To say that the Star Wars trilogy inspired video games is like saying that water is wet. Honestly, it's so obvious. The tremendous success of the The Empire Strikes Back film in 1980 spawned a fury of merchandising and the Star Wars arcade game released after the first movie was updated to follow the plot of the second movie.

The game used the same first person color vector style like its predecessor but featured four different missions that had to be mastered. First, the player had control of Snowspeeders and had to destroy Imperial Probe Droids before they discovered the rebel base on Hoth. Physical destruction and frequency jamming might not have stopped the droids and then you'd have to deal with the AT-ATs that advanced against you and your rebel friends.

Another mission made the player the pilot of the Millennium Falcon, in the midst of a TIE fighter attack while trying to escape Hoth. If you were lucky enough to evade the Imperial fireballs, you sought refuge in an asteroid field that did its best to smash the ship to bits. Navigating that field was the fourth mission a player had to complete.

A nifty power-up feature new to the Empire Strikes Back game was alloted to the player if he destroyed a set number of Droids, TIE fighter, AT-ATs or surviving the asteroid field. After completing each requirement, the word J-E-D-I would be spelled out and once completed, all enemy shots would be destroyed for a limited time.

Great graphics and controls were set to make Empire Strikes Back as popular as the first game but the Force wasn't with arcade games in the mid 80s when the industry experienced a crippling crash that buried many good games.