Video game design and theme‑park engineering may seem worlds apart, yet both craft immersive realms where narrative and interactivity collide. Whether through richly detailed virtual environments or physically engaging attractions, creators harness storytelling, environmental cues, and even virtual reality to draw participants into living narratives—albeit with mixed success.
In many cases, a theme‑park ride is essentially a video game you can walk through. Think of the playful minigames in Toy Story Midway Mania, the underwhelming Spider‑Man attraction at Disney California Adventure, or the dark‑ride shooting galleries that replace real targets with digital ones.
The pinnacle of this fusion is Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, a motion‑simulator housed at Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy Edge and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando. Debuting in 2019 with cutting‑edge Nvidia hardware, the attraction runs on Unreal Engine 4 and immerses guests in a full‑field‑of‑view screen that replicates the cockpit of the iconic starship. The experience sits beside a 114‑foot, life‑sized replica of the Falcon, turning the ride into a living, breathing set piece.
Inside the cockpit, six participants are divided into three distinct roles. Two pilots steer the ship—one handling horizontal movement, the other vertical—and the right‑seat pilot even gets the chance to fire the ship into hyperspace during a climactic moment. Two gunners sit behind, blasting on‑screen targets with a choice of manual or automatic firing modes, while the remaining two engineers keep the ship operational by responding to flashing prompts on the walls. Each player’s performance is scored individually, and the collective score determines the team’s rank, all of which is tracked via the Star Wars Datapad widget in the Play Disney app.
When Disney first unveiled Smugglers Run in 2019, Imagineers highlighted its game‑like modularity, suggesting that the underlying technology could accommodate new missions and gameplay tweaks. Over the years, minor adjustments were made—such as expanding the engineer’s responsibilities—but the core narrative, featuring a smuggling run for the Resistance, remained unchanged until recently.
As of May 22, 2026, guests can now embark on a brand‑new adventure alongside the Mandalorian and Grogu. The updated mission offers three branching paths that transport players to different planets across the Star Wars universe, and it marks the first major technological upgrade for Smugglers Run in years.
The latest iteration of the Smugglers Run attraction now runs on Unreal Engine 5, a platform that only emerged in 2022—three years after the original ride debuted. Morgan McDowell, Walt Disney Imagineering’s technical project manager, explained how the engine upgrade has revitalized the experience. “With Unreal Engine 5 we can add updated assets, so higher resolution graphics,” she said from a private meeting room adjacent to the Smugglers Run show building, a space that feels like a high‑tech accounting office on Coruscant. “We are also able to upgrade the hardware in tandem with coming up to Unreal 5,” she added, noting that the new assets now allow for dynamic flight paths, letting riders navigate through one of three different planets—left, right, up, or down—adding unprecedented variability to the journey.
These new flight routes lead to three fresh destinations—Coruscant, Bespin, and Endor—chosen by the ride’s engineers. The addition of a personal screen moment with Grogu is a subtle yet meaningful tweak that deepens the role of the ride operator, aligning the experience more closely with the latest Star Wars narrative. Riders now pilot the Falcon alongside Mando and Razor Crest, targeting three high‑priority Imperial objectives that hyperspace in different directions, forcing passengers to choose which path to pursue.
In addition to the software overhaul, Disney has upgraded the Nvidia GPUs that power the attraction. While the cost of these high‑end graphics cards remains steep, Disney’s investment underscores its commitment to delivering cutting‑edge visual fidelity.
McDowell emphasized the close collaboration between Disney and Epic Games, noting that Disney’s recent acquisition of an almost 10‑percent stake in Epic for $1.5 billion in 2024 has fostered a robust partnership. “When we’re doing the technical development of Smugglers Run, if we find bugs on their end, we find bugs on our end,” she said. “We’re using a custom build of Unreal Engine, but we work with them all the time to work through problems on the software side. And at the same time, when we start running it on the hardware, we run into problems there as well, and we work very closely with Nvidia on that side.”
Imagineering, like any leading game studio, subjected the new Smugglers Run update to exhaustive play‑testing before unveiling it to the public. Early on, lead developer McDowell revealed that the team employed a “lab setup” in California, mirroring the dome visualization tools used for designing theme‑park attractions. “It’s essentially a computer running five projectors that blend seamlessly in a dome, but in our lab we use five monitors wired to the same technology,” she explained. “We run soak tests and refine our builds in that space before bringing cast members in for on‑site play‑testing at the ride.”
With the fresh mission now live, McDowell noted that Imagineering will closely monitor player statistics to fine‑tune the experience. “We’ll use the data to adjust the tiered scoring system based on what constitutes a solid median score for the new mission,” she said. “Player metrics also inform gameplay tweaks, such as the number of TIE fighters that spawn or the difficulty of taking them down. In short, data drives the final score.”
During a recent visit to Disney World, I tested the updated mission and found that while the visual polish remained largely unchanged, the gameplay structure adopted a more overtly video‑game feel. The three targets now act as mini‑bosses, and players choose their path like selecting a level from a menu. The pilot seat will likely stay the most popular, offering the closest view and the greatest influence over the action. Conversely, those who opt for the gunner’s seat may need to abandon manual controls in favor of the automatic system; otherwise, the barrage of button‑pressing could distract from the narrative.
There’s a touch of irony in Disney announcing the ride’s upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 just before Epic unveiled Unreal Engine 6. Yet, for the majority of park guests, the underlying software engine is a non‑issue; they simply want to step into the cockpit, escape the Florida heat, and join Din Djarin and Baby Yoda in a brief, exhilarating adventure. Still, the technical evolution of Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run offers a compelling glimpse into how gaming and theme‑park worlds are increasingly converging, and hopefully this won’t be seven more years before we see another major update.
News Source: Kotaku
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