To visit the San Francisco offices of LucasArts, the video-game arm of George Lucas’s entertainment empire, is to glimpse first-hand the dividends that his six-episode Star Wars saga has generated over the last 30 years. The $350 million state-of-the-technological-art Presidio campus that the company shares with its moviemaking brethren, Lucasfilm and visual-effects house Industrial Light & Magic, boasts a commissary with panoramic views of the city (including, on a clear day, the Golden Gate Bridge); an employee gift shop stocked with Skywalker Ranch olive oil, Star Wars merchandise, and other Lucasfilm swag; and a plush 350-seat theater where employees can test-drive video games on a full-size movie screen or watch the latest film releases after work.

In many cases, the employees themselves are byproducts of the influence of Star Wars: writers, designers, animators, and artists who, as kids and teens, were wowed by the movies and decided that they, too, wanted to create science-fiction and fantasy characters and visuals that were as fully formed and plausible as those that Lucas had put on movie screens. But instead of lining up behind the crowds jockeying to get into film school, these future storytellers chose as their canvas the much younger and more interactive medium of video games, a medium that increasingly overlaps with filmmaking—artistically, technically, and in terms of storytelling technique—but that also has its own rules, philosophies, and cultural touchstones. On the Presidio campus there stands a bronze statue of Eadweard Muybridge, whose series of consecutive photos taken at a horse farm in 1878—known today as “The Horse in Motion”—is a motion-picture prototype. The Muybridge of the video-game industry is arguably Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari and the creator in the mid-70s of Pong, the first successful, if primitive, home video game: a digitally generated ball was knocked between two digitally generated paddles until one of the players was declared the winner or fell asleep from boredom. Along those same lines, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are the equivalent of silent-film stars, and, for a number of LucasArts executives, the Citizen Kane of 3-D video games is Nintendo’s Super Mario 64. Released in 1996 for what was then the groundbreaking Nintendo 64 game console, and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who has created some of the most enduring characters and games in the history of the industry, Super Mario 64 was not only the first true 3-D video game, according to LucasArts vice president of product development Peter Hirschmann, but also the game that established a number of conventions—“such as how you navigate a 3-D space and how a camera moves in 3-D space,” Hirschmann says—which game designers still use today.

But when it comes to mimicking real-life conventions—the laws of physics, the squishy dynamics of biology, the unpredictability of human behavior—video games are still struggling with their technical limitations. Take an action as simple, or at least in gaming as commonplace, as throwing a villain through a wooden door. No matter what combination of moves or punches the hero uses, the bad guy usually breaks through the door in the same stiff and unconvincing way—usually uttering the same stilted grunt or scream—each and every time the gamer plays through this point in the game. That’s because, in essence, most video games are composed of a series of brief, inter-related animations that are cued by the gamer. Some games provide multiple animations for a particular action, to give the illusion of spontaneity, but that is an expensive proposition.

The player’s suspension of disbelief is also tested in the way the door itself gives way when the villain flies through it. Instead of splintering in a way that resembles actual breaking wood, the door will typically come apart like separated pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

But these barriers to a much more realistic gaming experience, and, perhaps, a greater public interest in the medium, are about to fall, as I learn during an eye-opening two-day visit to Lucas’s Presidio campus. To observe the men and women of LucasArts in action—aside from noting their propensity to wear their security badges on bright yellow lanyards—is to realize that the process of making a video game is really the fulfillment of French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes’s dream of putting “the world into equation,” in the words of LucasArts lead software engineer Cedrick Collomb. Over the quarter-century the company (originally Lucasfilm Games) has been in business, that has become an increasingly complex and difficult proposition, as video-game consoles have become faster and smarter. The last generation of consoles, Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s original Xbox, were each outfitted with a single central processing unit (C.P.U.) and a single graphics processing unit (G.P.U.), but their successors, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, have the benefit of multiple C.P.U.’s and a much-advanced G.P.U. This means that the video games that run on them can be more complex, more challenging, and more three-dimensionally realistic. (Although Nintendo’s Wii does not have the C.P.U. and G.P.U. firepower of its competitors, it engages players in a level of interactivity not seen before in the video-game world by requiring them to mimic the action on-screen.)

