How To Fix Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run
Disney, my consulting fee is two (2) annual passes, please
I hate to say it, but Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run at Disneyland and Disney World’s Galaxy Edge Star Wars land, is in fact, deeply mid.
For those not familiar, here’s a ride through, but the gist is that you are in a group of 6 who enter the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and pilot it on a smuggling mission to steal cargo1. The ride itself is essentially a giant motion simulator video game, where the six guests are split into three roles: 2 pilots, 2 gunners, and 2 engineers, who have to respectively fly the ship, shoot down enemies, and make repairs as you go on your, well, smuggler’s run.
When I describe it like that, that sounds fucking awesome, especially if you add in the fact that the Falcon sets are incredibly detailed and immersive, and that this is a huge technological leap forward in that (to my understanding, at least) this is the first or among the first e-ticket rides that is completely rendered in realtime. It should rule!!!!
Unfortunately, it is mid.
Some of that is related to the overall aesthetic of Galaxy’s Edge being time locked partway through the Abrams/Johnson sequel trilogy, and that’s much less fun than like, if you’re flying to Bespin with Chewbacca2.
But the real problems are that there is only 1.5 good roles on the ride: The 1 is the pilot who gets to go to hyperspace, and .5 is the other pilot. The rest of the roles kinda suck.
The expensive ways to fix Smuggler’s Run
One reason the other roles suck is because the window and screen does not wrap around the entire cockpit, so if you are in the gunner or engineer roles you don’t get to feel like you’re flying the Falcon!!!! Devastatingly, one of the tips I’ve seen for how you might better enjoy the ride is if you’re the gunner, you should just hold the buttons the entire time and ignore the game and face forward to look out the window. That’s nuts!!!!
Unfortunately fixing this is obviously a massively expensive change, both in that you have to significantly retrofit the cockpits (of which I believe there are two sets of 7 each in both California and Florida), you have to purchase way more screens, and you have to render idk somewhere between 2 and 8 times as much graphical content. In fact, given the latter part, it may actually be impossible with current rendering technology3! But that would go a long way in a Smuggler’s Run year-10 or year-20 update to plus up the non-pilot experience.
The cheaper way
The pilot role is deeply overthought. I understand the desire to make sure that both pilots have something that is fun and contributes to the game, but what they chose is having one pilot control the up and down motion and the other control the left and right. That’s not great. In so far as it leads to chaos and crashes, it’s interesting (and that genuinely is part of the fun of the ride, both because that has the most physical reaction and bright lights/loud sounds, and because that’s very thematically appropriate for the hunk-of-junk that is the Falcon) But it’s very overthought, and I think should be reconsidered.
Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what would be a better replacement! Mario Kart at Universal features a steering mechanic where a turn indicator flashes in your AR goggles and your turning the steering wheel does not actually direct the ride vehicle, but each rider gets points according to how well they timed their moves to the AR cue. That wouldn’t work as well in this context where you are directly manipulating the motion of the ship, but still, worth considering how to plus up this experience. It would, however, presumably be moderately expensive, especially if there are new elements and affordances for the pilots to interact with.
The gunner role is mostly fine, though obviously could benefit from the aforementioned window extension. But it does hold the secret for how you could I think pretty cheaply(?) take the engineer role from the worst on the ship to the best: multiple difficulty modes.
For gunner you get to choose between an automatic version where you just push buttons and the guns auto-aim at enemies, or a manual mode where you have to select whether to aim hi, low, or in the middle. To this end, the primary non-window improvement to the gunner is to switch the aiming interaction from picking between three buttons to a joystick or something equivalent. Kinda expensive, given it requires new affordances (and reprogramming.)
The actually cheap way
But what if there was a hard mode for engineers? What if there were always too many flashing lights to press all at the same time, and the engineer role became one of constant firefighting by flipping switches, clicking buttons, turning knobs, pulling levers, etc?
Aka, what if the hard mode for the engineer was playing real-life Spaceteam in the Millennium Falcon!!
There are already enough interactive buttons in the engineer’s reach to accomplish this, they are just metered out so you’re only interacting with a set of three or so at any given time. Caveat I am not a ride engineer, but it seems to me enabling a hard mode for the engineer requires no new affordances or wiring or physical elements, just reprogramming.
Obviously that’s not nothing, but Disney is doing large scale content additions for the ride, so it’s not as if reprogramming is budgetarily impossible. You could even imagine going full Spaceteam and having elements that require communication between the two engineers, or between the other roles and the engineers (the pilot’s display saying fix the hyperdrive, and the pilot has to yell it back to the engineer to press the right key or whatever.)4
The power is yours Disney; with very little money you could make the engineer role the best one.
…Well maybe second best, because pulling the Hyperdrive lever is legitimately so cool I almost cried the only time I got to do it (across like 10 times riding it over the years 😡)
Interestingly, while quite New Traditional in its narrative, it does eschew the “Yay everything’s happy -> oh no something goes wrong” plot cliche, in that from the beginning it’s “You’re gonna go on a dangerous mission, something might go wrong”.
Is this desire to replace Hondo Ohnaka with someone like Han or Chewie or even Rey contradicting the fact that for Star Tours I am still sad about replacing theme-park-exclusive character Captain R3x, my Best Friend, with C-3PO? Very well, I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.
Though Disney has a corporate partnership with Epic and is working to upgrade the ride from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, so even if it’s not possible now that does imply Disney is interested in keeping this ride closer to the bleeding edge of technical possibility.
Though this would have its own problems given that most crews will be comprised of mixed groups of guests; it would be a blast to have a kid yell back to their parents to fix the hyperdrive, less so for a random 40-something annual pass holder to yell back to someone else’s kid.