Video Game / TIE Fighter

Good hunting, Alpha 1!

At the battle of Yavin
Rebel terrorists, aided by
spies and traitors within the
Empire, struck a cowardly
blow at the new symbol of
Imperial power... The Death Star!

Darth Vader brought swift justice
to the Rebels by destroying their
main base on Hoth. The pitiful
remnants of the Alliance have
now scattered to the Outer Rim.

In the days ahead, the Emperor
will call upon the Imperial Navy
to eradicate the last vestiges
of rebellion and restore law
and order to the galaxy!

TIE Fighter is a Star Wars Legends PC game first launched in 1994, with various expansion packs and collector's editions being released as late as 1997.

The history of the game itself goes back to the early 1990s, when LucasArts approached game developer Lawrence Holland and his studio, Totally Games!, to develop a series of games for the publisher. The first games were actually WWII flight simulators including Battlehawks 1942 and perhaps Holland's best known non-franchise game, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. These games became instant classics, and in the meantime Holland was working on a 3D rendering engine specifically for flight sims, something that back in 1992 was revolutionary.

This prompted LucasArts and Holland to develop a flight (or rather space) sim game using both this engine and the Star Wars license, and X-Wing was the result. A year later, Holland got working on a sequel. Rather than being a direct sequel chronicling the Rebel Alliance and their starfighter squadrons after the Battle of Hoth (which is where X-Wing left off), the game would put the pilot in the ranks of the Rebel's greatest enemies, the Galactic Empire, by putting them in the seat of one of the Empire's greatest symbols of military might, the TIE Fighter.

The main protagonist of TIE Fighter was Maarek Stele (though he was never named as such in the game; his name comes from the supplemental guidebook that came with first run editions of the game) who started out as an anonymous pilot but would rise through the ranks with distinction over the course of the game's events. What separated TIE Fighter from X-Wing in particular was its rather involving story and campaign, which not only pitted the player against the Rebels (and certain traitorous Imperials) but also explained the motivations behind the actions of the Empire and its enemies and gave significant insight into many key characters of the Star Wars universe, including Thrawn (a major story thread of the game is how Thrawn was promoted from Vice Admiral to Grand Admiral). The game also presented optional "secondary" mission goals which, when completed, would earn the player additional rank.

Since flying around in an unshielded TIE Fighter when the other guys have much faster and better shielded craft wasn't much fun, the game also introduced a number of new craft for the Imperials to fly around in. The "Assault Gunboat," invented for X-Wing to give the player a more challenging foe, was reintroduced in TIE Fighter to provide him with a craft that actually could be able to attack capital ships without dying all the time. Also introduced was the "TIE Advanced" ^note Which was later re-named the TIE Avenger after later Legends material directly contradicted the game which was an improved production version of Darth Vader's special TIE variant from A New Hope (it also had shields and a hyperdrive like the Assault Gunboat), the TIE Defender (a starfighter which pretty much defines the term "broken") and the Missile Boat (which manages to outdo even the TIE Defender in terms of being broken - you can take out entire fleets with one. And it is awesome).^note  It's implied in-game that the main limitation on starfighters is cost, with the Defender being staggeringly expensive, and the Missile Boat—designed particularly to hunt and kill TIE Defenders—being even more staggeringly, obscenely expensive. Unfortunately, Truth in Television: Often in wars the cheapest weapon is the most common even if better ones are available.

Another notable feature of the original issue was the "iMuse" system (no, it doesn't have anything to do with iMacs or iPods) which dynamically changed the background music based upon the player's actions. The background music itself was notable for being comprised of original scores by the Totally Games! crew. Sadly, the iMuse feature was dropped in the X-Wing Collector Series box-set rerelease, replaced by high-fidelity scores from the original trilogy, though the soundtrack's still quite good.

The market life of this game was extended numerous times through various expansions and "collector's editions." This was particularly annoying as LucasArts and Totally Games! clearly anticipated expansion packs from the beginning, since they left the campaign story of the original release of the game incomplete. The first expansion, "Defender of the Empire" added the TIE Defender and its associated campaign missions - by the way, even after installing Defender of the Empire, many players were annoyed when it was found that they still left the campaign story incomplete. The final "expansion pack" was abandoned in favor of releasing the "Collector's CD" edition in 1995 which not only (finally) included a finished campaign story, but upped the in-game resolution to 640x480 (though no changes were made to the graphics engine itself) as well as updated speech and voice acting. Of course, understandably, original purchasers of the first game were annoyed since in order to actually complete the campaign, they had to buy the game all over again. And then they had the nerve to rerelease it again in the X-Wing Collector Series, this time stripping it of the iMuse music technology in favour of the Williams scores. Fortunately all was forgiven because in the end, TIE Fighter turned out to be just that damn good.

Despite its age, you'll still see this game often in top 5 lists of best Star Wars games ever, and often across other related "best of" lists too. It is available to buy on GOG.com and Steam. A revamped version, developed as a mod for X-Wing Alliance and using the newer game's engine and expanded features to tell a significantly re-imagined story, is also in the works.

All the cutscenes have been collected here.

This game provides examples of:

