Video game and theme park design are two very different disciplines, but they have a lot in common. They share similar approaches to building worlds and turning narratives into interactive experiences, using environments to tell stories as much as dialogue, and both have embraced virtual reality in search of immersion—to similarly mixed results. Sometimes, though, a theme park ride is just straight-up a video game, albeit one you might physically move through; think the mini-games of Toy Story Midway Mania, or the lackluster Spider-Man ride at Disney California Adventure, or the many shooting-gallery dark rides that replace physical targets with screens.
The most elaborate and complex of those video game attractions is Millennium Falcon—Smugglers Run, a motion simulator found at the Star Wars outposts at Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando. Launched in 2019 with Nvidia tech, Smugglers Run is a show experience built in Unreal Engine 4 and utilizing a screen that takes up your entire field of vision; it’s the most elaborate possible version of those arcade cabinets at Dave & Buster’s that make you feel like you’re sitting in a cockpit. Only this cockpit is a fastidiously detailed recreation of the Millennium Falcon, with its iconic lounge and everything, inside (or, more accurately, next to) a 114-foot life-sized replica of Han Solo’s ship.
Inside that cockpit, teams of six are split into three different jobs. Two pilots guide the Falcon on its mission, with one controlling it horizontally and the other vertically. (The pilot in the right seat also gets to punch it into hyperspace a few times, in perhaps the most physically exciting part of the entire attraction.) Behind them sit two gunners who fire guns and launch rockets at on-screen targets by tapping buttons as they light up on the Falcon’s walls; you can pick between manual and automatic control schemes, which just determines how many different buttons you can potentially push. And in the last row are the two engineers, who repair the ship on the fly by responding to various light-up prompts on the ship’s walls, and whose initial responsibilities were so limited that various little perks have been added in over the years. (Engineer is where you seat the grandparents whose only experience with video games was a few rounds of Space Invaders at a smoke-filled bar back in 1980.) All players are scored individually on their performances, and those are added up for an overall team score. There are tiers and ranks and everything, and it’s all stored by the Star Wars Datapad widget in the Play Disney app, if you really want it to be.
Disney heavily touted Smugglers Run’s game-like qualities when first promoting the attraction before its 2019 opening. At the time, Imagineers who worked on the ride talked about its modularity—how they could use the tech they developed with Epic Games and Nvidia to add new missions or tweak gameplay. Not much became of that in Galaxy Edge’s first several years; the engineer role was slightly retooled to become a little more involved in the action, but the original mission, in which the Falcon was loaned out to conman Hondo Ohnaka to smuggle coaxium in a win-win for both Ohnaka and the Resistance, remained the only one until the last week. As of May 22, 2026, guests can embark on a new adventure alongside the Mandalorian and Grogu, with three branching paths that will take them to different planets in the Star Wars universe. And along with the new mission comes Smugglers Run’s first big tech upgrade.
The new mission runs on Unreal Engine 5, which wasn’t released until 2022, three years after Smugglers Run opened. As Morgan McDowell, a technical project manager at Walt Disney Imagineering, tells me, the upgrade lets them improve the ride’s visuals and also expand its play options. “With Unreal Engine 5 we can add updated assets, so higher resolution graphics,” she says, inside a private meeting room attached to the Smugglers Run show building that feels like a place where accountants on Coruscant would work. “We are also able to upgrade the hardware in tandem with coming up to Unreal 5,” she adds, “so with the added assets we were able to add variability to flying. So now we can fly through one of three different planets. Maybe you want to go left or right or up or down, right? We have variabilities in the paths that we’re able to take.”
Those paths head down one of three locations new to the ride: Coruscant, Bespin, and Endor. The choice is up to one of the engineers; this, along with some personal screen time with Grogu, is one of the small changes to make that role more fulfilling. It’s all tied in directly with the new story, where you’re piloting the Falcon on a mission alongside Mando and his ship Razor Crest with three high-priority Imperial targets; they all hyperspace it in different directions, and you can only follow one. Sounds like a good reason to ride this one a couple more times, doesn’t it?
They’ve also updated the Nvidia GPUs that the game experience runs on. If anybody can afford the surging prices of GPUs, it’s Disney.
As McDowell explains it, Disney and Epic Games work very closely together on Smugglers Run, as part of the larger partnership between the two companies that saw the former buy an almost 10-percent stake in the latter for $1.5 billion in 2024. “Oftentimes, when we’re doing the technical development [of Smugglers Run], if we find bugs on their end, we find bugs on our end. 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.”
And like any game studio, Imagineering put the Smugglers Run update through rigorous playtesting before rolling it out into the parks. At the ride’s earliest stages of development, McDowell explains, they used “a lab setup” in California to test it out, utilizing a concept similar to the dome Imagineering uses to create immersive visualizations of their theme park designs. “It’s just like a computer running five projectors that all blend together in the dome that you’re flying through. When we do that in our lab setup, it’s actually five monitors that we have hooked up to all the technology. We’d test our builds in this space, do soak testing, all within the lab. And then we’d playtest it here with cast members at the attraction.”
Now that the new mission has officially launched, McDowell explains, they’ll be keeping an eye on player stats. That can lead to changes in the ride’s tiered scoring system as they determine what’s a good median score in the new mission, but could also drive certain changes to gameplay itself. “We use [player stats] to change things like how many TIE fighters are going to spawn, or how hard it is to take down a TIE fighter, things like that,” she says. “We use data to drive the scores in the end.”
I tried out the new mission during a recent trip to Disney World. I didn’t notice much of an improvement to the ride game’s visuals, but it has a more overtly video game-like structure; the three targets are effectively minibosses, and then your engineer chooses which one to follow like they’re choosing from a level select screen. Pilot will probably remain the most popular role, as it’s not just the closest seat to the screen but the job that has the most direct control over the experience. And if you take the gunner’s seat, you might want to cast aside your gamer pride and just go with the automatic control scheme; otherwise you’ll be so busy staring at the buttons on the wall that you’ll miss most of the story.
There’s a little bit of irony in Disney touting the ride’s upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 the day before Epic officially announced Unreal Engine 6, but then the vast majority of theme park guests won’t notice or care about what software engine is running things behind the scenes. They’ll just want to get inside that cockpit (and out of that Florida heat) and fight alongside Din Djarin and Baby Yoda for a spell. Still, the technical side of Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run remains a fascinating look at how games and theme parks have dovetailed in recent years; hopefully it won’t take seven more years for the ride to see more updates like these.
