Developed/Published by: Atari
Released: 09/1984
Completed: 05/05/2026
Completion: Destroyed the Death Star once, but on a later return trip Lando Calrissian and Nien Numb [“No! Not Nien Numb!”–Ed.] sadly died after destroying the reactor.

Uh… July the 28th… be with you? It had been a while since I played a Star Wars game, so May the 4th, despite being an annoying pun, did actually put me in mind to finally sit down and play Atari’s take on Return Of The Jedi seriously, a game that I’d say my entire of experience up to this point had been dying close to instantly because I found the fast isometric scrolling so difficult to look at, and the game so hard to control.

Here’s what I’ll say: even if you really put your head down, try and get used to what Return of the Jedi is serving up… it’s hard to look at and impossible to comfortably control (and before you ask: I did get some time with an actual machine¹ with the yoke controller, and if anything that might have been worse.)

Atari’s take on Return Of The Jedi is sort of the black sheep of Atari’s Star Wars output. As it was released to capitalise on the film in a more timely manner than Atari’s Star Wars, it awkwardly precedes Atari’s arcade take on The Empire Strikes Back, and it’s the only game in the trilogy that doesn’t use vector graphics. In conversation with Retro Gamer, developer Dennis Harper recounted:

“Lyle Rains, our chief technical guy, gave me the assignment and he said that Atari had developed some innovative hardware that could store an enormous amount of playfield graphics using relatively little storage. Return Of The Jedi was to be the flagship game to show off this technology.”

Therefore–and inspired by Zaxxon–they decided to go for an isometric viewpoint, and create levels based on the climax of the film much the same way Atari’s take on Star Wars had: the speeder bike chase, the space ambush/attack on the shield generator, and the flight through the Death Star in the Millennium Falcon to destroy the reactor core.

In some respects, it’s a classic Atari arcade game of the era. It loops, you can choose to start on later levels for a score bonus, there’s as much digitised speech as they can jam in. But there’s something very unusual in it. 

You won’t notice it if you start on the first level and don’t make it into the second, and so I imagine most people never saw it, because Return Of The Jedi is, as I said, extremely challenging to survive any length of time in. On the first level, you only get the speeder bike chase and the Death Star reactor core attack/escape. On the second, you experience the space ambush/shield generator attack level between them, and the game cuts between the action.

The only other example I can give of a game doing something like this, this early, is Karateka, which came out over a year later (I have no sense if Mechner had ever seen a Return Of The Jedi arcade machine) and which, arguably, is doing something a lot simpler with its cuts–simply letting you know there’s a dude running towards you. A closer comparison, really, would be something like Thirty Flights Of Loving in terms of cuts between action you’re still in control of, but that’s years later and, really, doing something different with its cinematic cuts. 

In Return Of The Jedi, at one point you’re the Millennium Falcon with an X-Wing escort, fighting off TIE Fighters, then suddenly, you’re Chewbacca in a AT-ST, trying to dodge logs… then back again! Surprisingly, it’s not discombobulating at all (or at least, no more discombobulating than the game already is) and it does make me wonder, as Thirty Flights Of Loving did, if we haven’t missed something with the form by not engaging with cinematic cutting during play more. Harper believes he was the first to do this kind of cutting (I can’t find anything earlier, and I’ve annoyed the Gaming Alexandria discord enough as it is) and it came from a genuine attempt to recreate the parallel action from the film. The arcade flyer, interestingly, touts it as the “new ‘Split Wave’ movie technique.” Thanks to all that digitised speech, you get the sense of a battle across two fronts and the connection between them, with the level-ending cut-scene making clear that as you got the shield generator down on the ground, the Millennium Falcon can now get to the Death Star.

To be honest, I’m sure in a noisy arcade it just felt sort of random, and it really does require knowledge of the film to truly work, so it’s not exactly perfect, but I appreciate the attempt.

I’d probably appreciate it more, however, if Return Of The Jedi was just a little more… playable in the first place. The game is way, way way too fast when you’re actually playing it because the aspect ratio and isometric view mean you have almost no way to anticipate what’s coming. I didn’t get far–at all–and what I managed was pure grim memorisation. The isometric viewpoint plays strange little tricks, too. Flying into the Death Star? Fine. Flying out? Almost impossible. I’m certain for many people this game was just about surviving an escape from the Death Star even once–it certainly was for me.

Return Of The Jedi isn’t terrible, it just requires such a white-knuckle intensity that it’s never actually fun. If Star Wars gave you this great sense of “playing the movie” Return Of The Jedi keeps you at more of a distance and gives you a sense of “failing at recreating the movie.”

But hey. It’s still better than Death Star Battle.

Will I ever play it again? I’ll always hop on a Star Wars machine. But this? It’s just not fun!

Final Thought: One thing I particularly like about this game, however, is the strange interpretation of Star Destroyers that have a real “what if Klasky Csupo designed Star Wars?” feel to them. It’s not quite enough, but it’s something!

1. An Arcade1Up, but close enough.  ↩︎