• Ace Pilot: Initially you are not one, but as you progress through the game, you eventually become so well-respected throughout the Empire that Grand Admiral Thrawn and Darth Vader himself personally request your assistance. Even Imperial officers and the Secret Order will tell you how valuable you are to the Empire, you're really just that good.
• Antepiece: The missions just before the introduction to the Missile Boat pit you against entire squadrons of enemy TIE Defenders while you fly a sluggishly slow Assault Gunboat equipped with advanced missiles and the tractor beam, if you want to survive you must learn to manage your energy levels to keep up with the much faster enemy fighters and to maintain a tractor beam lock against the enemy craft, all which are essential skills for piloting the Missile Boat.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: And a laughably short one at that (2.5 km for warheads, 5 km for turbolasers and other capital ship weapons, and roughly 1 km for lasers).
• Armored Coffins: Averted. Even the unshielded fighters have reliable ejection systems. They can be damaged like any other system but its likely that you will be outright destroyed, and eject automatically, before this happens.
  • Whether or not the player is merely returned to the Star Destroyer or captured by enemy forces is determined by how close you were to an enemy capital ship when shot down.
• Arrow Cam: Like in X-Wing, it's possible to watch from the perspective of missiles and torpedoes as they home in on a target.
• Artifact Title: TIE Fighter is a household name, but the craft itself has nowhere near the protagonism of its X-Wing counterpart and plays a minor role. Right at the intro, most of the work is done by a single TIE Bomber and several TIE Interceptors. Despite forming the bulk of the fleet, missions where you actually pilot the eponymous fighter are a small fraction of the total.
• Artificial Stupidity: TIE Fighter actually has excellent AI as far as flight sims go, with one exception. At the end of Battle 7 (the final mission before the expansions) you're tasked with disabling an enemy shuttle for capture; destroying the shuttle results in mission failure. Unless you specifically order them to ignore the shuttle, your wingmen will destroy it. If you ask for hints from the officer after failing the mission, he will specifically tell you to give your wingmen "Ignore Target" commands on that shuttle for that reason. What's especially egregious about this behavior is that the shuttle in question HAS THE GODDAMN EMPEROR ABOARD IT!
• A-Team Firing: Based on how the AI works, stopping the craft or even simply not turning is an effective method of avoiding enemy fire from X-Wings and Z-95 Headhunters, on par with erratic maneuvering, because they try to aim directly at you while their cannons are far off on the tips of the wings. Y-Wings or other craft that shoots from the cockpit will still hit.
• Batman Gambit: Thrawn's plan to trap Admiral Zaarin; knowing full well the latter's obsession with advanced technology, Thrawn sought to lure Zaarin out in the open once word of the Vorknkx Project and its new cloaking device got out to the traitorous admiral, defending the project to the last man in the many attempts Zaarin made to seize it for himself; Thrawn had seen firsthand what an advantage the device would be to either side, even with the knowledge that if used with an active hyperdrive would cause a catastrophic meltdown.
  • Taking advantage of this, Thrawn ultimately allows Zaarin to make off with the corvette housing the device once the traitor has overcome Thrawn's defenses, and after boxing in his opponent watches as Zaarin makes a quick getaway aboard the stolen corvette, activating the device mid-jump as Thrawn had predicted and finally sealing his fate.
• Beam Spam: Nearly any hostile capital ship in the game will fill the screen with turbolaser fire if you get close enough to it. This can actually be used to your advantage if you shoot a friendly capital ship (thus making it target you) and use its firepower to take out nearby enemy ships.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Doubly subverted as traitor Imperial forces will adopt the tactics and equipment your side developed (indeed, it was them who developed them in the first place before they turned traitor), forcing you to use the same tactics to counter them (as they're the best available) until something even better can be developed.
• Big Bad: It takes a while for the real villain, namely Admiral Zaarin, to be revealed, and even then the Rebellion remains the Greater-Scope Villain in the background. The latter is actually a somewhat odd choice, and surprisingly little time is spent fighting the Rebellion proper (only two of the thirteen Tours of Duty features them as the main adversary, four if you count Harkov's defection). Much more effort is spent in conflict with tearaway Imperial factions and neutral third parties than chasing the actual rebels the Empire fights in the movies. This presumably builds on the Emperor's line in Return of the Jedi that the rebellion is tiny and even "insignificant" (as well as other franchise materials to the same effect), with the greater part of the Imperial Navy devoted to other things.
• Bittersweet Ending: After finally offing the Big Bad that you've spent half the game chasing, you'll get a brief moment of satisfaction for destroying one of the greatest threats to Imperial security ever to have lived. Then your debriefing officer cheerily informs you that the Battle of Endor is currently taking place and they're just waiting to hear word of the Empire's inevitable victory.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • While doing a bombing run, Luke Skywalker style, is super sexy, and promoted in-game; NOTHING beats 10-15 hits with an ion cannon after the shields are down, leaving your target dead in space for the remainder of the mission. This leaves the Gun Boat and the TIE Defender as your two best anti-capital ship fighters, pretty much the whole campaign.
  • The Assault Gunboat in general is like this - it's not the best at any single attribute of the game but it can do anything any other fighter craft can do, which is only otherwise true of the godlike TIE Defender. You'll have to use the Gunboat frequently as a result, and it's fine.
  • Scanning enemy ships and cruisers is this. Often secret objectives are accomplished by simply scanning other craft, and can uncover a number of different developments. Sometimes you're tasked with destroying or capturing said craft for the Empire's use, whichever they feel is more suited to their needs.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: You can make an argument that enemy TIE Defenders qualify since they will waste everything besides the player.
• Burial in Space: A ceremony for the deceased player is held and the casket is disposed of this way.
• Cavalry Betrayal: It's Zaarin's forces to the rescue! No wait, he's attacking us!
• Chase Fight: The second mission of Tour of Duty 7 is this. In the first mission the Interdictor Harpax managed to find Harkov's Star Destroyer, but a Nebulon B Frigate and a Rebel Calamari Cruiser quickly join in the fray as well. The second mission sees you trying to defend the slower Interdictor as it is fleeing from the Frigate and the Cruiser, both of which are faster than it and capable of destroying it if they get in range.
• Chasing Your Tail: Otherwise known as dogfights. Gamma-class Assault Transports and Escort Shuttles discourage this kind of behavior though as they feature rear-facing turrets.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Admiral Harkov acts as the player's commanding officer for the duration of the Second Tour of Duty: The Sepan Civil War. He would later attempt to defect to the Rebels in the Fifth Tour of Duty: Battle for Honor, where the player battles his forces, and captures him.
