A brief history of Star Wars arcade games

Today is Star Wars day! Hurray!

Let's be honest though, most people fell out of love with George Lucas's meandering sci-fi epic when he started to ret con the originals to fit the contrived story of the lacklustre prequels. However, with Disney recently buying the rights to all things Lucas and getting JJ "Lost" Abrhams on-board to make Episode VII over the next couple of years, Star Wars isn't going to go away any time soon and may even get good again.

Why do I mention this? Well, not only is today today Star Wars day, but this year is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars arcade video games, so I thought I would do a brief history of Star Wars arcade games, starting with one of the most iconic arcade games of all time.

Star Wars

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1983

What better sequence from the original Star Wars film to use for the basis of an arcade game than the seminal Death Star attack run? And that is precisely what Atari did with this magnificent vector graphics rail shooter. The multi-coloured vector graphics may have been incongruous with the film, but they still managed to be incredibly evocative. The game appeared around the same time as another first person vector graphics space game, Elite, for the BBC Micro B. Just like Elite, the way Star Wars looked and moved was closer to "real" space flight than anything else out there. Add in the beautiful cockpit cabinet with the flight stick controls and the digitised voice of Alec Guinness telling you, "The Force will be with you ... always" and Star Wars everyone were in sci-fi heaven.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Shoot 'em up
Year:	1984

A year after the first Star Wars game and the last Star Wars movie in the trilogy, Atari switched from vector graphics to sprites and an fixed isometric view for Return of the Jedi. Like latter half of the film, the game switched between the battle on Endor and the battle in space to take down the half-built Death Star (2). The Endor levels consisted of racing through the forest on speeders and blasting up rolling logs and eventually the shield generator in an AT-ST. The space levels put you in control of the Millenium Falcon during the attack run on the Death Star, then the escape. The final level has you swapping between both scenes every few seconds, which is simultaneously exciting and disorientating. Like their first game, Atari filled RotJ with digitised voices and also added a few pixellated cut scenes for good measure.

The video below shows a complete play through, although watching the game from beginning to end will give you a frequent sense of deja vu.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1985

No, I'm not losing it, the game of Empire Strikes Back may have looked like the original Star Wars game, but wasn't released until a year after Return of the Jedi. The game also used the same vector graphics and cabinet as the original game. The reason for this was simple, Empire was not a full game, but a conversion kit for the original, which included a new daughter board, a new marquee and a decal for the yoke. In terms of game play, it is very similar to the first game, as you might expect. Instead of doing the attack run on the Death Star in an X-Wing, you alternate between flying a T-47 airspeeder (my favourite Star Wars fighter) in the battle to defend Hoth, then escaping the Empire through an asteroid belt in the Millenium Falcon.

The video below is from John's Arcade, who has a brilliant little arcade in his basement. I'm really very, very jealous.

Star Wars Arcade

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1993

Here's where an appreciation of proper nouns is important, because Sega's Star Wars Arcade game is should not to be confused with Atari's Star Wars arcade game. See the difference? Anyway, this game does actually play a lot like the original, but with it being released in 1993 and made by Sega, it benefited from being polygonal, not sprites or vectors. Polygonal graphics were exploding in the early 90s and Sega with their Model-1 board were one of the pioneers of the new tech. It wasn't always done well (looking back at Virtua Fighter 1 now is quite hard), but simple textured polys work great for space ships.

Star Wars Trilogy Arcade

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5
Genre:	Rail shooter/Weapon combat
Year:	1998

By 1998 it was common knowledge that a new Star Wars film was on its way, which would explain Anakin Skywalker's origins, from his rise in the Jedi order to his eventual fall to the dark side. Despite the ham-fisted way Lucas handled the reissue of the original trilogy, Star Wars fans all over the world were still excited about the prospect of a new film. We all know how that turned out. Anyway, I digress. As the name suggests, Star Wars Trilogy featured scenes from all three of the original films, specifically the rebel attacks on the Death Stars in the first and third films and the Empire attack on Hoth in the second film. While these all played out in much the same way as both Sega's and Atari's previous games, this game had a trick up its sleeve. The cabinet featured a force feedback joystick that allowed you to take control of a light sabre in two special stages. The first pits you against Boba Fett in the battle over the Sarlak pit; the second has you facing down Vader himself. Exciting stuff and it's one of those games that does not emulate well, because the force feedback joystick really added to the atmosphere.

