the Star Wars films. This proposal was rejected, however. At that time, Lucasfilm was not comfortable with video games drawing directly from the films nor would they allow original content to be incorporated alongside battles from the films. Consequently, the resulting game was almost completely set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The designers at LucasArts initially planned to adapt Rogue Squadron and Star Wars: X-wing Rogue Squadron, a series of books and comic books set after the years of the original film trilogy, and have the game centered around Wedge Antilles. It was later decided that the game would instead focus on Luke Skywalker and primarily take place between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back as it was more commercially appealing. LucasArts began developing the story and gameplay in a setting that would include characters from the films participating in new, original missions using Factor 5's terrain map engine as the base. The development team's basic design plan was to combine the free-roaming style of Rescue on Fractalus with the on-rails gameplay of Atari's Star Wars arcade game. Initially, designing and refining the individualized flight controls for the game's various vehicles was difficult for programmer Mark Haigh-Hutchinson before breaking through to find the right balance for each. In May 1998, a demo of the game was displayed at E3, but the game was so incomplete at the time that Tosti considered it a tech demo. It rendered a basic heightmap and an immobile AT-AT model, while TIE fighters lacking artificial intelligence flew and fired in a predetermined path. When "playing" the demo for audiences, Tosti followed a very specific flight path of his own to give the illusion that he was actually battling with the TIEs. Despite the demo's barebones presentation, response from gamers was largely positive. In the final build of the game, many of the enemy fighters continued to follow predetermined flight paths as calculating flight paths on the fly required too much processing power. Late in development, the team realized that they were developing the game with a Nintendo 64 memory expansion in place at all times. Unable to run the game on a standard Nintendo 64, they began working on compression techniques to allow the game to run within the confines of the standard console. At the same time, Factor 5 appealed to Nintendo to release the newly developed memory