• Chekhov's Gun: Many of the high tech ships and weapons the player will use later in the game are first introduced in prototype form, either in cutscenes or in-game as unarmed prototypes the player must protect. Special mention goes to a few plot-relevant examples:
  • Attrition from early battles causes Admiral Harkov to request replacement fighters in the form of TIE Advanceds, some of which the player escorts to Harkov's flagship. Two campaigns and a dozen or so missions later, Harkov has defected with his fleet, and those same fighters are considered such a threat that an entire mission is devoted to eliminating them.
  • Early missions in Battle Six have the player escorting TIE Defender prototypes being tested by Grand Admiral Zaarin. In the expansion packs, these craft are shown to be more common among Zaarin's forces than the Empire's.
  • Battle Eleven introduces the Vorknkx, a Corellian Corvette with an experimental cloaking device; a cutscene reveals a potentially fatal flaw in the technology - it can't be used while jumping to hyperspace. In the final mission Zaarin steals the corvette and is killed trying to jump to hyperspace while still cloaked.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The player serves under both Harkov and Zaarin for a campaign or two before having to fight them.
• Chewing the Scenery: "For the greater glory of the Empire, destroy everything!"
• Civil Warcraft: Big time. Twice.
  • As well as varying who you fight, this is also a good explanation for why the Rebels stand a chance against the Empire (which, as we see, not only has numbers but game-breakingly good craft like the TIE Defender and Missile Boat) - because the Empire is expending a lot of its resources in fighting its own traitorous generals.
    • This is Truth in Television, as well. Historically, authoritarian states have tended to have trouble preventing competent senior military commanders from trying to take over the state. (For this reason, most authoritarian states don't have competent senior military commanders, which brings on other problems.)
• Collision Damage: A surprisingly effective weapon against other, weaker fighters. However, it is toned down a lot in this version, being only lethal when a capital ship is involved.
  • Also noteworthy in that debris from recently destroyed enemies can still damage your craft - and occasionally seems to come shooting back straight at your cockpit.
• Color-Coded Armies: On the flight map:
  • Red for the Empire.
  • Green for the Rebel Alliance.
  • Blue, Purple: Civilians, Neutral, Outlaws.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: More like end your mission - when Vader wants to leave NOW to rescue the Emperor, you better not dally getting back to your Star Destroyer when your objectives are complete.
• Continuity Nod: Two serve as bookends to the campaign:
  • The player's very first mission has them searching for Rebels fleeing from Hoth.
  • A number of references to the impending Battle of Endor are made in the game's final two battles. Battle 12 additionally serves as a retelling of certain events of Shadows of the Empire from the perspective of a largely out-of-the-loop Imperial pilot.
  • Thrawn appears as one of the admirals the player serves under, and is promoted to Grand Admiral by the end of the campaign.
• Cool Ship: Two of them.
  • First, you've got the inaccurately-named TIE Defender, which dominates all the other TIEs in speed, acceleration, maneuverability, and weapons systems. Yes, it's that powerful. Four lasers, 2 ion cannons, and 8 missiles mean it can dominate in space superiority situations. It's a full 50% faster than a X-Wing or TIE Interceptor, and comfortably faster than an A-Wing or TIE Advanced, while also being more maneuverable. With strong shields, the strongest in fact, and its own hyperdrive, it could pop in anywhere and basically stomp on any other fighter's head, while they would be unable to escape.
  • Secondly, you've got the holy hell war god Missile Boat, which is extremely powerful and was designed specifically to kill TIE Defenders with ease. It has merely one laser, but as its name implies, it carries more missiles than an entire wing of starfighters, enough to use them as its primary weapons at all times. The otherwise forgotten laser can instead be used to power the Missile Boat's exclusive SLAM system, which basically dumps all the energy from your laser banks into your engine for a phenomenal boost of speed, making faster than even the TIE Defender, giving it the ability to jump in or escape pretty much any situation at will. And like a lot of advanced imperial fighters, it has special beam systems, typically a tractor beam. This thing is designed to kill TIE Defenders by zooming up on top of them before they know it, grabbing them with the tractor beam before they can escape, and then pounding the poor bastard with a nearly endless supply of missiles. This plan works wonders against pretty much any fighter. And if it's armed for a bombing role instead, it can destroy entire fleets without having to pause or reload, simply because it carries that much ordnance.
  • Before either of these rear their heads, the TIE Advanced is the king of the hill, though not quite game-breaker material. It has decent shields, 4 laser cannons, its own hyperdrive, a set of missiles, and just enough speed to beat an A-Wing in a race. This is the ship that was based on Darth Vader's personal prototype. Of course, a short time later the Defender and Missile Boat show up, making everyone forget about the poor Advanced.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: Understandable, since one part of outer space has a tendency to look like every other part of outer space.
• Cosmetic Award: Your naval rank, status in the Secret Order, and the medals you've been awarded have absolutely no bearing on plot or gameplay.
• Cut Scene: The campaigns usually end, and/or begin with one. In the CD version, they are animated but with recorded voice acting.
• Cut Scene Power To The Max: Whereas enemy TIE Defenders can wreck an entire flight group of Assault Gunboats each, once you have some on your side they have an annoying tendency to fall in single combat against measly A-Wings.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: When the player's character dies (a rare event in of itself, actually) or is captured, it shows a cutscene with the character's demise. While X-Wing allowed you to continue by reviving your pilot and resetting the score, TIE Fighter allows an automatic backup and restore to bring you back without penalty. If you want, you can disable the automatic backup and try the game without dying.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: In this game, you now have the option to take out turrets on capital ships, rendering them defenseless. Likewise, you can use Ion cannons to quickly disable large capital ships. The result in either case allows you to destroy the largest of ships using lasers.
• Decapitated Army: Subverted with Harkov's fleet, who remain at large for a while after his execution.
• Deconstruction: Everything you learned about the "proper order" of the galaxy in Star Wars is subverted, since after all you are fighting for the Empire this time.