As the consoles have become faster and better, the software developers have risen to the challenge of designing a better game experience, and one of the reasons I have come to San Francisco is to see two demonstrations of software that LucasArts is excited about incorporating into its next marquee game. The first program is called Euphoria, and was developed by NaturalMotion, a tech company based in San Francisco and Oxford, England. On a projection screen in a darkened auditorium, I watch as a digitally animated Imperial stormtrooper, the comically doomed cannon fodder of Lucas’s Star Wars universe, is lifted by an invisible force and dropped in various ways—on his head, on his back—and over various objects such as steel and wooden crates. Each time he is lifted, he struggles mightily, and then, every time he drops, he reacts differently. Dropped on his head, he grabs it with his hands before going still. And after being dropped on his back, on a metal box, he arches it in a way that suggests he is in agonizing pain.

His reactions are eerily lifelike, and I am told that what I am seeing is not animation but a kind of artificial intelligence generated by Euphoria, which enables the stormtrooper to react with an almost human uniqueness—in real time, no less—to obstacles and attacks. Dropped 100 times, the Euphoria-imbued stormtrooper will react differently 100 times, unless he is dropped in exactly the same way twice. When he is placed at the top of a sloping roof, he struggles furiously to gain purchase as he slides down, and actually grabs and hangs on to its edge for a few moments before falling to his inevitable fate. But the real pièce de résistance of the demonstration is when the stormtrooper is placed on an unsteady surface and actually begins to shift his weight and pedal his feet in order to maintain his equilibrium. “That’s not animated at all,” says Steve Dykes, the LucasArts senior engineer running the presentation. “That is actually a character trying to maintain his balance, physically simulated.”

Another demonstration begins—for a technology called Digital Molecular Matter (D.M.M.), developed by a Switzerland-based company called Pixelux Entertainment. D.M.M. makes it possible to assign the molecular properties of virtually any substance to any virtual object. In other words, doors can be made to splinter like oak, bend like soft steel, or shatter like glass with a remarkable level of realism. For this demonstration, Pixelux chief operating officer Vik Sohal called up an on-screen control panel that enabled him to adjust the physical properties of a wall via such geeky-sounding parameters as Young’s Modulus (the measure of a material’s stiffness) and Poisson’s Ratio (a measure of “volume preservation”). First, Sohal made a brick wall. Then he began tossing what looked like human-weight versions of green plastic army men into the wall, which didn’t give much upon impact but cracked along the mortar lines. He called up the control panel again and gave the wall the physical properties of thin plastic. This time when the army men hit the wall it caved in and bent like a cheap aboveground swimming pool.

By the time the demonstration was over, I was left with the unmistakable sense that LucasArts was on the cutting edge of a huge leap forward for the video-game industry—a technological breakthrough, nearly as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in film, that could finally give gaming the kind of immersive realism that would enable it to join movies and television as a form of mainstream entertainment. The company has incorporated Euphoria and D.M.M. technologies into an ambitious video game called Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which is scheduled to be released this summer. In addition to groundbreaking software, the game will employ Industrial Light & Magic’s facial-likeness technology and motion-capture expertise, which will give the digitally animated characters remarkably lifelike expressions and movements. And perhaps most important of all, the game has a compelling, movie-like story line, involving a secret apprentice to Darth Vader and the formation of the Rebel Alliance, which provides a visual and narrative transition between Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. It is being billed as the “next great chapter” in George Lucas’s space saga, one that, according to the project’s art director, Matt Omernick, “aims to convince players that, ‘Oh my God, I’m actually, finally, in a Star Wars movie.’ ” And not only that: it will be a Star Wars movie with a life of its own.

Haden Blackman, who headed the Force Unleashed development team, is laughing now as he tells how he and his group persuaded George Lucas to sign off on the game’s underlying concept—but at the time, he says, he was genuinely stressed.

In 2004, LucasArts went through a reorganization that one executive referred to as a “reboot.” During the late 1980s and for much of the 90s, the company had enjoyed critical and commercial success as well as status as a cutting-edge developer and publisher of games, thanks to titles such as Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, and Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle. But just a few years into the new millennium, the company was beset by internal conflicts and criticism that it was publishing too many middling Star Wars games and no longer pushing the gaming envelope the way it once had. The bottom line reportedly reflected this as well (Lucas’s companies are privately held), and in the spring of 2004, Jim Ward was brought over from Lucasfilm to serve as president of LucasArts and to clean house. Ward, a no-nonsense executive who keeps a life-size statue of Darth Maul in his office, reportedly streamlined the staff by a fourth and refocused the troops.

