Star Wars review: the trench run you could finally fly yourself

You grab the yoke, and the screen fills with glowing lines. TIE fighters swing past. A voice from the movie crackles in your ear. Then the Death Star rises in front of you, you dive toward its surface, and you drop into the trench. For anyone who had spent the summer after the film pretending to be a pilot, this was the moment.

One scene, three phases

Atari's Star Wars does not try to tell the whole story. It takes the assault on the Death Star and splits it into three phases: a dogfight with TIE fighters in space, a low run across the surface of the Death Star, and then the trench itself. Clear all three and the whole thing starts again, harder, with each new wave bringing more fire and more obstacles.

The game is on rails, but it never feels passive. You are not trying to destroy everything. You are trying to survive long enough, and your shield can only take so many hits. The enemies fire glowing fireballs rather than beams, and you can shoot those down, so good players are always cleaning the air in front of them.

The yoke and the trench

The controls are a yoke with four buttons, and they are wonderful. The yoke gives the flight a sense of weight and aim that a joystick could not. It turns out the controller was originally designed for Army Battlezone, a training simulator built for the military, which may be why it feels so solid in your hands.

At the end of the trench you fire a proton torpedo at the exhaust port. Hit it and the Death Star explodes. There is even a bonus for using the Force, which you earn by destroying the Death Star without firing at anything except the exhaust port. Every serious player tried it, and most of us panicked and fired too early.

It was the first time the most famous scene in movies was a thing you did, not a thing you watched.

What it meant back then

In American arcades Star Wars came in upright and cockpit cabinets, and the cockpit was the prize. You sat inside, the room disappeared, and the voices from the film came from speakers around your head. A mall arcade with a cockpit Star Wars usually had a line in front of it, and a crowd of kids watching the screen over the shoulder of whoever was flying.

The color vector graphics looked like nothing else on the floor, bright lines on black, which somehow felt more like the movie than a detailed picture would have.

Playing it now

Star Wars holds up because it knows exactly what it is. It is a flight through the most famous sequence of the film, tuned to be tense and short and replayable. Shoot the fireballs, protect your shield, and on the trench run, trust your aim and wait. If you have a yoke to play it with, even better.