• Deflector Shields: The main advantage the Rebel fighters have over the Imperial basic ones — the only spacecrafts that lack a shield — until Gunboats and Tie Advanceds/Defenders appear. Regenerating Shield, Static Health variety, and an important element of the energy management gameplay once you are given shielded crafts, as every bit of energy dumped into maintaining or charging shields and lasers takes away energy from your engines and lowers your top speed.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The entire Rebel Alliance becomes this in the expansions. The Defender of the Empire expansion has only a handful of rebel craft at all (and no campaigns against them) and the Enemies of the Empire final expansion features them in a single Tour of Duty completely unrelated to the rest of the game.
  • Defender of the Empire introduces a couple pirate groups attempting to steal TIE Defender technology for themselves, and the final battle of the campaign focuses on defeating them, leaving Admiral Zaarin himself demoted to a role as a secondary antagonist.
• Developer's Foresight: Averted with players who rely extensively on ion cannons. Especially during the defections. You’d think the Empire would be giddy at the idea of recommissioning disabled Star Destroyers stolen by defectors, and interrogating their surviving crew, but the mission objectives for destroying capital ships generally don’t change if they’re disabled and there are no other enemies in the area.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In one of the missions you have to rescue Palpatine, because somehow Zaarin's men have managed to defeat and capture him.
• Doomed by Canon: You're flying for the Empire, and the Battle of Endor takes place pretty much at the exact same time as the final mission. Lampshaded in your final debriefing, when the officer brings up the fact that the Empire is about to enter into a new golden age thanks to the imminent destruction of the Rebellion.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Coruscant is pronounced "Corus-Kant", rather than "Corus-Ahnt" as shown throughout the Prequel Trilogy.
• Easter Egg
• Enemy Chatter: Apparently no one's heard of "secure communications channels" in the Star Wars universe. Or the Empire's radio technology is just that much better than the Rebels'.
• Enemy Mine: You're tasked with ending a longstanding Civil War by assisting both sides. Eventually they decide to team up against you.
• Enemy Scan: Built right into your fighter, just get really close to them and you find out what they're carrying. This is actually a plot point for at least one secret objective, as it's how the player begins to find out about Harkov's double dealing.
• Escort Mission: Standard use, whether to ensure ships reach hyperspace or at least ensure they don't get destroyed. In one case, you need to escort one vessel, only to discover that it was an enemy impersonating the real vessel.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Your life when you're forced to fly the titular TIE Fighter. The TIE has little armor and no shields: two laser blasts from anyone sends you spinning off into the icy void. Leaving out enemy fire, you also have to worry about friendly fire, collisions (both from the enemy and your own side), as well as simple debris; more than once you will fall victim to the flaming wreckage of your target that decided to fly in your direction.
  • Taken to extremes in the betrayal mission, where you are sent to clear a minefield alone in a Tie Interceptor, and it's revealed that your wingmen, the mines, and the cruiser you launched from are all trying to kill you. This is the only mission in the entire game with no primary objectives aside from survive to land on a friendly ship.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Missile Boat does indeed live up to its name.
• Face–Heel Turn: Harkov and his fleet, from the Empire's and the PC's perspective. He does make it quite clear that he has no ideological attachments and is just selling his services.
  • Grand Admiral Zaarin pulls this later and far less ambiguously; as he goes warlord rather than joining the Rebellion.
• Failure Is the Only Option:
  • Enforced in one mission in the expansion packs. The player is tasked with escorting a transport to recover cargo from a disabled ship. However, you find out after the mission is complete that the transport you escorted was an imposter sent by a pirate group. Should you use this newfound knowledge to retry the mission and disable/destroy the imposter vessel, you'll fail the mission (and the real transport will never show up).
  • In one battle you fly three missions in a row defending the same factory. You're then sent on an even more important mission elsewhere...and in the debriefing after you complete that next mission, you're told the factory was destroyed while you were gone.
• Fake Difficulty: In this game, very much related to the above trope.
• Falling into the Cockpit: The feelies reveal your character was a mechanic running a test on a fighter who happened to save a high ranking Imperial officer from rebellion attack during the flight.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Vessels enter and exit the combat zone via hyperspace jumps. Unlike more advanced ships, the basic TIE crafts lack a hyperdrive so they must return to some kind of Mother Ship to conclude their mission.
• Field Promotion: One of the training mission is this to teach you the basics of issuing commands to your squad mates. The team leader dies early on and you have to take command of your TIE fighter squadron.
• Friend or Foe?: The earlier missions have rebels and pirates Colour-Coded for Your Convenience and are generally easy to tell apart. As the game progresses, you are increasingly called upon to fight Imperial hardware, which usually are in the hands of defected or traitorous forces, and are encoded red on the radar (the same as your side). The targeting computer will generally show Z- or H- prefixed names to show that they are enemies, but you can't tell the ships apart should your targeting computer get disabled.
• Fragile Speedster: TIE Fighters and TIE Interceptors are small, maneuverable ships, meant to be more agile than the comparable X-Wing. However, it is outclassed by the rebel's A-Wing which is shielded and just as maneuverable, and the empire's later developments for the TIE Advanced, TIE Defender, and Missile Boat.
• Game-Breaking Bug: In the collector's version, you can destroy the nose warhead launcher of a Star Destroyer. This reveals a hole that you can fly into and attack the capital ship from the inside without worry about being attacked. Some laser batteries from the Star Destroyer may still be able to hit you, but other enemy craft would only hit the destroyer if they open fire.
• Glass Cannon: TIE Bombers. They actually have strong hulls, but the lack of shields means that they are prone to losing systems or being easily destroyed by missiles or even torpedoes, because of how sluggish they are. Their rockets and bombs however mean that if they survive even a single attack run they could cause the loss of all but the biggest capital ships.
  • The T-Wing, used mostly by pirates, is similar in that it has poor shields and hull strength but a high missile capacity. However it is also nearly as fast as an A-Wing, which means that sometimes a player's only chance to complete an Escort Mission is to take down the missiles in mid flight.
  • Z-95 Headhunters used by the Rebels and pirates, not particularly fast and with poor shields and hull; however when equipped with rockets they can easily bring down a capital ship.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For a good chunk of the game's middle act, you are fighting against the opportunistic Admiral Harkov, who defected to the Rebel Alliance for personal gain. Immediately after you have routed his remaining forces, Grand Admiral Zaarin reveals his true colors, having used Harkov's insurrection as a diversion as he readied for his own takeover of the Empire.
