🎮 Play The Empire Strikes Back Online (Arcade)

The Empire Strikes Back is a 1985 arcade shooter from Atari Games, a follow-up to their 1983 vector-graphics hit Star Wars and released as a conversion kit for that game’s cockpit and upright cabinets. Like the original, it renders the Star Wars universe in glowing color vector lines rather than sprites, putting the player through four linked stages drawn straight from the film: two as Luke Skywalker’s Snowspeeder over the ice plains of Hoth, and two as Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon making its escape.

How to play

Stage one, Hoth Patrol, has you hunting down Imperial Probe Droids on the Snowspeeder before they can radio your position to the Empire; shooting a Probot’s transmission burst prolongs the stage, and collecting all four Jedi letters clears every enemy shot off the screen. Stage two, Walker Assault, throws AT-AT and smaller AT-ST walkers at you — fire a tow-cable at an AT-AT’s legs to trip and destroy it instantly, or shoot its exposed cockpit the slower way. The final two stages switch to the Millennium Falcon: first surviving a TIE fighter attack on the escaping Rebel convoy, then threading an asteroid field where simply staying alive is the objective.

In the browser: Arrow keys steer, Z fires your blaster, X fires the tow-cable (Snowspeeder stages) or the secondary weapon (Falcon stages), Enter starts, and Shift inserts a coin.

Tip: your four tow-cables are limited, so save them for AT-ATs — they instantly destroy one if fired at the legs, rather than chipping away at the cockpit. On Hoth Patrol, shoot a Probot’s transmission the moment it starts broadcasting rather than letting it finish.