Trivia / Star Wars Episode I: Racer

• Early Draft Tie-In: And how! The majority of the Boonta Eve Classic's competing roster didn't make it into the initial release of The Phantom Menace, with many racers developed behind the scenes of the movie debuting in this title.
  • There's the racers that were left out of the first cut but were restored in the 2001 DVD, like Clegg Holdfast and Ody Mandrell.
  • The film's deleted scenes featured more podracers who never showed up in the film, with Elan Mak and Ark 'Bumpy' Roose debuting in this game. Plenty of podracing vehicles show up in the background of the film belonging to Boles Roor, Aldar Beedo, Neva Kee, Ebe Endocott and Wan Sandage.
  • The game also included a lot of designed racers that didn't get to participate in the film's race, such as Bozzie Baranta, Toy Dampner, Navior, Slide Paramita and Fud Sang.
  • Sebulba's flamethrower gimmick in this game came from two deleted scenes in Phantom Menace, where he uses it in both Clegg Holdfast and Anakin.
• Killer App: The game was a hot seller for the Nintendo 64 — only Diddy Kong Racing sold more copies among non-Nintendo-published games on the system — to where a bundle set was released that included the game with the console.
• Role Reprise:
  • Jake Lloyd^note Anakin Skywalker, Andrew Secombe^note Watto, Lewis Macleod^note Sebulba, Greg Proops^note Fode, and Scott Capurro^note Beed reprise their roles from the movie.
  • For Racer Revenge, Lloyd, Secombe, and Macleod return once again, along with all the voice actors for the pilots returning from the original. Lloyd even records some new lines even though his character is purely an anachronistic secret unlockable! (Hayden Christensen doesn't voice the Clones-aged Anakin, though — that's Scott Lawrence, Lucasarts' go-to Vader voice.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • A PS1 version of Episode 1 Racer was planned, but LucasArts scrapped it, claiming the system was technically incapable of handling the game—which makes it Hilarious in Hindsight that the game's sequel was a PS2 exclusive.
  • The game was originally going to be called Star Wars Podracing, but Lucasarts ran into legal trouble with Ubisoft, who had just released a game called Pod and thus had exclusive rights to use the word in their game titles. The game was renamed to Star Wars Episode 1 Racer instead.
  • According to a Gamesradar interview with lead designer Jon Knoles, the game initially tried to keep the combat aspect of podracing intact, but they quickly realised that a combo of technical limitations and trying to keep the high speed racing intact made that too hard to pull off on N64 hardware. The games direction shifted focus on making the environment more of a threat to you than the other racers, with the game being treated as a "toy" for kids who simply wanted to experience the thrill of podracing like in Phantom Menace.