• Guide Dang It!: Many of the bonus missions are not made known to the player until s/he destroys, inspects, or protects the ship or thing in question. A usual rule of thumb is that —unless you need to leave now— you should protect all Imperial vessels, destroy all enemy vessels, and inspect anything that has "Unknown" cargo.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Zigzagged. Players are required to sign in with a unique name so the game can track their progress individually. However, other than the login screen, the only place their name will appear is next to their current rank on their PDA; the player character is never addressed by name in dialogue and per the Feelies, is canonically named Maarek Stele.
• High-Altitude Battle: it doesn't get much higher than OUTER SPACE.
• Hold the Line: There are multiple missions requiring you to protect an installation, ship, or yourself against an ever-increasing onslaught of enemy ships coming from one or more directions. Let a single enemy fighter through, and you might discover that it is carrying a launchable that could end your mission instantly. The mission objectives are usually fulfilled just as instantly when a Star Destroyer jumps in to relieve you, though you still need to survive long enough to jump to hyperspace and/or return to hangar. Ejecting immediately will sometimes win you the mission anyway, though this costs you points.
• Initiation Quest: Alongside the main briefings, you will receive secondary briefings from a cloaked envoy of the Secret Order of the Emperor, offering you additional objectives to pursue. Impressing the envoy enough will result in you being inducted into the Order, resulting in a nifty Dark Side tattoo.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Objectives never change during a mission, meaning that any "surprise twists" that happen partway through a mission have to be accounted for in the objective list. Worse, players almost immediately get in the habit of checking the objective list as soon as a mission starts in order to figure out what they need to do to pass the mission. Accordingly, Zaarin's betrayal/ambush in the seventh tour of duty loses a bit of its punch, as attentive players will notice that their objectives include destroying the ships that are supposed to be reinforcing them.
  • The Training Simulator and Combat Chamber both allow access to the TIE Advanced from the beginning of the game, long before it is introduced in the storyline, and later versions of the game do the same for the TIE Defender and the Missile Boat. Similarly, the player's training certificate has obvious spaces for all 7 flyable craft.
  • The cockpit layouts of every craft in the game have spaces for all possible displays, with the panels plated over if a ship isn't currently equipped with a given item. This includes covered over displays for beam weapons, which aren't introduced until halfway through the game.
  • Averted with two initially nonfunctional doors on the concourse screen. One, the largest door, is simply to allow players to return to their current campaign mission without having to re-select a battle. The other turns out to be entirely decorative.
  • The appearance of the Secret Order envoy is spoiled (for all of a mission or two) by a closed door to the side chamber of the briefing room where he otherwise sits. Conversely, for a couple missions the normal briefing officer is not present, in at least one instance signalling that something unusual is going to take place in the coming mission.
• Inverse Law of Utility and Lethality: Once a ship’s shields are down, ion cannons tend to outclass any other weapon. Pretty much all unshielded ships in the game become disabled with an absurdly low number of direct hits with the ion cannons. These can hit anywhere on a ship for the same effect. This will effectively leave them helpless, and out of action for the rest of the mission. There’s never a mechanic introduced to restore an enemy ship’s systems after they’re disabled. Compared to missiles, ion bolts cant be shot down. With lasers, it can take an absurd number of hits to finally get the hull down to 0. A player can have all the enemy’s capital ships disabled early in a mission, and clear out the fighters. Afterwords, the end of each mission is a simple matter of destroying the disabled ships to satisfy any outlying objectives. This turns into a headscratcher when you realize a ship built around taking out a capital ship’s shields and then blasting it with ion cannons would be a far more effective than sending in actual bombers.
• Invisibility Cloak: Cutscene use only. It is one of the projects being researched, although Admiral Zaarin does steal the device.
• Irrelevant Importance:
  • A particularly annoying example where a pirate fighter can enter the hangar of a pirate cruiser and fail the mission because it's considered "escaped" even if the cruiser is destroyed afterwards.
  • Since when and how to accomplish each objective is largely up to the player, this can lead to situations where a mission's objectives, as far as the story is concerned, have been accomplished, but the mission remains incomplete due to some now irrelevant objective. For example, a mission to destroy a space station may list "destroy all mines around the station"^note to clear a path for other ships to attack the station itself as another objective. This will remain even if the station is destroyed.
  • Inverted with "Capture" or "Board" missions where the purpose of the task is to keep the captured vessel. The capture/Board objective is fulfilled immediately once boarding is completed, and will remain fulfilled even if the vessel is destroyed immediately afterwards. Its destruction will have no bearing on the post-mission debriefing text, nor on the craft's participation in any later missions.
• It's Up to You: Usually straight, but averted in the earliest missions - when the Rebels attack during your training, you're immediately ordered back to base. There's plenty of trained pilots about, no need to waste a rookie and his ship.
• Jack of All Stats: The TIE Advance/TIE Avenger. The TIE Defender takes this to Game Breaking levels.
• Kaizo Trap: The Bonus Objectives (which are hidden until completed) can cause this, because occasionally they require an event that is scripted to occur after the rest of the objectives have been completed. So you've struggled to shoot down the enemy fighters for minutes on end, you've finally put your last torpedoes into the enemy capital ship and destroyed it, and the victory music plays; then you jump to hyperspace or enter the hangar just as a message comes up saying that a new ship has entered the area - and then it turns out you had to scan or destroy that ship for a Bonus Objective. Worse yet, some bonus events only happen after a certain amount of mission time has passed, so the better you fight and the faster you finish off your enemies, the more likely you are to run into this. The only way to avoid this without Trial and Error is to wait around for a while after the end of every single mission - and hope that your ship is in the right position to intercept whatever (if anything) happens to appear.
• Last Ditch Move: Type C mines fire off a concussion missile (or, if you're really unlucky, an advanced concussion missile) at the ship that destroyed them.
• Lensman Arms Race: A variation of this occurs towards the end of the game. The Empire has just built the more durable TIE Defender to deal with Rebel starfighters. Then Grand Admiral Zaarin steals a few dozen TIE Defenders and stages a coup. Thus the Empire is, from a certain point of view, in an arms race with itself. They counter the TIE Defender with the Missile Boat, a starfighter loaded with as many warheads as it can carry and a tractor beam to help counter the Defender's agility.
