A Long Time Ago...
The same month principle photography finished on Return of the Jedi, winding his legendary saga down for the foreseeable future, George Lucas approached video game giant Atari with a proposal. The Atari 2600, launched just five months after Star Wars premiered, owned the relatively new home video game market. Lucas wanted to diversify his company's already-impressive portfolio. It was a perfect fit. LucasFilm Games split off from the main company in May 1982, and immediately started developing for the more advanced Atari 5200 and Atari 800 consoles... none of which were based on the Star Wars trilogy. Exclusive license to produce Star Wars games would be sold to outside companies for years to come.
First up was the venerable board game company Parker Bros., and rather than build a cart based on a five-year-old film, they decided to go with the three-year-old middle child instead. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600 puts players in a snowspeeder for the Battle of Hoth, fighting an unending march of Imperial Walkers headed straight for Echo Base. Each AT-AT has to be shot forty-eight times before it vaporized, unless players luck into hitting a small glowing block that appears at random. But the controls are responsive, your snowspeeder is genuinely speedy, and John Williams's score shrinks down nicely to MIDI-sound size when the speeder glows with the power of The Force, rendering it temporarily invulnerable.
This was the first Star Wars video game, and given its limitations, a good one... even if sales didn't reflect it. Empire had the poor fortune of arriving right on the leading edge of the video game crash of '83.
Parker Bros. took two more stabs with Jedi Arena in 1983, a paddle-game that somehow made swinging a lightsaber around seem dull, and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Death Star Battle in 1984, an anemic re-creation of the Millennium Falcon's assault on the second Death Star. A third completed game, Ewok Adventures, went unreleased. All quickly vanished, eclipsed by Atari's own take on the series.
While LucasFilm Games stepped away from the franchise, Atari stepped up in a big way. Fresh off creating Gravitar, his first-ever game project, in-house Atari designer Mike Hally drew the job of building a Star Wars cabinet for the now-booming arcade market. Vector graphics were his preferred medium, but a high-profile game like this needed something more. Hally found more when he lifted the game engine from a 1981 project called Warp-Speed, designed solely to help develop 3D vector images... a big jump from the 2D plane everyone was used to. Suddenly, Hally had a 3D shooter on his hands. His game would take players for a first-person spin in Red 5, Luke Skywalker's personal X-Wing, for an on-rails assault on the Death Star straight out of the movie.
Released in 1983 and simply called Star Wars, it became one of the most popular arcade titles in history, the first Atari game to include voice acting, and one of the few Star Wars games to feature the original actors.
Digitized sound clips of Luke, Obi-Wan, Han Solo, R2-D2, and Lord Vader himself (commenting that the Force was strong in you) float past your head in the sit-down cockpit cabinet. Players light up TIE fighters, blast gun turrets and towers rising up from the horizon, face off against Vader and shoot through the obstacle-course trench, just like the movie, and few things beat the rush of blowing up the Death Star real good. When the Imperials finally wear down your shields and take you out, Obi-Wan Kenobi sends you off in style: "The Force will be with you... always." Start to finish, it is pure fanboy wish fulfillment.
Disclaimer, I pieced together various existing articles.