It’s easy to understand why. Although video- and computer-game sales grew to $7.4 billion in 2006—almost triple what they were 10 years earlier—the business is a risky one. A top-shelf video game costs between $15 million and $30 million to develop and publish, but unlike the movie business, where producers and distributors can recoup their costs over time via DVD sales, pay-per-view, or other ancillary markets—movies generate revenue for decades—video-game publishers currently have only one real shot at making money, the retail level, and that window is a narrow one. Games today typically cost between $39.99 and $59.99, which doesn’t exactly make them impulse-purchase items, and they make most of their money within the first six to nine months of their release dates. New-game sales aren’t helped by retail chains such as GameStop that do a robust business in used titles, the proceeds of which they pocket.

Then again, when games hit, like the blockbuster Halo series has, the upside can be spectacular. Last September, Halo 3 raked in $170 million in sales in a single day (the total figure is now more than $300 million) and was even blamed for hurting movie-theater revenues the weekend after its release. (Another upside: the budget of a typical video game is likely a tenth of your average Hollywood blockbuster.)

Looking to the future, Ward split the bulk of LucasArts’ staff into two teams. One would produce an Indiana Jones game. The other would develop a new Star Wars title. Blackman, 35, who has been at LucasArts since the late 90s, was put in charge of this second team. With his stocky build and brown hair parted in the middle, the California native looks more like a football noseguard than a Star Wars nerd, but he is well versed in the mythology, having written a number of Star Wars comic books and worked on such video games as the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. According to Peter Hirschmann, Ward’s second-in-command, Blackman struck maybe the perfect geek balance: “He knew Star Wars intimately, but didn’t cross the line where he was dressing up in costumes and going to conventions.”

Seven months after a preliminary meeting in April 2005 in which Lucas gave the LucasArts team permission to develop a game that would fill the 19-year narrative gap between Episode III (the final film of the recent prequel trilogy) and Episode IV (the first film of the original trilogy), Blackman returned to Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, in Marin County, to pitch the boss the basic game concept that he and his team hoped to execute. Lucas’s only stipulation about setting the story in that time period had been that Darth Vader, who was fitted for his iconic black life-support suit in the final minutes of Episode III, be a key character in the story line. In keeping with this request, Blackman’s team had come up with the idea of making a game about “Darth Vader’s secret apprentice.” But there was one additional key element that Lucas needed to know about.

The core idea was to take the concept of the Force and supersize it in a way that would appeal both to Star Wars video-game fans, who at this point have played a number of LucasArts games that involve the use of Force powers, and to gamers who may not be Star Wars fans but will gravitate to a game that offers big-bang escapism. Blackman’s team also wanted to put the Force in the hands of a character who was not bound by the Jedi code, which, as the movies drive home, attaches all kinds of guilt and moralizing to letting one’s freak Force fly. Not only would the Apprentice be able to wreak havoc with the Force in the game LucasArts planned, but, Blackman says, there would be “no real penalty” for doing so; instead, gamers would be able to explore the pleasures of “kicking someone’s ass with the Force.” Unleashed Force wielders would now be able to dismantle buildings and, at the height of their powers, pluck an Imperial star destroyer—those massive triangular spacecraft that are the Empire’s equivalent of an aircraft carrier—out of the heavens and crash it onto a planet’s surface.

No one knew how Lucas would react, even with the aid of an extremely visceral and loud demo film that, Blackman claims, literally blew back Lucas’s hair. “I was terrified,” Blackman recalls, “because I’m going into this meeting and telling him, ‘You know this core concept to all the Star Wars movies? We want to totally reimagine it and re-invent it. Are you cool with that?’ ”

Lucas turned out to be perfectly cool with that. “That’s perfect for a game,” he told Blackman. “Go make that.”

