Star Wars Battlefront Turns 15 Years Old!

[Kit Fisto]

Hey everyone! Just thought I'd make a little anniversary post for the great Star Wars Battlefront (2004) that started it all.

Despite not being as active here as in the past I still play the Battlefront games all the time. I mostly play EA Battlefront 2 on Xbox now with my brother (if you play on the West Coast servers you'll see me a lot in Capital Supremacy under the good ol' gamertag, kitfisto15678).

Seeing all the 15 year anniversary posts, sales etc. on the internet made me think of this grand old forum and all the great years and countless hours I spent playing the original (still my favorite of all the games in the franchise) and exploring all the mods and how happy I am there is still a space for people who are newly discovering the long lasting joy that SWBFI gives and a wonderful archive of all the amazing mods and modding guides.

Big thank you to everyone here who still keeps things running!

What are all some of your greatest memories of Star Wars Battlefront (2004) and do you still play the old games? The new games? Are they with the same people as 15 years ago?

[Fire]

Hey Kit,

Crazy how this game is 15 years old already isn't it? I recently started playing some SWBF1 2004 again occasionally and it brought back a lot of good memories. This game has by far the best community I've ever encountered and I'm proud to say I was a part of it for a long time. My favorite memory would have to be competing in the GGW3 and GGT tournaments back in the day. Those were a lot of fun and good competition.

Hope to see more people come around for the 15 year anniversary!

[Unit 33]

Happy birthday SWBF!

[Ascertes]

Oh no, it appears I'm late to the festivities!  NEVERTHELES! Happy birthday SWBFI!

To your question, I never got into SWBF1 multiplayer until VERY late in the game, by which point most players had already mvoed on to other games. We're talking like 2014-2015 late. I don't remember very many of the people back then, though I'm sure a few of them are still around.

I still play SWBF1 on a regular basis, although with college and going on to graduate programs, I haven't had much time to play SWBF1, new games, work, and school. It's part of the reason why I haven't put out any mods in quite a while...

Hopefully I'll get back into it at some point, but SWBF1 will always hold a special place in my heart 

[wsa30h]

Welcome back Ascertes also happy birthday swbfI

[{PLA}gdh92]

It's amazing there's still people playing after 15 years, I got the game for ps2 in 2005 I think then went online on pc for the last couple of years of gamespy when there were still a hundred players a night. I miss charging around cloud city with all the old players but still enjoy playing now.

Battlefront is one of my all time favourite games but it was also my first online game and it's the community that's kept me here as much as anything.

Best memories:
My first time online having a great time and trying to talk to people then realising it was actually an empty server and they were ai...

My actual first week online going between PLA cloudity, cpt cupbear, ooc arena and ententeich servers and realising how different it was to single player.

Starting to think I was good then seeing players like question mark and quiz with 100-0-10 scores.

Finally getting more than 100 kills on a full cloudcity server.

Endless new clans that lasted a week trying to recruit me.

The 1 PLA clan night I made it to.

Learning all the secret grenade jumps with Wabbit and Stewie.

Accidentally shooting a teammate off the balcony with a rocket from the other side of cloudcity then staying silent as he just typed 'how in the world?' and flew off the map. Sorry Nemisis.

Winning a game with 0-1 in the enemies favour by capturing command posts.

Mod map nights and the close matches in the ICW tournament.

And a hundred others I can't type at the moment.

[JackDaniel]

Happy birthday swbf, best game ever. PS2 we still play Saturday and Tuesday on swbf1 and Friday and Sunday on swbf2. PS2 groups are facebook.com/groups/PS2.SWBF1 and facebook.com/groups/PS2.SWBFII

[Gold Man]

Wow, I came back to view the site and found this thread!

Hard to believe the game is truly over 15 years old now. Granted, I didn't start playing online until August of 2010, but it's amazing and kind of crazy to think of that.

I remember some of my first days in SWBF were spent playing on the old PLA CloudCity servers, back when FD, Wusi, 212th, and even the old RIP clan were around. I even remember spending hours upon hours playing in the Invincible servers, discovering glitches with robot, a super cool dude who showed me the behind-the-scenes of SWBF maps and such.

Ah man, so many fond memories I could list, but never enough time to do so.

Anyways, happy 15 years to SWBF!

[Snake]

Happy birthday Battlefront! Just dropping in due to a nostalgia trip so I'm glad I found this post.

SWBF was an oddly large part of my development as an adult. Crazy thing is I was 9 years old in 2004 playing that game. I learned all the coolest insults and curse words from people online. I got into clanning for a while and then joined up with AaTc. I made such great friends as I literally grew up with the game. Here I am 24 years old checking in on SWBF websites..

What a truly amazing game for reasons that I can't really put my finger on. It's like the game got out of the way and just let us enjoy it with modding and community.

My favorite memories were the glory days of AaTc when we were on top of the world for a while. Winning the Great Galactic War was so exciting and fun for a young kid. Especially when we won so many times outnumbered with maddening lag.

I am now a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S Army National Guard and I lead a platoon of 40+ men and women. I kid you not I pull so many leadership lessons from my time in leadership positions of the AaTc clan. 


Star Wars Battlefront was somehow one of the most shaping factors of my life. Thank you SWBF 

[Led]

Good to see ya snake.   

[Ty294]

Snake's story is really cool!

I don't have as dramatic of one, but I have to admit SWBF was a huge factor in my life as well. It was the first "proper" FPS (I had a couple old tactical shooters, including the original Rainbow Six, but I think I was too much of a dumb kid to understand them at the time) I ever owned, and I played the hell out of it in my mid-teens. Then I discovered modding (Thule Moon: Remnants was the first map I ever downloaded) and subsequently good ol' Filefront.

