L.A. GAMES: NINTENDO BETS ON `STAR WARS' RACES.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Among the companies betting big on the new ``Star Wars'' prequel is video game giant Nintendo, which used this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center to show off its newest game, based on what is probably the movie's most exciting sequence, the pod races.

Nintendo can count on one very interested fan: Jake Lloyd, the 10-year-old actor who plays Anakin Skywalker in the movie ``Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace.''

``It's really fun - a really fun game. It's faster than most regular car games because it's pod racing,'' said Lloyd, an avowed Nintendo fan, who was there when the company unveiled the game, Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, in a press conference in downtown Los Angeles Theater.

Lloyd's character participates in the pod races in an attempt to win his freedom. The pod racers are basically two rocket engines tethered by long cords to a small control pod.

The racers careen over a series of tracks across the desert planet of Tatooine, bumping against each other, swerving around curves and trying to shoehorn through tight canyons.

``On the sets, as much moving as I did with the pod, I was just sitting there,'' Lloyd said. But in the game, he said, ``I got to really react.''

Lloyd also appeared at Nintendo's mammoth booth at the Expo on Thursday, playing others in head-to-head races for a brief time, before resuming the whirlwind of publicity appearances leading up to the movie's release next week.

The game is to be released Monday, two days before the movie, and company officials hope it will help push Nintendo's share of the $7 billion-a-year video game business to more than 50 percent this year, said Peter Main, the company's executive vice president for sales and marketing. He called the game the star of the company's lineup of titles for this year.

The company will spend $10 million marketing the game with ads, television commercials and other promotion, Main said.

In the next six weeks, Nintendo is expecting to sell 1.5 million copies of the game, which runs on the Nintendo 64 video game console, Main said. The company also expects to sell 500,000 special-edition N64 consoles that will come packaged with the game.

At its press conference, Nintendo showed about five minutes of video clips from the game, which appears to be wildly fluid and quite fast. It takes good advantage of the talents of the N64 machine, which has substantially faster graphics capability than Sony's industry leader, the PlayStation.

``For those of you who have seen the movie, you'll agree with me that the most exciting part is the 10-minute clip of the pod racing,'' Main said. ``America's going to need seat belts in every living room to play this one.''

Lucasarts, the San Rafael-based game company owned by ``Star Wars'' creator George Lucas, also showed off its other movie-related titles at a packed theater presentation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, on Thursday.

The array of titles will appear on most major gaming platforms at some point this year, said Mary Bihr, director of sales and marketing for Lucasarts. Racer will also appear for personal computers but will work only with those using a graphics accelerator card.

In another good-looking game, with the same name as the movie, players will be able to live out the adventures of the main characters of the movie, which is mostly a third-person action adventure, Lucasarts President Jack Sorensen said.

``I actually think, at its heart, `Phantom Menace' is an adventure game,'' Sorensen said.

In the short video clip shown by Lucasarts, protagonists fight light-saber duels, travel through space, negotiate with hundreds of computer-based characters and work their way through a series of backdrops that look like scenes in the movie.

Sorensen said his company worked closely with the filmmaker to create scenes very similar to those in the movie's earlier versions.

``We think it's great we were able to get close to the original shots,'' Sorensen said. ``Maybe it's an earlier version of the film than you'll see, but it's no less valid.''

Tiger Electronics also was showing off its array of ``Star Wars''-related electronic games and other products, including Princess Amidala compact phones, royal Naboo starship answering machines, Darth Maul binoculars with a listening device and laser tag toys based on versions of ``Star Wars'' blasters.

The ``Star Wars'' hype nearly overshadowed other big news from Nintendo - namely the first details of its next-generation gaming machine, which is code-named Dolphin for now, said Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America.

Nintendo announced deals with Matsushita Electric Co. and with IBM Microelectronics to provide key parts of the new machine, though Nintendo officials released relatively few other details.

Matsushita, whose best-known American brand is Panasonic, will create special DVD drives with additional anti-piracy protection to run the games created for the Dolphin, Lincoln said.

In the past, Nintendo has been criticized for relying on cartridges for its games. Although the cartridges are hard to copy illegally, at least compared with the CD-ROMs used by the PlayStation, they also are much more expensive to make, increasing the cost to producers and consumers.

Matsushita and Nintendo also will work together to create other kinds of consumer electronics devices, such as set-top cable boxes or DVD drives that can also play Nintendo-branded games, movies and music, Lincoln said.

IBM and Nintendo signed a separate $1 billion deal to make the new computer brain for the Dolphin, and Lincoln promised it would exceed anything proposed by any of its competitors.

And unlike the Sony-Hitachi partnership, designed to create a superfast processor for Sony's next-generation PlayStation 2, IBM is already making chips using the specialized techniques that allow it to cram more circuits than ever on wires as fine as one-500th the width of a human hair, Lincoln said.

``Nobody, nobody else in the world, does what IBM can do,'' Lincoln said. ``It will be the fastest, most powerful chip in any home video game system now or announced, period.''

Sega is making a do-or-die pitch during E3 to push its own next-generation console, the Dreamcast. Its last run at the video game business, the Saturn, failed miserably, and most observers believe the company must do well with Dreamcast or it will founder or need radical remaking. Dreamcast, already released in Japan, will debut in the United States on Sept. 9.

Sony has announced most technical details of its PlayStation 2 but has what its own executives admit is an aggressive schedule to debut the final product in 2000 - in the spring in Japan and in the fall in the United States.

The new Nintendo machine will debut in late 2000, Lincoln said.

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3 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) Pod racing like that in the ``Star Wars'' prequel is the star of the video game scene at an exposition in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

(2--Color) The racer in a small pod runs two rocket engines in the game.

(3) Other game exhibitors walk near the Nintendo display Thursday in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press