Star Wars And The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1982, Intellivision)

Rob Wright: This was the reason I constantly nagged my parents to buy me an Intellivision system when I was younger. In retrospect, The Empire Strikes Back was somewhat boring and far too repetitive, even by the standards of 1982. Still, the game is worth mentioning, because it was the first Star Wars video game ever made for home consoles, appearing on both the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision systems.

View Star Wars Slide Show (40 images)

The game derives from just one scene from the movie "The Empire Strikes Back," which is unfortunate. Still, the Battle of Hoth is a most memorable sequence, and it makes for a decent enough video game. Players pilot a Snowspeeder and attempt to defend the Rebel base from the Imperial forces, which includes the giant AT-ATs, in a side-scrolling shooter. You have a limited number of Snowspeeders to defend the Rebel base, and a map at the bottom of the screen informs you about how close the advancing AT-ATs are to the base's generators. The heavily-armored Imperial walkers were quite hard to bring down, and that difficulty was about the only element of The Empire Strikes Back that kept the game going for more than 10 minutes.

The box art for the 1982 version of The Empire Strikes Back.

The graphics and gameplay are primitive, of course, but if my memory serves me correctly, the sound effects were quite good - they successfully replicated the robotic noises of the enormous AT-ATs as they stomped their way across the ice. Early video games always had to leave quite a bit to the imagination, because they were limited by the graphics of the 8-bit era, and the sound effects and music helped set the scene tremendously.

"The Empire Strikes Back" would get two more treatments in later years: Atari's 1988 version, which is similar to the original Star Wars arcade game, and the LucasArts 1992 title, which is a side-scrolling action game. Parker Brothers, which designed and produced the original Empire title, didn't earn any medals for creativity or depth of gameplay, but for the first Star Wars-inspired video game, The Empire Strikes Back isn't all that bad.