Disney bought Star Wars in 2012, the dread was immediate and completely reasonable. Nobody knew what the franchise that gave us The Empire Strikes Back would look like under the same roof as the Haunted Mansion gift shop. What someone did figure out was what it might have looked like if Nintendo had gotten there first—and the result is exactly the kind of 16-bit parallel universe that hurts in a specific way. Lightsabers rendered in an SNES color palette. The Force as a power-up. It hits the nostalgia hard precisely because it never existed and never will.