It's a testament to the legacy of Rescue on Fractalus! that, 40 years after its release, I can still describe its trackless and turreted landscape of fractal mountains. Depending on when video games were most formative for you, it could bring to mind any number of other games. It might be Titania in Starfox, Beggar's Canyon in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, or maybe Roca Roja in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.Together with Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus! formed the first pair of titles developed by Lucasfilm's Games Group. Their reach has remained undimmed through the decades, and they're foundational games for many developers and players alike. Yet through technical genius and a bit of George Lucas knowhow, the story of their development is a timely reminder that there may once have been some very real magic in the hills around Marin County, California."George Lucas had a sense that what he had done for films could be done for other things too," says Peter Langston, who led the Lucasfilm Games Group through the development of Rescue on Fractalus! and Ballblazer. Propelled by the technological achievement of Star Wars, Lucas expanded the newly-minted Computer Division at Lucasfilm to explore video games. Then division head Ed Catmull lured Langston from a lucrative role in New York with the potential of leading the Games Group to new ways of developing games.Watch on YouTube"I was really committed to using computers in the arts," Langston tells me. And besides, he jokes, "None of Ed's friends would do it!"Atari had an exclusive license to develop Star Wars arcade games already, and it became the first partner of the new Games Group. With Atari paying $1 million for first refusal rights on its games, and in the wake of the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Langston had no trouble attracting prospective employees. Though, experienced game developers weren't necessarily a priority."We wanted to explore alternate ways to produce games using higher-end computers and computer science," says David Fox, project lead on Rescue on Fractalus! and the Games Group's third employee after Langston and Rob Poor. "You don't want people who are stuck in their previous mindset of 'This is how you make a game'."Fox had been running a micro-computer centre in Marin County while co-authoring a book in which he detailed how to animate on the Atari 800. He was drawn, like so many others, to Lucasfilm by the intangible magnetism that enveloped the company in the wake of Star Wars. The Lucasfilm Games Group. | Image credit: David FoxThat feeling solidified on a family trip to Eugene, Oregon. Living in Marin County was expensive, and seeing how affordable housing was outside California, Fox seriously considered moving his young family. As he did so, however, he was aware of a profound sadness washing over him. Asking himself why, he realised: "If we moved here, I would never get to work for Lucasfilm."Lucasfilm had already attracted some of the best minds in film and special effects, and Fox felt he had none of the requisite skills to force his way into those areas. Despite this, an intense desire to be a part of Lucas' world gripped him. "I'd always wanted to work for the company," he says. "I wanted to somehow get as close as I could to being in a Star Wars movie." Image credit: Peter LangstonSpeaking to people in and around Lucasfilm at the time, a word that repeatedly comes up is "magic". There was a very real sense that something beyond the usual was reaching out from Lucasfilm in the 1970s and 80s and driving a serendipitous streak brought together by its great minds around George Lucas.Fox postponed the move to Oregon and soon word reached him of the founding of the Games Group. "I was like, 'Holy shit, this is my in!'" he says.In Vol Libre, Loren Carpenter's 1980 experimental short, a computer animated first-person camera careers through a fractal mountain landscape. Fox had met Carpenter when interviewing people at the Computer Division in 1980 while researching his book, where, he says, Carpenter also showed him footage of Vol Libre. When Fox joined Lucasfilm, the Games Group didn't yet have office space, so he found himself sharing with Carpenter, who was fresh off developing the fractal video effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. When Fox asked if the same effect could be replicated on the Atari, Carpenter was initially incredulous."I wanted to do a Star Wars thing," Fox says, which also captured "the first-person rush [Atari 800 game] Star Raiders gave when you did your hyperspace thing."After spending a few days with an Atari 800 and teaching himself 6502 Assembly, Carpenter returned with a working demo of moving through fractally-generated landscapes. With the Parker Brothers holding the exclusive Star Wars license for home consoles, Fox's "Star Wars thing" was short-lived. The resulting game, soon dubbed simply Rescue!, would be built in its own world. "Any similarities between this game and the rescue scene on the ice planet Hoth are purely coincidental," the game's concept document stated. The launch sequence from Rescue on Fractalus! The mothership from Rescue on Fractalus! Image credit: David FoxThat limit, Langston says, was for the best: "Working to an existing concept, all the creative part is already done and you're just implementing someone else's idea. I think if David had had to stick to the scribe of one of the [Star Wars] movies, it wouldn't have been as fun a game."Rescue! was conceived as a peacenik experience of rescuing downed pilots on an alien planet, inhabited by the aggressive Jaggi. Your sole method of avoiding their ships was through your superior piloting, luring them into the fractal mountains that formed the game's world. The oft-reported story of the game shifting direction was that George Lucas, upon testing the game, insisted Rescue! needed a fire button. Its omission, he suggested, being a philosophical rather than gameplay decision."I think he felt his role was to keep us from being too idealistic," Langston says. "George's sense was right; anybody playing [Rescue!] was going to want to have a more active response."Outside of these interactions, and bringing Steven Spielberg to play the Games Group's modified Atari arcade games, the team had little interaction with Lucas. But for the odd company picnic and the Lucasfilm softball league (Langston and Lucas played first- and second-base respectively for The Base Walkers, even though "George and I never got a double play," says Langston), Lucas was mostly hands-off. Director David Fox donned a flight suit for a development team photoshoot, and was soon joined by... ... fellow programmers and designers Peter Langston, Loren Carpenter, and Charlie Kellner.Image credit: Peter Langston"We had free rein initially," Langston says. "We did not want to be pushed around and, by chance I think, we didn't get pushed around. I think we probably should