Based on the presentation of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that Blackman and the game’s lead content designer, John Stafford, gave me using slides of concept art—which also lines the hallways of LucasArts—and occasional screen shots, they’ve done the Star Wars universe proud. Full of action and epic Force wielding, and largely free of the plot convolutions that made parts of Episode I and Episode II go down like big bowls of bran flakes, The Force Unleashed sounds like a video game that could easily have been a movie.

The character of Darth Vader is fleshed out further, and, in a plot twist almost as good as the “I am your father” moment from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, the game also contains surprising information about the birth of the Rebel Alliance. And like the dramatic arc of the six-episode saga within which it’s nestled, The Force Unleashed is ultimately a tale of redemption. In a particularly inspired casting choice, Matt Sloan, who is the voice of Darth Vader’s heavy-breathing, black-helmeted supermarket-manager brother in the popular YouTube parody Chad Vader, lends his pipes to the real deal. “He’s dead-on,” says John Stafford. (James Earl Jones, the voice of Vader in the original films, was not approached to reprise his role for reasons, it seems, of both cost and availability.)

By February 2006, when the story line to The Force Unleashed was set in stone, production of the game had been under way for months. Although conceived at a time when the PlayStation 2, original Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube were the state of the art of game consoles, The Force Unleashed was envisioned as a “next gen” game, which meant that it would be designed to take advantage of the vastly improved graphic capabilities, faster processing speeds, and increased multi-tasking and memory capabilities of the next generation of consoles, particularly the Xbox 360, which debuted at the end of 2005, and Sony’s PlayStation 3, which hit the market at the end of 2006. (Simpler versions of the game will be published for PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s Wii and DS platforms.)

Making The Force Unleashed a next-gen game meant a couple of things. For one, every time new consoles are introduced, game-makers essentially have to start a brand-new computer-code base that is compatible with the new hardware, and each console requires its own proprietary code. “It would be like, in the film business, if you had to stop and re-invent the camera, re-invent film, re-invent lighting, re-invent how you record audio, and re-invent the theatrical aspect of it,” says Hirschmann.

Complicating this transition was LucasArts’ planned summer 2005 move to the Presidio campus. In the interest of synergy, it had been decided that I.L.M. and LucasArts would begin to share resources, technology, and even manpower to benefit from each other’s strengths. For example, the visual-effects company shared its Clone Cam facial-likeness technology, which created remarkably lifelike digital facsimiles of the actors who played the game’s main characters, facial moles included.

Creating a video game demands an amazing amount of coordination among artists, game-play designers, animators, engineers, and producers as the game is assembled in sections and then fitted together. (A LucasArts spokesman estimates that approximately 300 people will work on The Force Unleashed in some capacity by the time it is released. In comparison, he says, approximately 1,000 worked on the last Star Wars movie, about half of them in visual effects.) Like those frustrating strings of Christmas lights that won’t work if a single bulb burns out, a glitch in one level can crash the whole game until it is fixed. These normal hurdles were complicated by the necessity of learning how to work with Euphoria and D.M.M.

Each program came with its own headaches: When the stormtroopers were first programmed with Euphoria, for example, they were so good at dodging objects that their artificial intelligence had to be dumbed down. But the challenges only multiplied when the LucasArts engineers, sometimes with technical support from NaturalMotion and Pixelux, got down to the business of teaching Euphoria and D.M.M. how to interface with each other as well as a third program, Havok Physics, that’s been a staple of LucasArts games for years. The Apprentice’s Force powers had to be tweaked when it was discovered that, in some cases, he was tossing his victims through D.M.M.-enabled walls and windows with such virtual velocity that the software didn’t have enough time to communicate with the Euphoria-enabled stormtrooper flying toward it, make the necessary physical calculations, and react accordingly; instead of hitting the wall with a thud, stormtroopers were sailing through it like ghosts. And in game-play situations where all three technologies are involved—for example, if the Apprentice picks up a Euphoria-enabled stormtrooper who manages to latch onto a Havok-programmed metal cargo box before he’s lifted into the air and hurled through a D.M.M. plate-glass window—“that’s where it gets exponentially more complicated,” Blackman says.

