How to play Star Wars: Dark Forces on Mac

PlatformsComputer

Game summary

The Empire stretches its evil clutches across the galaxy, consuming planets with devastating results. Through many struggles, the Rebel Alliance has learned of a new Imperial battle station, the Death Star, with enough power to destroy an entire planet. The evil Empire is secretly building a massive army to complete their arsenal of domination and render their reign of terror unstoppable. Kyle Katarn, a formal Imperial Stormtrooper must join the Rebel Alliance's covert operations division, and re-take the Empire from the inside, one battle at a time. Unlike many other Doom-based games, Star Wars: Dark Forces attempted a realistic approach: the missions followed a specific storyline, sometimes cut up by scenes to progress the narrative. Each mission had its own briefing and objective. The levels were designed to represent actual bases, mines, facilities, and other known places from the Star Wars universe, like Star Destroyer interiors, Jabba's ship, Coruscant, etc.
First released: Feb 1995

Play Star Wars: Dark Forces on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Star Wars: Dark Forces on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Star Wars: Dark Forces installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Star Wars: Dark Forces like you would on any PC.
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