• Lightning Bruiser: TIE Advanced, which has a strong shield, is highly maneuverable and is fast. In the seventh campaign, you obtain the TIE Defender which is even more powerful. During the eighth campaign (which requires an expansion pack or the collector's edition), you receive the Missile Boat.
• Locked Out of the Loop: The twelfth campaign is focused on recovering stolen intelligence concerning the second Death Star from Bothan spies before they pass it to the Rebellion, however most of the missions' objectives deal with learning what info was stolen rather than actually recovering it; only the Emperor's Cloaked Representative advises you to stick to your objectives and hints you that there's more at work. Later your flight officer comes clean and explains to you that the Emperor himself had leaked that information in order to lure the Rebels into a trap.
• Lord British Postulate: Except in a few rare cases, it is theoretically possible to destroy almost everything. And you get more points for doing so (and maybe a scolding) as long as the win conditions are met. Star Destroyers have a blind spot if you take out the one rear laser turret, and can be taken down with an unshielded craft.
  • Averted with Darth Vader; while you can shoot him down with enough time and patience, doing so fails the mission.
• The Man Behind the Man: Not quite, but after defeating the last of Harkov's forces an even bigger traitor is revealed.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • Missile Boats, which can pack up to 80 warheads of various types, at least half of which will be the extremely lethal advanced concussion missiles.
  • Capital ships and space stations have a tendency to launch missiles of their own when attacked (and, unlike fighters, have a seemingly unlimited supply and can lock onto you from any angle), making destroying their warhead launchers a top priority for the player.
• Marathon Level: TIE Defender training mission #1, Custom Dogfight. While the primary objective is easy (only four kills), completing the bonus objective require destroying all 225 crafts (there's 25 ships in 9 waves.) You need to sustain four kills per minute to complete the bonus objectives within one hour, taking proportionally longer if you have a slower kill rate.
• Master of All: The TIE Defender. The only ship that came before it that can do SOMETHING better is the TIE Bomber, possessing the ability to carry more ordnance; but the TIE Defender is still respectable in that area, and it's greater speed and shields means it can still do the TIE Bomber's job better than it can.
• Master of None: The TIE Avenger, though in the lore rather than the gameplay, where it's pretty decent. In its case, it was considered to be not as cost-effective as the standard TIE, and not as all-around amazing as the Defender, resulting in something that was neither particularly good at ace combat nor at swarming the opponent.
• Meaningful Name:
  • With the player fighting for rather than against the Empire, capital ship naming conventions are noticeably different from other Legends sources:
    • In contrast to the sinister-sounding names^note Accuser and Corruptor, for example given them in other games in the series (and elsewhere), Star Destroyers are given more virtuous names that evoke a sense of strength, such as Protector, Stalwart, and Majestic.
    • The names of Rebel ships, in contrast, are non-evocative to the point of being bland. Never will the player encounter the Independence, Liberty, or Redemption.
  • Special mention should be made of Zaarin's personal Star Destroyer, the Glory, a name that evokes the sort of bravado needed to challenge Darth Vader and the Emperor himself for power.
• Mêlée à Trois: The Empire, Zaarin and the Rebels in later parts of the game. Also add some Space Pirates for flavor.
• Mighty Glacier: Assault Gunboats have powerful weapons in the fore and out the rear, but are slow to accelerate and turn like molasses.
• Mook: An unusual variation, in that the player takes on the role of one of the Empire's random Mooks, at least early on in the game. The player even gets stuck in the ultimate Mook Mobile, the bog-standard TIE Fighter. Then increasingly subverted, as the PC is promoted and gets to fly rarer and more impressive fighters.
• Mook Maker: just about any enemy capital ship, but they'll eventually run out.
• Mother Ship: As noted above, most of the capital ships are capable of launching and recovering fighters. One is guaranteed to be present if the craft the player is flying lacks a hyperdrive, as they will have to return to said ship at the end of the mission.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: From the Rebellion's perspective, anyway - it's pretty clear that the Empire wasn't able to fully bring its forces to bear because of Harkov and Zaarin's treachery. This is even true of the player to some extent, as you are required to destroy high-end Imperial craft by the thousands, which could have probably been useful to serve the Emperor somewhere else.
• Nitro Boost: The Missile Boat's "SLAM" drive, which makes it temporarily the fastest ship in the game... at the expense of your laser cannon's ammunition. As the Missile Boat has only a single laser cannon and usually carries up to eighty missiles, this isn't really a problem. The TIE Defender on the other hand is the fastest without such.
  • You can adjust which systems get how much power in any ship. If you redirect all power to the engines, you can make anything go ridiculously fast... though you won't have lasers, shields, or tractor beams.
    • Also, craft equipped with beam weapons (tractor beam, targeting jammer) don't have any kind of speed or maneuverability penalty over their non beam equipped counterparts, meaning you can simply shunt all power from the beam recharge to the engines and use it as a makeshift speed upgrade. Since the TIE Defender and Missile Boat almost always have a beam equipped, you can easily make these already fast craft faster still. The extra energy also means you keep your lasers recharged without the usual loss of speed, and of course, you can keep the SLAM operating for significantly longer.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Inverted, since this is essentially the "wicked campaign" counterpart to X-Wing.
• No Fair Cheating: As this game was much harder than the predecessor, there was a simple toggle in the in-flight menu to give you invulnerability and unlimited ammunition. However, this reduced your score by 90% if used at any point in the mission, making advancements and promotions difficult at best.
• Not So Above It All: The briefing officer and Secret Order envoy generally have neutral expressions when briefing or debriefing the player, but will smile^note or as close as the envoy can manage with his mouth covered when reporting your kills or captures.
• Not So Invincible After All: The TIE Defender once the Missile Boat is introduced; but even before that, despite their speed and maneuverability, the Defenders have a relatively large hitbox, meaning that a moderately skilled pilot can take them out with just lasers relatively easily.
• Not So Stoic: Conversely to Not So Above It All, the same characters will be visibly upset when reporting Imperial losses.
• No Warping Zone: Interdictors prevent ships from using the Hyperspace Escape, while having other ships destroy the intended targets. An allied interdictor is used across multiple missions to prevent enemy capital ships from escaping, while a few missions later, another interdictor prevents you from escaping.
• Oh, Crap!: By your fellow comrades immediately after you destroy Harkov's flagship when Zaarin's reinforcements arrive only to open fire on your command ship.

