The Empire Strikes Back

[DuckandCover]

When I was a youngster one arcade game I expended a lot of quarters on was Star Wars. Dogfighting with TIE fighters and hurtling down the Death Star trench at high speed never got old. I can remember reading, in one of the old videogame magazines, about The Empire Strikes Back conversion. The thought of doing battle with vector AT-ATs sounded promising. Yet, to this day I've never seen an actual Empire Strikes Back machine. Was the conversion limited in its release? Or did arcade owners feel the new game wasn't worth the trouble and effort? Just wondering if anyone knows anything about the history of the game. Granted, I live in the west texas wastelands now, but even during my residencies in large cities, I never encountered one of these games.

 

[ 04-17-2002: Message edited by: duckandcover ]

[NE146]

ESB was released as an conversion for Star Wars cabinets but I think by that time the industry was already on a downturn and thus it didn't see wide release.

 

You can read about the game on KLOV. And of course you can play it the game itself in MAME (but it tends to lose something in the tranlation when you use a mouse) People who collect the Star Wars cabinets/cockpits sometimes have the Empire Strikes Back board installed to play just that. But these days you can just buy Clay Cowgill's multi-game kit and have BOTH in one cabinet!

 

Check it out: http://www.multigame.com/ESB.HTM

[Inky]

Actually, download the st emulator STEEM and the approps TOS rom and the image. I actually like that better than the emulated via MAME

[schuwalker]

Back in the day, I went to alot of arcades and even one of my friends owns one. I saw this game once and a local pizza place. So I say it was pretty rare...

[Gregory DG]

I saw it a lot back in the day. It was usually right next to a SW machine so I never thought of it as being a conversion kit.

[+DamonicFury]

I never saw this game back in the 80's despite being a HUGE fan of the Star Wars vector game.

 

I became aware of it's existence when a friend showed me the port of it running on his Amiga (this was around 1992.)

 

A few years later, I saw the actual game for the first (and so far, only) time at a Videotopia exhibit.

 

In the years since then, I've played it a bit in MAME, but like the original Star Wars, it just doesn't control all that well with a mouse.

 

Last year, I finally picked up a real Star Wars machine, and soon after a ESB multigame from Mark Spaeth (Looking at multigame.com, it seems that Clay is out of the multigame business) It's mighty nice to be able to play ESB the way it was intended! That said, it doesn't quite offer the same thrill as the original Star Wars game.