The Game: Star Wars Arcade (1983)
Original Platform: Arcade Cabinet
Version We Played: Arcade Cabinet (we found one in the wild!)
Verdict: The Force is strong with this one.
There was a Star Wars arcade game when I was growing up, and it was a very good one. Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, released in 1998, is a glorified rail shooter, shepherding players through a greatest hits of original trilogy moments, ranging from the Battle of Hoth to the Endor Moon speeder chase to the fabled Death Star trench run. Controlled with a giant joystick – also used to wield the lightsaber in the game’s awkward duelling segments – it was a fixture of 90s arcades and devourer of far too much of my allowance money.
But that Star Wars Arcade is not the Star Wars Arcade, as any true Jedi can tell you. To get the real deal, to experience the arcade game that blew minds at the time Star Wars was new, you’d need to track down the original 1983 cabinet, designed by Atari in-house programmer Mike Hally and released to rave reviews – and the joy of my older brother and cousins – the same year as Return of the Jedi.
I’d heard about Star Wars Arcade for years, I’d even watched videos of it on YouTube. As much as I loved the Trilogy Arcade of my own youth, I envied those who’d gotten to experience the original, during the era of peak Star Wars. That period has, not to put too fine a point on it, long since passed, but this has never stopped me from keeping an eye out for the classic cabinet.
Recently, on vacation to Las Vegas, I managed to find a cabinet in good – nay, excellent – condition, still operating on quarters, to my great delight. Read on, for my thoughts on one of the great arcade classics, and maybe even the best vector-graphics game ever made. (Sorry, Tempest.)
The very first interactive electronic game, William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, was built in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. Programmed to display on an oscilloscope – picture a heart monitor – it combined then-sophisticated physics modelling with rudimentary two-dimensional graphics for its abstract representation of a tennis court: one horizontal line for the ground, a short vertical line for the net, a bouncing dot for the ball.
Later, as the era of arcades and home consoles got underway, games like Pong (1972), Space Race (1973), Lunar Lander (1979), and Asteroids (1979) all tended to resemble Table for Tennis, with simple physics-based gameplay and the same two-tone, white on black, colour scheme. While some titles relied on raster graphics (where each object is made up of a cluster of pixels), many used a vector graphics system, which smoothly renders geometric shapes, based on mathematical formulas not unlike Tennis For Two’s physics model.
When Luke Skywalker pulls up his Targeting Computer at the end of Star Wars (1977), what he’s actually looking at is a vector render of the Death Star trench run – one of the earliest examples of computer generated imagery in a movie. It’s an iconic moment, even if Obi-Wan Kenobi ultimately convinces Luke to “use the Force”, landing the perfect shot (spoilers!) without relying on his computer-aided targeting system.
Decades later, the Death Star sequence remains one of the great aerial battles in cinematic history and a perennial favourite for Star Wars game adaptations. But back in the late 70s/early 80s, the odds of recreating it accurately in interactive form were next to nil. So Mike Hally and the Atari team did the next best thing: building a whole arcade cabinet which looks and plays exactly like you’re in the cockpit of an X-Wing, looking through Luke’s targeting scanner.
At its core, Star Wars Arcade (1983) isn’t so different from Tennis for Two, with its physics-based modelling and cleanly rendered geometric shapes against a black background, albeit in a multi-tone scheme (blue, green, yellow, and red) capable of rendering more than Tennis for Two’s limited palette.
Star Wars Arcade is, of course, working at a vastly more sophisticated level, replicating not only the aesthetic of the in-universe targeting scanner (variants of which are also seen on the Millennium Falcon and in the cockpit of Darth Vader’s TIE Advanced), but also the physical space, giving players a real-world yoke to grasp onto for the X-Wing controls. In so doing, Star Wars Arcade effectively offers players the opportunity to participate in one of the great battle sequences of that and any time.
Star Wars Arcade consists of three phases, programmed on an endless loop which increases with difficulty each round. Each phase is recognizably lifted from the climactic Death Star attack, seen from the first-person perspective of the X-Wing cockpit.