Another issue was that, for all its realism, the game couldn’t be too realistic. Getting hit with the real-world equivalent of the Force powers used in the game would be like getting hit by “a cannonball,” Blackman says. “It would probably rip a person apart,” and that would be commercially unpalatable, since The Force Unleashed is being tooled for a T rating—for teen-appropriate—which means that it can’t contain gore or too much blood. From a technical point of view, Star Wars’ comic-book realism requires designers to strike a tricky balance. “To take simulations that are based on real-world math and real-world physics and apply those to an unreal world has been very tough,” Blackman says, but often entertaining as well. The first time that a Euphoria-enabled stormtrooper was placed in the game and hit with the Force, “his body stretched like Plastic Man in all directions and literally exploded.”

By the time I visit LucasArts, those bugs have been fixed, and the game is “screaming toward the alpha milestone,” in Blackman’s words, meaning that the game is close to reaching its final test stages. “Our alpha definition is code-and-content-complete, no showstopping bugs, no crashes. You can play through the whole game and determine, ‘Is it fun yet?’ ” If it is, the game must then pass beta testing, when select groups of civilians are allowed to play it, before it ends up on store shelves.

Given the steep learning curve, Jim Ward is careful to downplay expectations about The Force Unleashed, but Hirschmann expects that the company’s growing understanding of Euphoria and D.M.M. will enable LucasArts to do even better work in subsequent games, such as the future Indiana Jones title. “In the same way that they were able to take a pretty big leap from Star Wars to The Empire Strikes Back as far as the complexity of the visual effects, we’ve now taken that first step,” he says. “Now the next game will be that much farther down the path and hopefully it will just continue.” Once The Force Unleashed hits stores, it will be only a matter of time before other game developers and publishers license or come up with their own versions of Euphoria and D.M.M.—Rockstar Games will be using Euphoria in its next version of Grand Theft Auto—but Hirschmann figures LucasArts has about a three-year jump on the competition.

Before I leave, Blackman and Stafford take me to a workstation where Adam Piper, a senior-level designer for The Force Unleashed, is playing through the prologue on a PlayStation 3 console. The prologue allows the gamer to play Darth Vader, who has gone to Kashyyyk, the Wookiee home planet, to hunt down a recalcitrant Jedi.

The Dark Lord of the Sith is on Piper’s screen, his black cape billowing, his death’s-head helmet gleaming in the computer-generated sunlight. Piper guides Vader forward using the game controller and eventually arrives at a narrow rope bridge of lashed-together logs. As the Wookiees begin to charge across the bridge, Piper mashes buttons and summons up a ball of Force energy that, in a nice artistic touch, withers the plant life beneath Vader’s boots. Then, pushing another button, he hurls that energy at the furry, fanged Wookiees. A bunch of them go flying off into space, causing the D.M.M.-enabled bridge to start rippling like a water bed. This sends more Euphoria-infused Wookiees toppling over the sides while those that remain struggle to regain their balance. They are only prolonging the inevitable. Using a more personal form of the Force, Vader hoists a struggling Wookiee into the air and dashes him against a wooden support beam, which cracks and splinters with remarkable authenticity. As another warrior is lifted, he grabs on to one of the remaining beams and hangs on for dear life, but Vader dislodges the wooden buttress and hurls it, with the Wookiee still attached, over the bridge.

Not everything goes as planned. At one point, a tossed boulder hangs suspended in midair—a bug that needs to be fixed. And once Vader’s Force attacks start the bridge rippling, it doesn’t stop, making it look like one of those time-lapse films of a bridge being roiled by an earthquake. “They get a little bouncy. That’s something we’re working on,” Blackman says before turning his attention back to the game. Whenever Piper dispatches a Wookiee in a particularly inspired way, an excited “Whoa!” or a satisfied “Sweet!” erupts from the half-dozen or so men who are watching this scene of bloodless carnage with me. “Impale him,” shouts out Blackman, and Piper responds by pushing the appropriate buttons. Darth Vader’s red-bladed lightsaber powers up with a familiar hum, and he hurls it hilt over blade at a Wookiee. The weapon embeds itself in the chest of the ill-fated creature and then returns to Vader’s hand as his victim crumples. Blackman chuckles mirthfully along with some of the other men. “Best move in the game,” he says.

In their hoodies and lanyards and baseball caps, they do not look like gods, but after what I have just seen, it is hard not to think in those terms.