#Death Star Battle

[pedroam-bang]

John Conrad Berkey - Return Of The Jedi: Death Star Battle (1983)

[everygame]

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle (Atari 2600)

Developed/Published by: James Wickstead Design Associates / Parker Brothers Released: 12/9/1983 Completed: 19/11/2024 Completion: Blew up the Death Star. A bunch of times.

Well, we’ve reached the end of Parker Brothers run with the Star Wars license for video games, and while it hasn’t exactly been diminishing returns (the unreleased Ewok Adventure was better than Jedi Arena, at least) it hasn’t been exactly edifying. If I want to be completely fair here, they weren’t in the best situation: the video games industry in North America was imploding and they were stuck making games for the creaky hardware that was at the center of it. 

You’d hope they’d have made the best of it–and I really do think The Empire Strikes Back is a fully formed piece of work. But if Ewok Adventure was half-baked, we’re talking raw dough here.

In Death Star Battle, you control the Millennium Falcon as it attempts to destroy the Death Star II before it’s fully constructed–first by getting past the Death Star’s shield, and then by, er, shooting bits off it off until you can reach the core and shoot that. And then you do it all again.

It’s a bit weird. There are two screens, which feels… wrong (come on guys, I know memory was at a premium, but rule of three at least) and in both screens you effectively only play in the bottom two-thirds of the screen. On the first screen, the rest is taken up with the shield and the Death Star in the distance, and you have to try and time it to pop through one of the holes (?) that show up in the shield randomly to get to the second screen while avoiding TIE Interceptors and (most dangerously) the shield’s “outermost energy band” which appears and disappears and kills you because… well, it would be too easy to get through the shield otherwise.

Look at that perspective! One nice touch is that you can actually see the Death Star being constructed as you play.

On the second screen the Death Star itself takes up a big chunk of real estate, and it feels like you should be able to move all the way around it–but you can’t. This seems to be because if you could move around it the “death ray” which moves back and forth (hey, a bit like the lasers in Gridrunner!) would have to aim in more than one direction, so you’re still stuck on the bottom two-thirds even if there’s no visual reason why.

Overall this game is simple, but it could be, I don’t know… fine. What stops it reaching the bare minimum is that you have no fine control over the Millennium Falcon at all, as it slides around like Nien Numb is drunk on (checks Wookipedia) "Kowakian Rum" after a night listening to hot jizz [“you couldn’t resist, could you”--Star Wars Ed.] While a touch of inertia isn’t a horrible idea–after all, this is a post-Asteroids space game, we expect a little–this is a game where you need to be able to accurately shoot in all directions to try and pick your way to the Death Star core, and you just… can’t. Instead you end up doing the herky-jerky dancing that represent the very worst kind of control system as you desperately move left a bit and then right a bit overshooting endlessly–and never mind if you want to hold on a diagonal! It’s not so much frustrating–you’d have to care a lot more about this game than I think it’s possible to–but it’s certainly annoying.

To be honest though, if you could move accurately the game would be a piece of piss. The difficulty switches tell the story: the left difficulty switch allows you to set the game so that you either collide with TIE Fighters or not, and the right difficulty switch allows you to set the Death Star’s death ray to either only move to the extent of the Death Star or across the entire screen.

If you set it so that you collide with TIE Fighters, the game is essentially impossible. There’s not enough screen space to avoid them, and you can’t control well enough to anyway! But then this means that the first screen is trivial–you just wait until the first hole in the shield appears and pop through it immediately. And then on the second screen, if you don’t set it so the Death Star’s death ray can reach across the entire screen, you can literally just set the Millennium Falcon up in a corner away from it and shoot your way to the core (well, after the half hour it takes you to get into position.)

It’s actively not possible to get the game settings where it provides an interesting challenge throughout (again, wrestling with controls is not an interesting challenge.) Yet the graphics and sound are (comparatively) decent, with a hyperspace animation and everything, so there's a sense here that the effort on this game was largely expended there.

Considering that, I got a bit interested in who made Death Star Battle, because there’s a dearth of good information on it online–Ewok Adventure is, if anything, better memorialised.

In his interview with Digital Press about Ewok Adventure, Larry Gelberg described that after Parker Brothers signed the rights for Return of the Jedi he and Ray “Raymo” Miller “came up with 3-4 game concepts” after seeing concept art and production stills: “Raymo came up with the Breakout-style Death Star Battle game.”

(It’s interesting that he describes it as “Breakout-style” considering the finished game has little to no relation to breakout other than I suppose the Death Star is destructible. It speaks to how unrefined the final design was.)

Unusually, although Parker Brothers did Ewok Adventure in house, as they did with their earlier Star Wars games, Death Star Battle was in fact outsourced to James Wickstead Design Associates (JWDA) a fascinatingly unhallowed developer who you may only have heard of due to Kevin Bunch’s detailed article for the Video Game History Foundation on the lost Atari 2600 game Tarzan.

As Bunch noted, JWDA already had a relationship with Parker Brothers as toy designers, and so it seemed likely that they’ve have been considered a safe pair of hands for Ray Miller’s concept if the rest of Parker Brothers was at capacity.

Indeed, in an interview with Atari Compendium, JWDA’s Todd Marshall said of Death Star Battle “we had a lot of freedom and leeway to redesign things until the 'client' was happy with it” so it seems likely they were largely left to their own devices.