In the first phase, players engage in a high stakes battle above the Death Star against waves of enemy TIE fighters, led by Darth Vader. Defeat enough TIEs, and Star Wars Arcade moves to its second phase, which sees you zooming along the surface of the Death Star, dodging enemy turrets. In the final phase, you zip down into the trench leading to the Death Star’s highly vulnerable thermal exhaust port, where, in the immortal words of General Dodonna, “a precise hit will set up a chain reaction.”
Complete the third phase and the game resets to the beginning, only this time with more obstacles and more foes. The game gets harder and harder, faster and faster, until finally even the superhuman (or Jedi) is overwhelmed by the speed and difficulty, crashing into the inevitable GAME OVER. Land a certain number of points in a given round, and the game doles out one of its handful of Easter Eggs, displaying the phrase “May the Force Be With You” in the shape of the lights on the Death Star exterior. It’s good stuff.
As I said, you can watch Star Wars Arcade right now, and it’s a decent way to get a feel for how this thing works. It’s still impressive how just a few scrolling green lines can replicate the thrill of zooming down the Death Star trench, while the musical bleeps and bloops of a forty-two-year-old soundboard manage to conjure up John Williams’s legendary score.
Watching Star Wars Arcade is not, however, a substitute for the real thing: what looks dated and slow on YouTube is thrilling and unexpectedly timeless in person. Vector graphics have sadly gone the way of the dodo – Rez (available on most VR headsets) mimics the aesthetic without replicating it, though you’d probably have to go back to PS1 cult classic Vib-Ribbon for the last truly great vector game. Still, playing Star Wars Arcade today, it’s easy to see the appeal of this format. At a time when realistic graphics weren’t possible, tricking the player into perceiving a 3D space, akin to that in-universe targeting scanner, was not only viable, but better than whatever pixels a raster machine might have been able to pump out.
Just as importantly, the controls for Star Wars Arcade are slick. In lieu of a conventional joystick, players grasp a jet fighter-style yoke, with four trigger buttons corresponding to the four foils of an X-Wing. Highly responsive, this control setup only adds to the immersion, that feeling that the cabinet has been built out of the remnants of a decommissioned X-Wing.
The Death Star attack has been redone countless times in interactive media – here it is on SNES, and in LEGO, and in the legendary Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (though oddly, it’s never been translated to VR) – and while these games all have their merits, there’s no denying the charm of that first attempt, way back in 1983.
As I experienced firsthand, there’s just something very cool about playing a Star Wars game that feels like it might actually exist in-universe, perhaps hauled out of a back room at the Mos Eisley cantina for would-be Rebel pilots to test their skills on. I wasn’t the only one drawn to that cabinet that day, and it was a pleasant surprise to see just how many kids were interested in this odd-looking contraption, older, in some cases, than their parents.
When I embarked upon the Late to the Game project, it didn’t occur to me that one of the enduring classics would prove to be an arcade game I more or less stumbled upon by accident. But Star Wars Arcade really has stood the test of time, its unfamiliar visual scheme is probably one of the reasons why it works so well today: there really is nothing else that looks like it, and it hasn’t aged poorly in the same way as, say, 8-bit polygonal efforts of the same era.
In 1984, Star Wars knock-off The Last Starfighter dared to suggest an arcade cabinet could be used as a recruiting tool for an intergalactic war.
Star Wars Arcade proves this wasn’t such a crazy idea.
***
Star Wars Arcade can be found, if you’re very lucky, in a dusty old arcade somewhere or, further afield, at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. (We recommend calling ahead to make sure the cabinet is up and running.)
Alternatively, all you wealthier Star Wars dorks may want to look into the Arcade1Up Star Wars Arcade Machine, which recreates, at a slightly smaller scale, the original arcade versions of Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Having not played it, I can’t speak to the emulation quality, but Arcade1Up has a solid reputation for reproductions.
