Star Wars II - The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars II - The Empire Strikes Back is the ZX Spectrum version, made for the British eight-bit machine that shaped an entire generation of players across Europe. The numeral in the title marks it as a follow-up to an earlier game based on the first film of the saga.

The catalogue record has no release year filled in, so the game cannot be dated precisely here. That is hardly unusual for Spectrum software: many titles appeared in several versions, on cassettes with minimal credits, and telling an original release apart from later reissues and budget compilations is often difficult.

The source material tells you roughly what to expect. The second film is built around a battle on an ice world and a flight from a pursuing fleet, and game adaptations concentrated on exactly those scenes. The Spectrum worked with extremely economical graphics and a colour system that allowed only two colours per small cell, so space and snow were drawn mostly in outline.

Film licences were among the best-selling goods on eight-bit machines, and Star Wars adaptations sat at the top of that pile, even when what happened on screen bore only a loose resemblance to the film.

No need to take our word for the feel of it: this title loads and runs directly in your browser here, so you can try the eight-bit version yourself.