However, the best piece of information I have to go on, and you’ll never believe this, is original research. It looks like Todd Marshall provided JWDA engineer Henry Will IV’s notebooks to Atari Compendium (which is… interesting, because Henry Will IV is still kicking, so why did he have them?) and while you have to parse some difficult handwriting at points, you can follow the entire development of Death Star Battle from the 1st of February 1983, where Will writes “Discovered that: Parker has asked us to do VCS Star Wars.”

History is made.

He even says “1% royalty & fees - no cap” which is crazy, because I thought only Gen Z said that. He was saying it in 1983!!!

A much more dedicated historian than I might want to pour over the notebooks for more details, though even at a glance just learning that Will was by and large solely responsible for Death Star Battle is something–and he even notes on the 12th of September 1983 that the game is available in “Bradlees” for $31.77 giving us the earliest confirmed release date for the game. Wow! Etc.

Of course, the problem now is that I can put a face to the game–it’s Ray Miller’s concept, sure, but Henry Will IV’s fault. Sorry Henry but this is fucking rubbish.

Will I ever play it again? No thank you.

Final Thought: Look, to be fair to the guy, he had like seven months to make this while working on several other things, and for the Atari 2600 as I said the game honestly looks pretty good, with strong perspective and animation on the Death Star’s shield and pleasingly iconic sprites. But it cries out for a dedicated designer; it manages to have even less of an unified design concept than Ewok Adventure, and above all it makes me wonder why after The Empire Strikes Back Sam Kjellman didn’t design any more Star Wars games–he was good at it!

(Kjellman wouldn’t design another game until… Outback Joey for Sega Genesis??? One of the rarest games on the system, that used a heart rate sensor???)

Anyway, I think discovering that this was a JWDA joint gives some clarity as to why it was published over Ewok Adventure. This has arguably even more horrible controls than Ewok Adventure, but it’s about a more exciting part of the movie and Parker Brothers almost certainly put more money into outsourcing this than on Ewok Adventure in-house, which I suspect made it somewhat easier to throw away what their programmer made. So perhaps less of a punishment for Gelberg’s hubris than he thought, and simply some sunk-cost fallacy at work.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[aspiringnexu]

Love that Star Trek accurately portrays humans in the future as being DTF practically anything. Works wonders for diplomacy.

"Sure I don't find you attractive, but give me ten minutes, your Excellency, and I'll find someone on this ship who's into tentacles and slime."

We may not be super intelligent or super strong, but give humans a chance. We're annoyingly likeable, tenacious, stubborn, and attracted to the weirdest things.

[star-wars-forever]

[tellmegoodbye]

Sadly, some of the shit I've seen people saying is reminding me of 3x13 all over again.

I'm not sure how you look at a couple like Tarlos who are constantly fighting for each other and love each other unconditionally and think "I need to paint one of them as a shitty husband and a villain" just because they are in couples counseling.

There was no reason to take a "side" in 3x13 because it was about mutual understanding and the strength of their relationship. TK was right to want more of a support system outside of Carlos, and Carlos was right for wanting to understand TK better and remind him that he didn't have to hide any pieces of himself from him.

It's the same thing here. TK is not being "needy" or "selfish", he is concerned about Carlos' mental health and he can see that his obsession is getting to the point where it is detrimental to Carlos, and to their relationship. Carlos is still grieving, and he is definitely not going to have answers this episode. The goal is for him to be okay with the possibility of never having answers, not to stop wanting them. He is still allowed to want justice. And TK is allowed to step in when he sees that Carlos is starting to use this case as an unhealthy coping mechanism and completely distance himself.

There are no "sides" in a relationship. There is mutal understanding, and there is working together. That is what they are doing by going to counseling.

[dangerdazee]

me wanting to do a full in-order rewatch

vs

my list of favorite episodes

[imaginative-joy]

Meanwhile on Tanalorr, circa 4 ABY...

Text (In case you can't read my handwriting):

Merrin: So the Rebels blew up another Death Star. Cal: Good for them.

[alphamecha-mkii]

[redbean-nom]

rewatched carnage of krell and it just hit me that between the entire? 501st battalion and the entirety of Ghost:

general's dead

unable to contact commander and other general

ghost lieutenant's dead

meaning that, for the post-execution battle to defend the base, Rex was the highest ranking on that side of the planet and therefore had to be the acting general for an entire 1.5 battalions.

[silentghostboy]

When packing for a quest Will insisted I bring a first aid kit, so I decided to pack my “Oops You Died” emergency kit! He was not amused.

[stumblegrounds]

WEEK 1 DAY 4 MATCH 1

PATCHOULI KNOWLEDGE FROM TOUHOU PROJECT

VS

[YOUR FRIEND] PALPATINE FROM STAR WAR

CHECK THE RULES AND CHOOSE THEIR FATE

[pedroam-bang]

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return Of The Jedi (1983)

[passumstars]

Sweet dreams

[thevaudevilledemon]

Disney Duels 2: Round 15 of 15: Corrupted Heroes

If I had a nickel for every time I ended these polls with a Kingdom Hearts vs Star Wars match-up, I'd have two nickels... which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

And no, we are not looking at Darth Vader stats, this is pre-Vader Anakin we're talking about here.

[star-wars-forever]

[vintagepromotions]

Advertisement for Return of the Jedi Death Star Battle video game on the Atari 2600 (1983).