When I was a teenager and getting into Star Wars, I didn’t care whether Han shot first or not in the cantina.
You see, I knew better. I’d played Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. I knew he’d use a bunker buster bomb to turn the cantina to a pile of rubble and dust instead.
Pandemic’s 2005 open-world explode-’em-up let you create capital-C Chaos as Han Solo. This in itself is a mark of a different time. Han was no microtransaction. Just a simple cheat code and you could run around North Korea as the space scoundrel (or a whipless Indiana Jones).
These were simpler times when plucky, beloved publisher LucasArts was approaching its end of days. But Mercenaries proved there was still life in the old dog yet. The game chucked you into conflict-heavy North Korea where warring factions could only agree on one thing: doling out cash for you to blow stuff up.