  Imperial Officer: The treachery is worse than we imagined!

• Old-School Dogfight: The game engine uses physics appropriate to atmospheric battles, rather than what we would expect of realistic space war. Of course, for the most part, so did the movies. Most combat is fought out at low ranges and slow speeds with unguided weapons. However, this is partially subverted later in the game, where the higher-end fighters make greater use of missiles.
• One Game for the Price of Two: or three in this case, and you literally have to buy the same game again (in "Collector's CD Edition" form) if you bought the original release and want to see how the whole thing ends. The developers tried to mitigate this with a discount coupon for the Collector's CD Edition included in the base TIE Fighter game.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: The basic TIE Fighter is almost one. Usually they can survive one, sometimes two laser hits. Surviving a missile hit? Hahahaha. No.
• One-Man Army: For the most part accidental just because your wingmen (and reinforcements, which you can call in in almost any mission) are pretty much useless, but there are true One Man Army missions as well. For example, when you've been using the TIE Advanced (fast, hyperdrive, shields, and concussion missiles) only to be assigned to show two wingmen how to clear a minefield... in an unshielded TIE Interceptor, with them watching from behind you... Gee, what's the worst that could happen?
  • Hint: Destroying your wing men will not result in the stock message identifying friendly fire.
  • The Empire certainly seems to use you as one in the later campaigns, particularly when you're flying the TIE Defender or the Missile Boat. Most of your missions at this stage see you either as the sole line of defense for a vulnerable target or executing complex and difficult strike missions that would normally be assigned to multiple units. This is especially true of levels involving the Missile Boat, as its multiple high capacity warhead launchers allow it to be its own escort, equally capable of picking off defending fighters and destroying large, heavily shielded targets in the same mission.
• Only in It for the Money: Harkov had no love for Rebel ideals but they paid him a generous sum so over he went.
• Outranking Your Job: Since promotions within both the Imperial Navy and Secret Order ranks are Cosmetic Awards with no bearing on plot or gameplay, this trope can be inverted, averted, or played straight depending on the player's skill and the mission details. Early on, it is possible to be a lowly Flight Officer in direct command of half a dozen fighters (and able to order even more powerful reinforcements into the area); later missions may see the player as a General, yet flying solo missions or seemingly run-of-the-mill patrols.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: The TIE Advanced, which was introduced as the most powerful Imperial starfighter, being the first TIE starfighter with shields and hyperdrive. But not long after its introduction, it gets outmatched by the TIE Defender and the Missile Boat.
  • This even extends into Star Wars Legends; the Defender occasionally pops up but the Advanced hardly ever appears and is only mentioned in visual encyclopedias.
• The Paralyzer: Several variations.
  • Ion cannons that disable unshielded vessels.
  • Mag Pulse warheads were introduced to temporarily disable weapon systems on a fully shielded craft.
  • Two flavors of beam weapons:
    • Tractor beams, which lock targeted ships onto their current heading, preventing them from evading incoming fire.
    • Jamming beams, which prevent targeted ships from firing on the player.
  • Gravity well generators render hyperdrives useless, trapping ships in a particular region of space.
• Pass Through the Rings: Surprisingly fun training missions. Some people have spent hours running through the training course as a sort of odd racing (against the clock) game.
• Playing Both Sides: Admiral Harkov has been secretly selling Imperial military supplies to the Dimok and Ripoblus who have been at war with each other for generations.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Most space objects larger than a shuttlecraft will go down in a chain of explosions if you succeed in destroying them.
• Protection Mission: In one mission, your wingmen are destroyed more quickly than the platform you're defending. When just one wingman is left, he asks how the two of us can stop all these ships.
• Punny Name:
  • Destroying the ships you are supposed to be escorting can cause Star Destroyer Badi Dea to warp in and launch endless waves of fighters at you.
  • Harkov makes his final escape attempt on a Corellian transport named Geddawai.
  • Battle 3, "Battle on the Frontier," sees the player fighting on the fringes of Imperial territory to establish a brand new base in the Newland system.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Shades of this if you play the tours of duty in order. At the end of Battle III, you are helping ferry over the new TIE Advanced to Admiral Harkov's VSD Protector, and your flight officer even says to go brush up on your TIE Advanced piloting in the simulator, but then you uncover evidence that Harkov is working with the Rebellion (by scanning a shuttle heading to the Protector and finding it is carrying a Rebel officer), and Harkov tells you that your curiosity may be your undoing. The next two battles see you sent off to establish a new base and fight pirates in remote sectors.
• Retcon: The game seems to retcon its own predecessor — X-Wing — regarding the TIE Advanced - a fast, shielded TIE model. This craft was seen in numerous X-Wing missions taking place during and after the Battle of Yavin (including on the Death Star itself), and often appeared in very large numbers. In TIE Fighter, the TIE Advanced is still in prototype development after the Battle of Hoth, and is only approved by Vader for service after a hyperdrive is added to the design.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Played up straight and ultimately is itself a result of revenue enhancing devices of the Star Wars merchandising empire.
• Rooting for the Empire: Apparently invoked in the literal sense but it comes out more as a subversion since this is among the first Star Wars high-profile works to avert Black-and-White Morality.
• Royal Cruiser: One mission involves intercepting Zaarin's forces as they attempt to destroy the Emperor's personal liner, the Excalibur, as he's travelling to the second Death Star.
• Sacrificial Lion: Some instances of this are present; a notable one is the Interdictor Harpax, which is tasked with luring Harkov's forces and their Rebel allies out into the open. The subsequent Imperial assault led by Vader makes quick work of the traitors as they planned, just as the Harpax was being savaged by repeated assaults. While it is possible to save it, official sources confirm that the Harpax didn't survive the engagement.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Given the manpower needed to field even a skeleton crew for a Star Destroyer, Harkov is leading at least a few thousand Imperials in defecting. Meanwhile, Zaarin has millions under his command as a Grand Admiral. Even if only a fraction of his forces followed him into treason,^note and given (1) the virtually complete secrecy he was able to maintain leading up to his coup attempt, (2) the priority given to defeating him by the Empire, and (3) the scale of damage his forces were able to inflict, it seems likely the bulk of his command remained loyal to him he would still be leading a coup of upwards of 100,000 disaffected Imperials. "Vast conspiracy of traitors" is an understatement.
• Scoring Points: The player receives a score for every mission, revealed in the debriefing. Activating either of the game's cheat modes at any point during a mission incurs a 90% reduction in score. Cumulative points determine the player's rank in both the Imperial Navy and Secret Order.
• Script Breaking: it's possible to ensure that certain conditions to achieve Secondary Goals are never met due to actions performed within the mission.
• The Siege:
  • The first half of Tour of Duty 7 is pretty much as close to this as you can get in space. An Interdictor manages to catch Harkov's Star Destroyer, only for it to be swiftly reinforced by a Rebel Mon Calamari Cruiser and a traitorous Imperial Nebulon Frigate. Note that the Interdictor against any one of those would be a challenge. The player has to lead a breakout to destroy some of the ships and fighters, including the Frigate, while waiting for help to arrive.
  • The game's final few missions are a reprise of this trope, with the player defending a secret Imperial research base against increasingly fierce opposition.
• Serial Escalation: TIE Advanced was considered the most powerful imperial fighter. They then released the TIE Defender (faster, tougher, and has ion cannons), and the missile boat (carries enough ordinance to wax multiple capital ships). However, these two ships were scrapped and/or mothballed in the final missions.
• Ship Shape: Some abandoned containers lying around happen to be perfectly salvageable for building a space station (but it is space, after all, and they were only abandoned for a short while)
• Shoot the Bullet: Warheads can be shot down using laser cannons (or, if you're talented and feel like wasting valuable ammo, faster warheads). This is a common defence against enemies who lock onto you. Significantly harder, however, is shooting down a warhead heading for something else. The game, of course, forces you to do this in one Escort Mission where T-wings launch heavy rockets at a mission sensitive ship mere seconds after you start the mission (and letting even a single one through is more or less an automatic failed mission).
• Shout-Out: There's a lot, overlapping with Meaningful Name - probably at least a third of the ships have names referencing something else.
  • The Dimok and Ripoblus forces fought during the second tour of duty are believed to be shout-outs to the Democrats and Republicans respectively.
