Disney Snuck In and Overhauled the Millennium Falcon While You Were Sleeping. Here’s Why
Disney Imagineers have revealed how they updated the Millennium Falcon ride at Disneyland and Hollywood Studios with new missions and graphics without any downtime.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
Disney Imagineers have shared the process of updating the Millennium Falcon ride at Disneyland and Hollywood Studios with new missions and graphics without any downtime.
Imagineers updated the Millennium Falcon ride at Disneyland and Hollywood Studios with new missions and graphics without any downtime. They used a special console to test the ride and make sure it worked the same way for everyone.
Analysis
The Update Process
Disney Imagineers Asa Kalama and Angela Jay explained that the update to the Millennium Falcon ride involved upgrading every single one of the 224 graphics cards to a new Nvidia Blackwell card and updating the game to Unreal Engine 5. This allowed the platform to be more flexible and enabled the testing environment to get an upgrade as well.
The Developer Console
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 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.
The Importance of Smuggler's Run
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.
Key points
- Disney Imagineers updated the Millennium Falcon ride at Disneyland and Hollywood Studios with new missions and graphics without any downtime.
- The update involved upgrading every single one of the 224 graphics cards to a new Nvidia Blackwell card and updating the game to Unreal Engine 5.
- The developer console used to test Smuggler's Run includes virtual buttons, screens, and multiple perspectives of the game itself.
- The ride was updated overnight for weeks to minimize downtime and ensure a smooth guest experience.
The success of the update to Smuggler's Run suggests that more upgrades and improvements are on the way for the ride, which could keep it feeling new and interesting for years to come.
The update to Smuggler's Run was a complex and time-consuming process, and it's possible that future updates could be similarly challenging and disrupt the guest experience.
