When Disney announced back in May that Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run in both Disneyland and Hollywood Studios was getting an update with new missions, it was widely viewed as a welcomed but fairly minor update to the popular attraction. At its D23 conference this weekend, Disney Imagineers are offering a deep dive into how that update happened and a peek behind the curtain at all the tools used to make that update a reality.
For the uninitiated, there’s quite a bit of sleight of hand involved in how Smuggler’s Run works. Each version of this ride has multiple cockpits that rotate around on a massive set of plates, so more people can quickly get on and off the ride. This means there are 28 iterations of the same ride environment inside both the California and Florida versions of the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge attraction. According to Disney Imagineers Asa Kalama and Angela Jay, each one of those 28 cockpits is powered by five 4K projectors driven by eight graphics cards to make the whole thing work.
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The upgrade to Smuggler’s Run back in May added a lot of complexity to the ride, allowing riders to choose between different worlds to travel to for your unique adventure. To make something like that possible, every single one of the 224 graphics cards was upgraded to a new Nvidia Blackwell card and the whole game was updated to Unreal Engine 5. This allowed the platform as a whole to be more flexible, but it also allowed the testing environment to get an upgrade as well.
A big part of the Imagineering Pavilion at D23 this year is dedicated to a live demo of the developer console used to test Smuggler’s Run and its many new updates. This includes virtual buttons to simulate all the functions in the cockpit, screens dedicated to all the readouts you see while on the ride and, of course, multiple perspectives of the game itself.
Some testing is done within virtual reality headsets so they can see the same way you would by sitting in the ride, while other times people are sat in an office with a phone or tablet that has all the buttons laid out. Nearly all of it happens on a computer just like the one in the ride to make sure everyone gets the same experience.
One other important thing to know about Smuggler’s Run is how incredibly popular it is. If you’re a regular in either theme park, you know this ride always has a line, and nobody likes it when a popular ride is offline, even if it’s for very cool upgrades. That’s why Imagineers set off working overnight for weeks to successfully update the hardware and the software for this ride, and the result was zero downtime.
It’s clear from the way Kalama and Jay talked about the work on Smuggler’s Run in 2026 that more is coming for the most famous hunk of junk in the galaxy. It’s clear this work wasn’t just for helping the Mandalorian and Grogu take out Imperials, as made clear by a new partnership with Fortnite where your gameplay in Smuggler’s Run will carry over. This ride has now not only been future-proofed for more upgrades later on, but the success of what seemed at first like a fairly minor update to the software likely means Smuggler’s Run will be able to feel new and interesting for years. If you’re not sure why that’s important, remember that Indiana Jones in Disneyland is still running Windows XP.
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