• The Smurfette Principle: Mon Mothma is the only major female character of the game and she only shows up in a cutscene.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: The imperial vessels start with the simple TIE Fighter, which is less effective than the TIE Interceptor (having two laser cannons instead of four, and is slower and less maneuverable), and in turn less powerful than TIE Avenger (which has shields). Likewise, TIE Bomber is a weaker version of the Assault Gunboat (the latter having shields and ion cannons to disable targets). In the later campaigns, they're outperformed yet again by both the TIE Defender and Missile Boat, the latter being able to move at high speeds and destroy capital ships with the weapon payload alone, while still dominating enemy fighters.
• Space Mines: They use lasers as introduced in X-Wing, but also have ion cannon and warhead variants. One mission also requires you to clear a minefield in an unshielded craft.
• Space Pirates: They mostly use outdated ships compared to the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.
• Spell My Name With An S: The player character is Maarek Stele. His last name is subject to several misspellings amongst the fans (Steele being the most common). And sometimes in the official materials, as well. Forgetting the second "A" in Maarek is also common.
• Sprint Shoes: In a weird way, the Tractor Beam, since against anything but A-Wings and the more advanced TIEs it's kinda wasted, so most people shunt the energy that would go to it back into the engines.
  • Even better: if the tractor beam wasn't mounted on your craft, that energy was not available to shunt into other systems. Apparently, the tractor beam carried its own power supply that could be fed into your craft at will. Makes you wonder why they didn't just leave our the beam generating part and added the power supply to your fighter in order to strengthen it. It would have been handy against the traitor craft.
  • Ironic in the case of the Missile Boat/TIE Defender; the TIE Defender can actually mount the tractor beam in some missions (perhaps only in the Combat Simulator?), but the Tractor Beam is supposed to be part of the Missile Boat's basic in-universe tactic: catch a TIE Defender in a tractor beam and missile spam it to death.
    • The technology was originally developed for the Advanced, so it's nothing like odd for it to have been implemented on the Defender a couple of times.
  • Also, the Missile Boat has the SLAM system, which doubles your speed by consuming your stored laser energy. If you redirect all power to engines, you'll still be coasting above maximum speed for a while.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Everything from numerous fighter types to freighters to frigates, cruisers and star destroyers.
• Suicide Attack: Some capital ships are scripted to ram or block other capital ships. If they touch, both are instantly destroyed. This is explained by having one of the vessels contain "explosives" or some other dangerous cargo.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As absurdly powerful as the Missle Boat is, the Empire is forced to shelve it as the ship falling into enemy hands would prove disastrous.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: The game is notable for giving this to the Empire, showing the Imperial Navy from the inside. As portrayed here, they come across as a fairly normal military who don't think of themselves as evil, spending most of their time doing general police, security and peacekeeping work, and only rarely hunting the "insignificant rebellion" who are the protagonists in the movies.
• Tempting Fate: Grand Admiral Zaarin, who is fleeing his crippled flagship on the Vorknkx, armed with the stolen cloaking device. Unfortunately, he was unaware of the consequences of using it in hyperspace:
  Zaarin: Once again we have evaded Thrawn's grasp! I knew I would be able to beat that......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!! (Corvette explodes}
• Theme Naming: Timothy Zahn started it with the Emperor's Hand and this game builds on it. In addition to a Hand, you become an Emperor's Reach and an Emperor's Voice (all of these being ranks within the Secret Order). You also become part of the Emperor's Sword fighter wing.
• Too Awesome to Use: The missile boat was an in-universe version. After Zaarin was dealt with, the remaining missile boats were mothballed and placed into storage, as they were considered too powerful to see mass deployment (the consequences of even one being captured or stolen by a traitor would be disastrous, as it could take on entire fleets by itself).
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway:
  • The Vorknkx, a Corellian Corvette carrying an experimental cloaking device noted for being extremely unstable when used in conjunction with a hyperspace engine. That doesn't stop Zaarin from attempting to use it as a getaway ship. It eventually blows up with him onboard.
  • The Missile Boat is repeatedly described in briefings as "experimental", and it is likewise noted that it would not have been sent into combat so quickly if not for Zaarin and his numerous TIE Advanceds and Defenders. In your earliest missions with it, the TIE Defender is similarly described as still in testing and only aboard the Garrett for operational trials. Neither craft has any of the flaws or bugs sometimes implied by this trope, however.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The early version would sometimes carry over ship conditions from previous missions. If you managed to destroy a win condition ship from a previous battle, it would become impossible to finish the game. The Collector's CD fixed this in most cases (except the Falaricae, which was only a bonus goal later).
• Updated Re-release: the "Collector's CD ROM Edition" defines this trope. The game received two updated releases, one with upgraded SVGA graphics (Collector's CD-ROM Edition '95) and a second one (Tie Fighter '98) retrofited and ported to the engine of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. A fanmade total conversion for X-Wing Alliance also exists.
• Uriah Gambit: One mission requires you to clear a minefield with an unshielded craft, for no good reason. The mission is actually a trap orchestrated by a defecting imperial officer.
• Variable Mix: Like X-Wing before it, the game features the iMuse music engine (unfortunately this was lost on the Tie Fighter '98 Edition); however it offers more variety for soundtrack changes depending on the gameplay, like a triumphant music whenever you are doing particularly well on a mission, and an ominous theme whenever you're approaching an enemy capital ship.
• Villain Protagonist: Subverted. Tie Fighter was the first game ever where the protagonist is on the side of the Galactic Empire, so this was expected by default and played up in the artwork and marketing. However, the Empire is portrayed as a force for peace and order, while the Rebel Alliance is portrayed as a cause of anarchy and chaos.
• With This Herring: One of the missions in Battle III has you protecting a newly established space station from Rebel and pirate fighters in a TIE Bomber. The flight officer specifically says that the TIE Bomber was not designed for this kind of role, and upon completion of the mission he conveys Vice Admiral Thrawn's compliments for being able to pull off a victory despite this fact.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • In the first training mission, destroying the training platform causes a revenge wave of imperial Gunboats and TIE Advanced. However, that platform is invincible, leaving the revenge wave Dummied Out.
  • In some of the missions (such as TIE Fighter Combat Mission 3 and 4), you can disable and destroy your own command ship, a small Corellian Corvette. If you succeed, the Imperial Star Destroyer Punisher shows up. If you attack that, it will launch its fighters to attack you. If you survive the retaliatory waves, and have not yet completed your mission goals, you'll only receive the generic mission failure debriefing by the officer and get to try again.
  • If you can out last the game's cheating ass, you can shoot down Darth Vader. You also get reprimanded if Darth Vader is killed while on a command ship that you are also supposed to defend. However, it's a non-issue since you completed all other objectives and he's around on later missions as well.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • Happens in the Feelies when one of Harkov's lieutenants fails to kill Maarek Stele, bringing the Empire down on their heads. He is shot for his trouble.
  • Mentioned to have happened off-screen, courtesy of Darth Vader, to the unfortunate captain of a Star Destroyer in the aforementioned mission on Failure Is the Only Option for falling into the trap; your flight officer mentions that your piloting skills in protecting the destroyer from the ambush spared you from Vader's wrath.
• You Rebel Scum!: This phrase, or variants thereof, are often said by wingmen.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The player is a star fighter pilot in service to the Empire, which is presented as the guardian of order, and the Rebels are portrayed as terrorists (though Vader still scares everyone and you don't actually fight Rebels that much). In fact, most of the early missions consist of legitimate work like scanning freighters for contraband and defending military installations from attack. The Opening Scroll and cutscenes in TIE Fighter specifically refer to "Rebel terrorists" and "Rebel insurgents."
  • All of the Star Wars flight sims, and their companion comics and novels, play with this trope in regard to capital ship names. Those stories told from the Rebel perspective are likely to include Alliance ships named after ideals - "Independence," "Liberty," "Freedom" - while enemy ships have names with definite negative connotations - "Inquisitor," for example, or even "Eviscerator." If, however, the protagonists fly for the Empire, suddenly all the Star Destroyers have names like "Protector" or "Stalwart", while the ships of their Rebel opponents have non-evocative names.
• Zerg Rush: Nope, not here. Despite X-Wing saying otherwise, the Galactic Empire seems to have a TIE Fighter shortage and as such, has to deal with more powerful enemy craft outnumbering them.

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