Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, the centerpiece of Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, doesn’t feel like a traditional ride. I’m tempted to call it the most impressive arcade game on the planet, but that feels like a backhanded compliment. The ride is like something from a different timeline, in which arcades games became the dominant form of entertainment, the sort of things mega-companies would dump million upon millions of dollars, merging gameplay with real-life feedback to create short, exhilarating adventures.
It’s weird. Joyfully, unabashedly weird!
The first of two rides to open at Galaxy’s Edge (the second, Rise of the Resistance, will open later this year), Smugglers Run builds upon the design of the park’s original Star Wars ride, Star Tours: a group of people sit in a pod that shakes and shifts as action plays on a video screen.
This brand new ride is considerably fancier than Star Tours, even after that rides recent visual upgrades. The experience prioritizes interactivity and intimacy, more so than any other ride in the park, or arguably in theme park. Six guests ride together, and for a few minutes, it feels as if there’s nobody else in the universe.
The adventure, like all of Galaxy’s Edge, takes place during the sequel trilogy. Hondo Ohnaka (best known for his role in Clone Wars) has brokered a deal with Chewbacca to borrow the Millennium Falcon. Ohnaka can use the craft for some less-than-legal jobs, and Chewie can score some credits for the Resistance. Win-win.
For each ride, Hondo tasks six guests with completing one of those gigs.
On one hand, Smugglers Run progresses like a traditional ride. Six guests board the Millennium Falcon, and perform what can best be summarized as a train heist in space. Every ride, the six guests take off from Black Spire, travel at lightspeed to a distant planet, chase down the aforementioned space train, collect its precious cargo, then return home to the planet of Batuu to collect their reward.
On the other hand, Smugglers Run plays like an on-rails arcade game. While every ride hits the core beats, the guests have a good deal of control in how the heist goes down. The riders take on a trio of roles: two people pilot the ship, one steering up and down, the other left and right; two control the guns, shooting anything that gets in their way; two serve as engineers, repairing the ship and, at a crucial moment, unleashing a harpoon.
This isn’t an open-world game. The pilots can’t cut upwards and travel to another planet, but they do aim the ship. It’s less about steering and more about dodging meteors and enemy crafts, while speeding through tight tunnels and avoiding the walls.
I had the chance to ride Smugglers Run twice. The first trip, we had a pilot I will generously describe as bad. They controlled the Millennium Falcon’s up and down movement, and decided pretty much immediately that the vehicle would exclusively move up. Meteor in the way? Up into the meteor we went! Barreling through tube of sharp steel beams? We rubbed up against the metal, presumably shredding our ship to bits.
Inside the cockpit, I watched a display show the ship’s health rapidly deplete to roughly 20%. When we eventually made our escape from the heist, our hyperdrive gave out, and we found ourselves caught in a meteor stream. We pulled into Hondo’s spaceport with the Falcon barely together, our employer reprimanding us for busting Chewie’s personal property.
The second time, and I know I will sound like a real jerk here, I had the chance to pilot the ship. And let me tell you: I did… okay. Not great. But okay.
Turns out piloting a Millennium Falcon is hard! It turned a bit like a boat, a slight lag whenever I pushed in an opposing direction. At times, I worried I would send the ship into a fishtail.
But thanks to a strong crew, we competently performed the mission. We kept the craft in good shape, and when it came time to blast to lightspeed, it actually worked. We skipped the meteor sequence altogether. As the ship touched down, Hondo gave us some light praise, and a screen onboard showed that we’d actually earned money this time, rather than go into the negatives.
This isn’t a pre-rendered video. This it isn’t Pixar-quality computer animation that takes supercomputers hours and hours to produce a few frames of film. It’s like a video game, playing out in real-time. I mean, it is a video game. It runs on video game hardware and software.
In March 2018, Nvidia announced that Disney Parks had partnered with the graphics card manufacturer and Epic Games, the publisher responsible for the Unreal Engine, to create a system to run this experience. The announced explained that Smugglers Run is “powered with a single BOXX chassis packed with eight high-end NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs, connected via Quadro SLI.” The ride requires five projectors working in tandem to produce the ultra-high resolution image. They didn’t just build the world’s best gaming computer, they created an entire new system to power graphics that are many years away from the average consumer experience.
And so when I say it feels like the world’s most impressive arcade game, that’s because it really is precisely that. This isn’t a game with depth that would be enjoyable at home, nor should it be. It’s a breathtaking experience, that prioritized spectacle and immersion above all else, and it succeeds on that goal splendidly.
The recreated Falcon cockpit is full of dozens of buttons, switches, and shifters, and while most of them don’t seem to serve a clear purpose, the riders do have enough control to feel like their actions determined success or failure. When we barely dodged a crashing Imperial ship, our entire crew burst into joyful screams. It felt, if only for a moment, like we’d just barely avoided a terrifying crash. Calling this the world’s best arcade game feels like feint praise because an arcade game has never felt this real.
I can imagine the ride will disappoint some video game folks who expect more control, and ride enthusiasts who want something more tactile and traditional. But as I sat outside the exit, I only saw big, silly smiles.
Smugglers Run’s eventual companion, Rise of the Resistance, is rumored to be one of Disney Parks’ most ambitious projects, a ride that is actually a collection of many sub-rides, an evolution of the iconic Disney dark ride formula. By comparison, Smugglers Run is a bit more straightforward.
If Rise of the Resistance aspires to be the Citizen Kane of theme park rides, then Smugglers Run is a Bruckheimer-at-his-prime-style blockbuster. This isn’t a ride that will change the world, but for a few minutes, it will make the world a hell of a lot more fun.
Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge opens at Disneyland on May 31. The Smugglers Run ride reviewed at the park’s press day event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.