Star Wars (1983 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 1985, Flavio Tozzi, Dave Roberts and Mike Ohren took turns at one Star Wars arcade machine for five days, two hours and 26 minutes. They did it all on a single credit. Their combined score reached 1,000,000,012 points, and Computer and Video Games verified it in its September 1985 edition. The marathon raised money for a local charity. The machine they played was Star Wars, a 1983 arcade game from Atari, Inc., designed by Mike Hally. It used 3D color vector graphics to turn the assault on the Death Star from the 1977 film into something a player could fly. Several questions sit behind that marathon. Where did the game's unusual flight yoke come from? Why does the Death Star keep coming back no matter how many times it explodes? And how did one arcade cabinet earn a place on lists of the greatest video games of all time?

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• 2. Survival Over Slaughter

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  Red Five is the call sign the player inherits, flying an X-wing fighter as Luke Skywalker from a first-person view. The controller is a yoke with four buttons. Two are trigger style, and two sit where the thumbs fall. Every button fires a laser from the X-wing's four leading edges.

  Nothing here demands a clean sweep of the enemy. The player does not have to destroy every TIE fighter and gun turret to move on. The real task is to stay alive for a set stretch of time, either by dodging enemies and their shots or by blasting them.

  Six shields give the pilot a margin for error. Each collision with an enemy or a projectile costs one shield. Once all six are gone, the next hit ends the game.

  The enemy fire itself departs from the film. In the movie, the units shoot beams like lasers. In the game, they hurl projectiles that resemble fireballs, and the player gets a chance to shoot those down. Speech synthesis adds voices that emulate the actors from the film.

  Those shields are tested across three connected attack sequences, and the first one unfolds in open space beside the Death Star.

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• 3. Three Attack Phases

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  The "Imperial March" or another piece of John Williams's Star Wars score plays electronically as phase one begins. The player then dogfights with Darth Vader and enemy TIE fighters in space near the Death Star. When the TIE waves are done, yellow grid lines on the Death Star spell out a message. On odd-numbered waves it reads "May the force be with you." On even-numbered waves the lines spell the names of some of the developers.

  The first wave skips phase two altogether. From the second wave onward, the player must skim the surface of the Death Star toward its equatorial trench. In the second wave, artillery bunkers attack. From the third wave on, laser turrets on towers rise up to confront the pilot. Destroying every turret earns a bonus.

  Phase three is the trench run. The player steers down the trench and fires a proton torpedo at the exhaust port. A direct hit destroys the Death Star and awards a bonus shield, up to a maximum of six. The game can be set internally to allow eight. A miss costs a shield and sends the player back to attempt the trench again. A player who fires at nothing except the exhaust port earns a bonus for "using the Force."

  Then the cycle restarts at phase one, and each new wave greatly raises the difficulty. TIE fighters shoot more often, and obstacles appear in the trench.

  The developer names glowing on those grid lines belong to a project that began under a different title.

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• 4. Warp Speed Origins

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  Warp Speed was the working title when development began in 1981. Ed Rotberg, who also worked on the vector-based game Battlezone, first headed the project. The yoke had an odd pedigree. It was originally designed for Army Battlezone, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle training simulator that Atari built for the United States Army.

  Rotberg left Atari in October 1981. After he left, Atari signed a licensing agreement with Lucasfilm and finished the game.

  On the 24th of January 1983, Atari held focus group testing. Three groups of players took part: men aged 15-19, men aged 20-35, and women aged 17-30.

  The verdict of those groups was only the first test, and the next would come from the arcade charts that autumn.

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• 5. Home Ports

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  Parker Brothers, with development by Imagic, made the first home conversions in 1983 and 1984. They arrived on the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision and Commodore 64.

  A second round of conversions followed in 1987 and 1988. These covered the Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron and BBC Micro. The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 got new versions as well. The UK-based Vektor Grafix developed all of them, except that Zeppelin Games made the Atari 8-bit version. Domark published them in Europe.

  During this period, Broderbund acquired the rights to develop Star Wars games from Lucasfilm. In 1988, Broderbund published the Macintosh, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS versions in North America. In 1989 it republished the Atari ST and Amiga versions.

  The Amiga and Atari ST versions allow mouse control and include digitized sound effects. The Macintosh version carries sampled speech from the films. Its only in-game music is a monophonic theme during the "attract" mode, the demonstration loop that plays while the machine waits for a player.

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• 6. Sales and Reviews

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  Atari produced 12,695 arcade cabinets of Star Wars, and it was the company's top-selling arcade release of 1983. In October 1983, it topped the Play Meter arcade chart for street locations in the United States. In Japan, the Game Machine issue of the 1st of November 1983 named it the most successful upright or cockpit arcade unit of the month.

  Home versions drew their own notices. COMPUTE! praised the Atari ST version, calling it "amazing, smoothly animated."

  In 1989, Hartley, Patricia and Kirk Lesser reviewed Broderbund's MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 versions for Dragon #145. Their column was called "The Role of Computers." They gave the game 3 out of 5 stars.

  Macworld liked the Macintosh version's gameplay, citing "fast-paced action" and calling it "extremely challenging in higher levels." It also praised the sound effects and the 3D graphics, which it said "enhance the game's action and excitement." It criticized the copy protection built around a master disk. It also found the game's three playable scenarios to have "limited" replay value.

  Years later, magazine editors would sort the game into ranked lists, and the placements say a lot about how it aged.

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• 7. Hall of Fame Rankings

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  In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Star Wars 61st on its "Top 100 Video Games." A year later, Next Generation placed the arcade version 58th on its "Top 100 Games of All Time." The magazine cited "Awesome vector graphics, multiple triggers, a deluxe cabinet with powerful speakers in the back, and digitized voices." It ventured that this was "Probably the best licensed game ever."

  Next Generation returned to the game in 1999, listing it 24th on its "Top 50 Games of All Time." Its comment ran: "Besides giving you the opportunity to reenact what many of us consider to be the greatest cinematic experience of our youth, Star Wars delivered fast-shooting gameplay with all the subtleties, and the combination of tight control and vector graphics make it equally fun today."

  In 2001, the members of Killer List of Videogames voted it one of the top 100 arcade games of all time.

  The arcade original also had a sequel, though a far less famous one.

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• 8. Sequels and Revivals

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  Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back arrived in 1985 as an arcade sequel, and it was sold as a conversion kit for the original. An owner could convert a Star Wars machine into The Empire Strikes Back with that kit. It remains the lesser-known of the two.

  In October 2019, the Arcade1up division of Tastemakers LLC released a 3/4 scale recreation of the original Atari cabinet. It features emulated versions of the Star Wars coin-op, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi games.

  Still, the longest-lived tradition around the game belongs to the players who tried to outlast the machine.

  Robert Mruczek scored 300 million points in 49 hours of play in 1984, the world record for an individual. The score counter on the game turns over at 100 million points, so a run like that means passing the counter's limit repeatedly.

  In 2005, Brandon Erickson set a world endurance record of 54 hours on a single credit. His score was 283 million.

  Some competitions chose to make the game harder. The annual Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard/Guinness Book Masters Tournament set the machines to start with the initial shields and no bonus shields. In the 1986 tournament, David Palmer scored 31,660,614 points in about 7 hours.

  That score was published in the Guinness Book of World Records, and it remains the world record to this day.

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