Colin Cantwell, designer of the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and other iconic spaceships, has died
The animator, inventor, and analyst was 90.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Colin Cantwell, lead starship designer for Star Wars and CBS analyst for the moon landing, has died. His partner, Sierra Dall, confirmed toThe Hollywood Reporterthat he died at home in Colorado on Saturday.
Cantwell worked with George Lucas to draw and build prototypes for various Star Wars spacecraft, creating memorable designs that would continue being featured in subsequent movies and games. His designs include the TIE Fighter, X-Wing, Y-Wing, Tantive IV, sandcrawler, landspeeder, and Death Star.
Cantwell also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and WarGames, for which he created the computer graphics dramatizing a nuclear launch that would later inspireDEFCON.
Before his career in Hollywood, Cantwell had worked for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on educational programs, which is how he ended up becoming CBS’s lead analyst for the broadcast of the moon landing. It was Cantwell’s job to handle communications between NASA and news anchor Walter Cronkite.
In aReddit AMAfrom 2016, Cantwell recalled the creation of the Death Star. “I didn’t originally plan for the Death Star to have a trench,” he wrote, “but when I was working with the mold, I noticed the two halves had shrunk at the point where they met across the middle. It would have taken a week of work just to fill and sand and re-fill this depression. So, to save me the labor, I went to George and suggested a trench. He liked the idea so much that it became one of the most iconic moments in the film!”
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
‘Please give it a chance’: Brighter Shores studio asks players to have patience with its unusual progression system, promises it’s actually a lot of fun ‘once you get used to it’
Brighter Shores is a RuneScape successor with lots of professions and little wonder
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
