Forty years ago this May, Star Wars fans were given the opportunity to relive Luke Skywalker’s epic attack run on the Death Star thanks to Atari’s Star Wars arcade game. In Star Wars Insider #218, hitting newsstands next week, writer Dan Brooks speaks with Mike Hally, architect of the seminal coin-op machine to mark this landmark anniversary; read on for an exclusive excerpt, in which Hally tells of he came to take arcades to the galaxy far, far away…
In 1977, the year of Star Wars: A New Hope’s release, Hally was a mechanical engineering student at Santa Clara University in California. Atari, the gaming giant behind arcade megahits like Space Invaders, was located in nearby Sunnyvale. As Hally neared graduation and needed to find a job, a seemingly fated opportunity would