Star Wars III - Return of the Jedi

Star Wars III - Return of the Jedi is a ZX Spectrum treatment of the third film in the original trilogy. The record carries neither a year nor an author, so any dating has to be inferred: film licences from this series reached eight-bit computers during the second half of the eighties, several years after the film itself.

Licensed adaptations had a peculiar economy on the Spectrum. The publisher paid for a name and a story, but the game still had to fit into 48 kilobytes, so one or two scenes were chosen and turned into an action sequence. The player received not a retold plot but a short stretch they remembered from the cinema.

Colour was the main obstacle for spectacle licences on this machine. Space scenes were drawn either in monochrome or with heavy stylisation, because per-pixel colour simply was not available on the hardware.

The catalogue also omits player count and perspective, though the archive already logs plays for it, so the image is confirmed working.

The Spectrum developed a habit of its own with licensed titles: the loading screen. While the tape streamed in, a hand-drawn picture appeared line by line, often the most elaborate artwork in the whole product. Larger games then used multiload, pulling each section from tape separately, so losing progress meant waiting through another load.

This Spectrum take on the film can be opened and played in the browser here on OldGame.cz.