Star Wars Racer

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5/LucasArts
Genre:	Racing
Year:	2000

Would it shock any of you if I said I didn't like Phantom Menace? No, I didn't think so. However, the pod racers were a cool (if utterly ridiculous) idea and one that lent itself well to a hectic arcade racing game - which is precisely what Sega AM5 and LucasArts did when they made Star Wars Racer in 2000.
Despite the cabinet looking like Anakin Skywalker's pod racer, the game did give the player a choice of Episode 1 pod racers to play as. While that is a nice idea, I doubt most people could name any of the other racers, with the exception of the villainous Sebulba.
There were many pod racing games on home computers and consoles and to be honest, none of them, not even this arcade version, were as good as WipeOut series on the PlayStation or Nintendo's F-Zero series, both of which did futuristic racing better.

Star Wars Starfighter

Manufacturer:	Tsunami Visual Technologies, Inc.
Developer:	Tsunami Visual Technologies, Inc.
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	2003

By 2003 the second Star Wars prequel had come and gone, and Star Wars fans were no happier about the direction these new movies were going in. While Attack of the Clones was marginally better than Phantom Menace it was still a terrible, lumbering, incoherent wreck. Anakin Skywalker was now being played by Hayden Christiansen, whose wooden acting earned him the nickname Manikin Skywalker. Even the presence of the world's most potent actor, Christopher Lee, or the appearance of Boba Fett's dad, Jango, could do nothing to save the film. Also by 2003, the arcade scene was all but dead, with modern consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Xbox offering experiences that could match or sometimes even better a typical arcade machine. So it seems hardly surprising that Sega did not do another arcade game. Instead, for the last ever Star Wars arcade game, Tsunami Visual Technologies took us back to Episode I. This time the player got to pilot a Naboo StarFighter in a series of aerial challenges followed by an assault on the Trade Federation Droid Control ships around the planet, in much the same way as many previous Star Wars star fighter games. Actually finding footage of this unexceptional game is tough, especially as there was the similarly named Jedi Star Fighter available on many home platforms. It's not a big loss and to be honest, you'll have more fun playing the 30 year-old Atari game instead.

And so it seems whether it's Star Wars movies or Star Wars arcade games, the quality can go up as well as down, but one thing you can say in favour the classic Star Wars arcade games is that George Lucas has never gone back and ret conned them.nj

But wait, that's not all...

Anyone who's been following Arcade Throwback for a good while will know I love pinball machines almost as much as video games, and there have been a fair few Star Wars pinball tables over the years. In fact, they pre-date video arcade games by 3 years. So as an appendix to the brief history of Star Wars arcade games is the even more brief history of Star Wars pin games. 

Empire Strikes Back

Manufacturer:	A. Hankin & Company
Developer:	A. Hankin & Company
Year:	1980

Star Wars 

Manufacturer:	Data East
Developer:	Data East
Year:	1992

Star Wars Trilogy Trilogy 

Manufacturer:	Sega Pinball
Developer:	Sega Pinball
Year:	1997

Star Wars Episode 1 

Manufacturer:	Williams
Developer:	Williams
Year:	2000

Sadly, not only is Episode 1 pinball the only Star Wars pinball table I've played, it was also the last real pinball table I ever played. I found it in an seafront arcade in Blackpool, back in 2002. Based on William's Pinball 2000 platform, the game included a holographic display, which you could interact with by firing the ball at targets on display. It also had a light sabre toy inside the table, which lit up at various points during play. This was before those more authentic light sabre replicas were on the market, so it seemed more special at the time. General consensus is that, like William's only other Pinball 2000 machine, Revenge from Mars, this Star Wars table was not great. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing it in Far Sight's Pinball Arcade.

So there we have it, all of the official Star Wars video games and pinball tables to have appeared in the arcades over the decades. And as rich as this history is, it's nothing compared to history of Star Wars games for home computers and consoles, but I'll leave that to another blog. In the mean time, May the forth be with you - until midnight, then it'll be May the fifth.

MTW