have."Even the Computer Division mostly left the Games Group alone, despite lending them Carpenter for the development of Rescue on Fractalus!. If anything, there was a touch of derision from their colleagues. "They were doing grown-up film-level graphics and we're 'just doing toy stuff'," Fox says. "So, I think we kind of thought: 'We're going to show them what we can do with our toys'."In many ways, the first two titles of the Games Group were essays in a broader exploration of the outer limits of game development, especially on Atari hardware. If it was just "toy stuff", it remains a startling technological achievement to this day."It was basically revolutionary for its time," says Julian Eggebrecht, CEO and co-founder of Factor 5. "Rescue on Fractalus! is the greatest technological achievement for the Atari 8-Bit Computers." A Jaggi attacks in Rescue on Fractalus! | Image credit: David FoxIt's something the team was certainly aware of at the time. "It was kind of eye-opening," Langston says. "With the fractal stuff in Rescue on Fractalus! and the ability to create a world that's endless nobody had seen that before." While on Ballblazer, Langston's algorithm that generated music that reflected what was happening in the game was groundbreaking in an industry that often treated music and sound as an afterthought.The profound effect both games had on the industry and players was felt, unfortunately, long before the games' release, however. "Like most Atari owners, I first encountered Rescue on Fractalus! as Behind Jaggi Lines due to the rampant piracy back in the day," Eggebrecht says.However he first encountered it, the game drove him and Factor 5 to explore the idea of free-flight in 3D space through a proposed sequel, dubbed Return to Fractalus!, for the Commodore Amiga. Eventually, Factor 5 was contracted for the project in 1995, though the game would ultimately grow and release under a different name: Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.It's often reported that the first level of Shadows of the Empire was the inspiration behind Rogue Squadron, but "that's not correct," Eggebrecht says. The contract drawn up between Factor 5 and the then LucasArts wasn't even attached to Star Wars, but rather Rescue on Fractalus!. "Without Rescue on Fractalus!, Rogue Squadron wouldn't have existed," he adds. The relationship between Rescue on Fractalus! and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron can be traced right back to its initial contract. | Image credit: Julian EggebrechtThe source of the piracy remains uncertain. The Games Group delivered Ballblaster and Rescue Mission (before their final name change) to Atari in 1983. Atari, however, was not a healthy company. The video game crash that started that same year was challenging the company's relevancy, and as it wrestled with the crash the games were pushed back to grant exclusivity to home consoles until the company was ultimately sold and the contract with Lucasfilm renegotiated.Somewhere along the line, somebody whether at Atari or among the few others who had access leaked the games to buccaneering Atari owners well ahead of their eventual release by Epyx in 1985."We were devastated," Fox says. "It wasn't a release version; it was pretty far along beta. There are a bunch of optimisations and fixes and things we did to it, but it was 98 percent of the finished games."The games were well-received, and rightly lauded for their technical achievement, but the leak took some of the splash out of the release. For some games of the time, the story might end there. But perhaps a spark of that Lucasfilm magic remains imprinted on those old tapes, as what followed in the next few decades surprised even the Games Group. Image credit: MobyGamesLuke Arnold was introduced to Rescue on Fractalus! by his father on the Commodore 64. "What really captivated me about Rescue on Fractalus! was the 3D aspect of it," he says. "I found it fascinating that these machines could be made to render 3D images, especially in contrast to most other games at the time being sprite- and tile-based."In 2008, Arnold was working on his own engine and one of the first things he rendered was a landscape of jagged peaks that immediately brought to mind the fractal mountains of Rescue on Fractalus!. Over the next 12 years, he painstakingly reproduced, latterly with input from Fox and Carpenter, the game as a remake, releasing in 2020 and simply named: Fractalus.For Fox and Carpenter, both of whom had sought to re-release Rescue on Fractalus! for iPhone only for the project to be cancelled, Arnold's remake was a realisation of that desire outside official channels. "I was really wanting to go back and recreate the game with the current tech," Fox says. "When I saw Luke's version, I thought, 'Okay, we don't have to do it now; people can play it pretty much how it was envisioned'."That the Games Group's earliest games still exerted such a strong influence, however, crept up on them. "We figured these games would have a life of about two or three years," Fox says. "People would throw away their computers, they'd get another computer, the game wouldn't work on the next one, and our games would vanish." The Atari 8-Bit version of Rescue on Fractalus! has quite a different colour palette than other versions of the game. Image credit: MobyGamesYet, the effect of those games remains powerful decades later, not just in examples like Rogue Squadron and Fractalus, but for players, too. Discussing attending an event for the anniversary of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Fox relates his shock that so many had come and it's a shock that repeats for both him and Langston when they see full auditoriums when they attend events and conferences now. "I had no idea people even knew about these games and they were still playing I felt like I was being Punk'd," he says. "It kind of hit me, like, wow, I guess we actually made something that could be timeless."The catalyst for that timelessness? According to everyone at Lucasfilm: right place, right time, right people - and, Langston says, the time to do it. Yet, it remains hard to pin all that on luck. There are so many factors working together, and such a talented group of people congregating in one place even if that place is Lucasfilm."You know, in the 70s, I had this feeling there was probably a group of people I was supposed to connect with," Fox offers, "and what can I do to literally put out a psychic billboard that would attract the attention of these other people I was supposed to connect with I think George Lucas for sure did that with his ideas and brought all these amazing people together."The reality of that will be up to the reader to decide, but it's undeniable that something was working its magic in Marin County in the 1980s. As we celebrate 40 years of Rescue on Fractalus! (and Ballblazer), whatever manifested from that energy has stayed with us - with Langston, with Fox, and most profoundly, with the players.