Through Filefront I made my way into the modding community, and though BF1 was already declined dramatically by that time (BF2 got all the attention, so my maps sat in the queue for way too long all the time), I churned out quite a few maps and had a blast.

Thanks to the BF Filefront site, I learned of all the other Filefront sites across their network, which led me to JK2/JKA Files. I'm not sure if it was through JKAFiles or SWBFFiles that I found Star Wars: Fanon in the process, but I wound up there for a while too, writing fan-fiction articles and putting me on the road to fiction writing.

Then perhaps the biggest thing ever in my life happened; during one of the periods when Break Media "broke" the Filefront network, a poll went out on JKA files that wound up spawning a spontaneous Role-Play game among some of the bored members there. I was one of them, of course. After spamming the hell out of two polls in a row, we moved to ModdB and started a Role-Play group to continue our (awful) story. Sadly, that more or less killed my modding career (as well as my Fanon writing), because the role-playing took up all my time. Soon I had ceased doing any modding for Battlefront or for JK2, and largely for the last eight or so years, my time has mostly been spent with that same RP group. Some of the original members are my best friends now, and I've even seen a couple IRL (despite them living hundreds of miles away).

In addition, both the RPing and my experience working with ODFs set me on my career path as a web graphic designer, as the RPing made me want to be able to draw my characters (still can't do that very well though) and when I went to school, in addition to learning Illustrator and Photoshop, we also learned HTML and CSS coding, which I picked up with ease. And subsequently I now have a job that has allowed me to buy a house and live on my own...

And now coming full circle, I found myself very disappointed with the DICE Battlefronts (the first one is better than the second, despite its AWFUL balancing, but both suck), and recently decided I wanted to reinstall and play the classics. And once I did that, I wanted my old mod maps, and once I found I couldn't simply download them anymore, I had to dig up my files and...

Well, here I am. 

[Dark_Phantom]

Nice to see you again Snake!  Glad to hear you're doing well!
It's nice that this had an impact on your future Ty294 - it's interesting to hear what people did after leaving the scene as well.

My story maybe isn't as interesting.  BF1 was not my first experience playing online - I was playing JK:DF2 back about 2001-2002, made some friends, settled on a screen name for eternity.  I was familiar with the modding scene and mod maps of the game, but never truly learned how to do it (I knew the terminology and the tools and where to download them.  I'm sure I played 100+ mod maps in DF2.)  MSN Zone went down and that was pretty much the end of that (except I still played single player and checked out new MP maps).

Skip ahead, I started playing on PS2 when BF1 came out in 2004 - I was and still am a huge Star Wars fan, like most of you here.  I loved it, played it with my brother and friends, never really got tired of it.  BF2 came out and I played it all the time on PS2.  In 2006 I got it for PC, played online for a little while, backed off when I started playing American football and other organized sports.  We then have to skip ahead to 2009, when I had a lot of free time and picked the game up again.  I never stopped after that.  I joined the clan scene in 1.0, learned about the wonders of 1.2, but ended up sticking with 1.0 except on special occasions.  However, I did start picking up modding the game in 2010, which led me here.  At first it was just to download mod maps, then it was for the knowledge and the tools, then for the community.  I've never been particularly apt at a lot of the aspects, but I did effectively create a basis for my programming knowledge by modding this game.  I already knew I wanted to go into the technology field but now I had a lot of stuff to build off of.  I've always been fascinated at how to "break" the game's engine, or make it do something that somebody hadn't thought of or attempted.

I went to college, graduated, got married, got a tech job, living the dream.  As of now, the game is still a big part of my life, as it's how I started speedrunning and streaming, which has become a fun part of my days.  I still mod the game, although maybe in a less visible aspect - I have various projects going on, and it's really stretching my programming skills to the limits.

TLDR; Joined, never left, became admin, hope the server doesn't go down.

[Unit 33]

Really nice stories folks!

For me, I learned to use image editing software making SWBF skins. I also learned valuable lessons about artist - client relations when making textures to order for lots of different people.

What's that got to do with anything you ask?

Well, I've now been a full-time illustrator for 2 years, and I point to the SWBF community as a really important milestone in my career.

[Fire]

Hey Snake, long time no see bud!

I already posted here but I like how everyone is going in depth here on their battlefront journey, so I'll just drop part of mine here as well. Honestly, I don't remember what year I started playing battlefront 1 exactly but it was sometime around 2007 and it was my first online gaming experience. The idea of playing against other actual people in a video game for the first time really stimulated the competitive side in me which I thought previously I only had for sports. Eventually I ended up creating my own clan {FD}, and after a few stints of inactivity I stuck with it for good in early 2009 and made some good online friends that helped me grow it. I started in 1.0 and had some fun clan wars with the BOBclan and some others as well. Eventually the clan made the move to 1.2 and got pretty competitive for the next three years, while having active members from all over the world. Making these connections with people from all over was honestly so cool to me and I was really proud of the diversity of the clan and how it felt like a brother ship to a lot of members. I remember having a blast competing in the GGW3, the GGT, and other small tournaments/clan wars here and there. My battlefront journey ended up being more much than I ever thought it would be and looking back it really helped shape me as a person as well.

Awesome to see how this game has shaped some of your lives and careers as well!

[Snake]

Great to see all you old heads still around. I still hang out on PS4 sometimes so if anyone is on PSN my username is Octa-king. Fire are any of the old clan websites still up?